The logic behind the connection between matrilineality and external warfare is as follows: The married men who move into a matrilocal Iroquois communal house come from different families and villages. Their change of residence prevents them from viewing their interests exclusively in terms of what is good for their fathers, brothers, and sons and at the same time brings them into daily contact with men of nearby villages. This promotes peace between neighboring villages and lays the basis for men to cooperate in forming large war parties capable of attacking enemies hundreds of miles away. (Iroquois armies consisting of over 500 warriors mounted attacks from New York against targets in places as distant as Illinois.) Divale has expanded the number of cases to which this logic applies by suggesting that the patrilineal people who were attacked by matrilineally organized groups would also have to adopt a similar organization in a short time or be destroyed.
But let me enter a caveat here against the conclusion that all cases of matrilineal organization are related to the practice of external warfare. The protracted absence of males for any reason may lead to a focus on women as the carriers of titles and the guardians of male interests. Hunting and fishing expeditions and long-distance trading are two male-centered activities which are also associated with matrilineality. The logic is similar to that involved in warfare: Men must join together for hazardous undertakings which will require them to be away from their houses, lands, and other property for weeks or months. Such prolonged absences mean that women must bear the responsibility for the decisions about daily work patterns and the care and training of children, and that they must also shoulder the burden of agricultural production in gardens and fields. Shifts from patrilineal to matrilineal organizations originate as an attempt on the part of absentee males to turn over the care of jointly owned houses, lands, and property to their sisters. Absentee males rely on their sisters rather than their wives because wives are drawn from someone else’s paternal interest group and have divided loyalties. Sisters who stay at home, however, have the same property interests as brothers. Absentee brothers therefore discourage marriages which would remove their sisters from the household in which they grew up together. Sisters are only too happy to comply since patrilocal marriage exposes them to abuses at the hands of male supremacist husbands and unsympathetic fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law.
The actual transition from patrilocality to matrilocality need not involve any sudden traumatic institutional changes. It can take place by the simple expedient of changing bride-price to bride-service. In other words, instead of transferring valuables as a prelude to removing his bride from her family, the husband settles in temporarily with the family, hunts for them, and helps them clear their fields. From this situation it is but a small step to the kinds of marriages that are characteristic of matrilineal, matrilocal systems. Such marriages are easily broken liaisons in which husbands are in fact regarded as temporary sojourners with sexual privileges who can be asked to leave whenever their presence causes the slightest inconvenience. Among the matrilocal Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, for example, inconvenient husbands were ejected by the simple expedient of placing their moccasins outside the front door. Iroquois women might at any moment decide to order a man to pick up his blanket and go elsewhere; as Lewis Henry Morgan noted of Iroquois marriage, “the most frivolous reasons, or the caprice of the moment, were sufficient for breaking the marriage tie.” Among the Nayars, a militaristic matrilineal caste of the Malabar Coast in India, the insignificance of husbands reached the point where joint residence was limited to nightly visits.
Households that consist of a resident core of mothers, sisters, and daughters with men either away on war parties or other expeditions or temporarily installed with their wife’s family are incompatible with the ideology and practice of patrilineal descent and inheritance. It is no longer to his own children—scattered among the various households in which he sojourned during his peripatetic liaisons—that a man can look for the continuity of his hearth and lands; rather, it is to his sisters’ children, who will be brought up where he himself was reared. Or, to look at the same situation from the perspective of the children, it is not their father to whom they can turn for security and inheritance; rather it is their mother’s brother.
Let me face one additional complication. Not all expansionist pre-state societies that engage in external warfare are matrilineally organized. In Africa, for example, pastoral societies such as the Nuer and the Massai engaged in external warfare but were patrilineal-patrilocal. These groups require separate consideration. Most nomadic or seminomadic pre-state pastoral societies are expansionist and extremely militaristic, but strongly patrilineal or patrilocal rather than matrilineal or matrilocal. The reason is that animals on the hoof rather than crops in the field are the pastoralists’ main source of subsistence and wealth. When pre-state pastoralists intensify production and, as a result of population pressure, invade the territories of their neighbors, the male combatants do not have to worry about what’s going on back home. Pastoralists usually go to war in order to lead their stock to better pasture, so “home” follows right along behind them. Hence the expansionist warfare of pre-state pastoral peoples is characterized not by seasonal long-distance raiding from a home base, as is the case among many agricultural matrilineal societies, but by the migration of whole communities—men, women, children, and livestock.
The discovery of the relationship between external warfare and the development of matrilineal institutions clears up a number of puzzles which have plagued anthropologists for over a hundred years. One can now see why patriarchy was never replaced by matriarchy, polygyny by polyandry, or bride-price by groom-price. Matriarchy is ruled out as long as males continue to monopolize the techniques and technology of physical violence. The reason residence with the mother’s brothers—avunculocality—is so common in matrilineal societies is that men refuse to let their sisters dominate the allocation of their joint maternal estate. The reason amitalocality does not exist is that women—the father’s sisters—are never able to exercise a degree of control over their paternal estate greater than that exercised by their brothers. The reason groom-price virtually does not occur is that husbands in matrilineal systems never occupy a position analogous to that of wives in patrilineal systems. They are not incorporated as dependents into the wife’s domestic group and they do not surrender control over their domestic affairs to their sisters; therefore, wives do not pay groom-price to their husband’s sisters in compensation for the loss of the man’s productive and reproductive services. And the reason that matrilineal societies are not polyandrous as often as they are polygynous is that sex continues to be used as a reward for male bravery. No battle-hardened head-hunter or scalp-taker is going to settle down to connubial bliss in the company of four or five of his boon companions under the tutelage of a single woman (although the sharing of concubines and gang rape are easily managed).
All of this is not to deny that the development of matrilineal institutions exerts a moderating influence on the severity of the male supremacist complex. For reasons associated with the explanation of the shift to external warfare, which I will discuss later on, matrilineality leads to a diminution of preferential female infanticide and even to a reversal of preference for the sex of the first-born child. An Iroquois man, for example, wanted his sisters to have daughters so that his matrilineage would not die out, and where strict matrilocality is observed a man who wants to have several wives must restrict himself to women who are each other’s sisters. (Formal polygyny was often forgone in matrilineal societies as was true of the Iroquois.) And, as I’ve said, marriages in matrilineal societies are easily broken by the women. When a man is a guest in his wife’s homestead, he cannot mistreat her and expect her to take it lying down. Yet this moderation of the sexist hierarchy should not be confused with the nullification of that hierarchy. In their eagerness to overturn common stereotypes of male supremacy, some anthropologists cite the moderating effect of matr
ilineal institutions on the degree of male control as if it were evidence of sexual parity. One should not make too much of the fact that Iroquois women “greatly resented being beaten by their husbands.” And the fact that the women “might commit suicide to revenge themselves for the ill treatment” is not a sign of their equality with men, as one researcher has recently implied. The important point is that no Iroquois woman would dare to beat her husband. And if such a thing were ever to happen, the husband would certainly have “revenged” himself in a more convincing fashion than by committing suicide. I see no reason to doubt that Lewis Henry Morgan knew what he was talking about when he wrote that the Iroquois male “regarded women as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and from nurture and habit, she actually considered herself to be so.” Early observers who expressed opinions contrary to Morgan’s were completely befuddled by the difference between matrilineal descent and female supremacy.
The moderating effect of matrilineality upon the Iroquois was stronger and perhaps even more unusual in the sphere of politics than it was in marriage and domestic life. As far as I know, of all the village cultures about which we have any reliable information none came nearer to being a political matriarchy than the Iroquois. Yet the role of Iroquois women as political decision-makers did not establish political parity between the sexes. Iroquois matrons had the power to raise and depose the male elders who were elected to the highest ruling body, called the council. Through a male representative on the council they could influence its decisions and exercise power over the conduct of war and the establishment of treaties. Eligibility for office passed through the female line, and it was the duty of women to nominate the men who would serve on the council. But women themselves could not serve on the council, and the incumbent males had a veto power over the matrons’ nominations. Judith Brown concludes her survey of the Iroquois sexual hierarchy with the remark that “the nation was not a matriarchy, as claimed by some.” But she adds that “the matrons were an éminence grise.” This is not the point. Women are always more influential behind the scenes than they seem to be out front. It is the fact that they are seldom out in front that is so puzzling and that, as I see it, can only be explained in relation to the practice of warfare.
Aside from the problems presented by warlike matrilineal societies, there is another reason that the influence of warfare on sex roles has been virtually ignored up to now. Modern theories about sex roles have been dominated by Freudian psychologists and psychiatrists. Freudians have long been aware that some kind of link must exist between warfare and sex roles, but they have inverted the causal arrow and derived warfare from male aggressiveness rather than male aggressiveness from warfare. This inversion has penetrated to other disciplines and entered the popular culture, where it lies like a fog over the intellectual scene. Freud claimed that aggression is a manifestation of the frustrations of sexual instincts during childhood and that war is simply socially sanctioned aggression writ large in its most homicidal form. That men should dominate women followed automatically from the way in which the possessors of male sex organs and the possessors of female sex organs, respectively, experienced the pangs of childhood sexuality. According to Freud, boys compete with their father for sexual mastery of the same woman. They fantasize that they are omnipotent and that they can kill their rival, who in fact or fancy threatens to cut off their sex organs. This—the central scenario of Freudian psychodynamic theory—Freud called the Oedipus complex. Its resolution consists in the boy’s learning to direct his aggression away from his father toward socially “constructive” activities (which may include warfare).
For the young girl, Freud envisioned a parallel but fundamentally different trauma. A girl’s sexuality is also initially directed toward her mother, but at the phallic stage she makes a shocking discovery: she lacks a penis. The girl “holds her mother responsible for her castrated condition” and thus “transfers her love to her father because he has the valued organ which she aspires to share with him.” But her love for her father and for other men “is mixed with a feeling of envy because they possess something she lacks.” So while males must work out their Oedipus complex by learning how to express hostility against others, girls must learn to compensate for their lack of a penis by accepting a subordinate status and by having babies (which symbolically stand for the lost penis).
Although this scenario might seem sheer poppycock, anthropological research has shown that there is widespread if not universal occurrence of psychodynamic patterns that resemble Oedipal strivings—at least in the minimal sense of sexually charged hostility between older and younger generation males and penis envy among females. Bronislaw Malinowski pointed out that even among the matrilineal, avunculocal Trobriand Islanders, Oedipal rivalries exist—although not exactly in the form Freud had anticipated since the authority figure during childhood is the mother’s brother rather than the father. Freud was definitely on to something, but unfortunately his causal arrows were running backwards. What is poppycock is the idea that the Oedipal situation is caused by human nature rather than by human cultures. No wonder the Oedipus situation is so widespread. All of the conditions for creating castration fears and penis envy are present in the male supremacy complex—in the male monopoly over weaponry and the training of males for bravery and combat roles, in female infanticide and the training of females to be the passive rewards for “masculine” performance, in the patrilineal bias, in the prevalence of polygyny, competitive male sports, intense male puberty rituals, ritual uncleanliness of menstruating women, in the bride-price, and in many other male-centered institutions. Obviously, wherever the objective of childrearing is to produce aggressive, “masculine,” dominant males and passive, “feminine,” subordinate females, there will be something like a castration fear between males in adjacent generations—they will feel insecure about their manliness—and something like penis envy among their sisters, who will be taught to exaggerate the power and significance of the male genitalia.
All of this leads to but one conclusion: The Oedipus complex was not the cause of war; war was the cause of the Oedipus complex (keeping in mind that war itself was not a first cause but a derivative of the attempt to control ecological and reproductive pressures). This may sound like a hopeless chicken and egg problem, but there are excellent scientific reasons for rejecting the Freudian priorities. Starting with the Oedipus complex, one cannot explain variations in the intensity and scope of warfare—why some groups are more warlike than others and why some practice external forms and others internal forms of raiding. Nor can one explain why the complex of male supremacist institutions varies in substance and strength. Nor, starting with the Oedipus complex, can one explain the origin of agriculture, the divergent paths of Old and New World intensifications and depletions, or the origin of the state. But by starting with reproductive pressure, intensification, and depletion, one can understand both the constant and variable aspects of warfare. And from a knowledge of the causes of the variations in warfare, one can reach an understanding of the causes of the variations in family organization, sex hierarchies, and sex roles, and thence of both the constant and variable features of the Oedipus complex. It is an established principle in the philosophy of science that if one must choose between two theories the theory that explains more variables with the least number of independent unexplained assumptions deserves priority.
This point is worth pursuing because different philosophical and practical consequences adhere to each theory. On the one hand, Freudian theory closely resembles the war as human nature approach. It makes homicidal aggression seem inevitable. At the same time it shackles both men and women with a biological imperative (“anatomy is destiny”), therewith clouding and constricting the movement to achieve sexual parity. Although I have argued that anatomy destines males for training to be fierce and aggressive if there is war, I have not said that anatomy or genes or instinct or anything else makes war inevitable. Merely because all human beings in the wo
rld today and in the known past have lived in warmaking sexist societies or societies affected by war-making sexist societies is not reason enough to cast human nature in the image of the savage characteristics which are necessary for waging successful war. The fact that warfare and sexism have played and continue to play such prominent roles in human affairs does not mean that they must continue to do so for all future time. War and sexism will cease to be practiced when their productive, reproductive, and ecological functions are fulfilled by less costly alternatives. Such alternatives now lie within our grasp for the first time in history. If we fail to make use of them, it will be the fault not of our natures but of our intelligence and will.
7
The Origin of Pristine States
In most band and village societies before the evolution of the state, the average human being enjoyed economic and political freedoms which only a privileged minority enjoy today. Men decided for themselves how long they would work on a particular day, what they would work at—or if they would work at all. Women, too, despite their subordination to men, generally set up their own daily schedules and paced themselves on an individual basis. There were few routines. People did what they had to do, but the where and when of it was not laid out by someone else. No executives, foremen, or bosses stood apart, measuring and counting. No one said how many deer or rabbits you had to catch or how many wild yams you had to dig up. A man might decide it was a good day to string his bow, pile on thatch, look for feathers, or lounge about the camp. A woman might decide to look for grubs, collect firewood, plait a basket, or visit her mother. If the cultures of modern band and village peoples can be relied upon to reveal the past, work got done this way for tens of thousands of years. Moreover, wood for the bow, leaves for the thatch, birds for the feathers, logs for the grubs, fiber for the basket—all were there for everyone to take. Earth, water, plants, and game were communally owned. Every man and woman held title to an equal share of nature. Neither rent, taxes, nor tribute kept people from doing what they wanted to do.
Cannibals and Kings Page 8