Ch 8. Patriarchy, Nature and Indigenous Societies
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Terry Leahy 2024
I will be writing four chapters on feminist and eco feminist views of class society. The first two lay out my own picture of how this all works. This one is about how patriarchy, gender and nature are related in the context of Indigenous societies – classless societies. The next one is about how all this gets configured in the context of class. Following that is a chapter on discourses circulating in current capitalism. Finally, I will look at recent environmental and ecofeminist politics.
My first proposal is that class society has a psychic base in patriarchy, that class society depends on patriarchy. Patriarchy is in no way an outcome of class society. It’s the other way around. The second proposal is that class societies have a troubled relationship with non-human nature. I am not saying that all class societies are hell bent on destroying the natural world. On the other hand, compared to stateless societies, they are more likely to run into ecological trouble. This troubled relationship is often expressed through a discourse that links women to nature, denigrating both. In the standard phrase, women are to nature as men are to culture. Women and nature must be controlled by men. What comes out of this are four allied dualisms. Men versus women. The ruling class versus the subordinate class. Civilisation versus the barbarians. Humans versus nature.
My analysis in these chapters is loosely based on some wonderful books by feminist scholars and by an earlier tradition of psychoanalytic Marxism. To mention four key authors. Wilhelm Reich, a radical psychoanalytic theorist from the thirties. Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist social theorist from the New York women’s liberation movement. Nancy Chodorow, a feminist anthropologist and psychological theorist. Val Plumwood, an Australian eco-philosopher. All writing in the seventies.
Before I get into all this, I want to talk about how this configuration of ideas and practices in class societies is absent in Indigenous societies. The link between women and nature is not an eternal verity of the human species but a construct of class society.
Patriarchy
So, first to re-cap some of the ideas from earlier chapters that are relevant here. My first question: is patriarchy natural? Patriarchy is both socially constructed and also relies on natural differences between the sexes. Does this make patriarchy natural in the sense of given and inevitable? No, it means that we need to attend to both these natural material elements of sexual difference and, also to the social construction of gender. If we are to understand and hopefully to eliminate patriarchy.
Patriarchy is cross-cultural and trans historical. There is no mode of production that escapes patriarchy. I do not think we can know whether it has been one hundred per cent universal, but it is hard to come up with exceptions that stand up to detailed examination. It is the exploitation and domination of women by men. It depends upon men’s political advantage in power conflicts with women. Men are not hampered by pregnancy, wet nursing or strong emotional ties to infants coming out of those experiences. All of these things mean that men are free to develop political control in societies and have much more freedom than women. But it’s also a political choice by men. You can talk about men, as Firestone does, as a sex class. They make a political choice to take advantage of those differences. It’s not inevitable in the sense that they might make a different choice.
It is even possible that that patriarchy is a cultural invention. We could set it back to 80,000 years and say it was invented at the same time as the exodus from Africa. There is no way to contradict that. The archaeological evidence is moot. It is certainly not inevitable now at the present time. Women’s biological role in reproduction is subject to technological intervention, given a feminist movement. Things like a lower birth rate, control over death in childbirth, contraception.
So, what are the cultural impacts of patriarchy that play out in different social orders? Setting aside the more obvious aspects of patriarchy in gender oppression. The first aspect I want to talk about is first theorized by Reich and later Firestone. The predisposition to expect society to be organized hierarchically. With leaders and followers. Or authorities and subordinates. This predisposition is based on an experience of childhood where a father or grandfather is the head of the family. This experience is not restricted to nuclear families in capitalism. It equally applies in communities where authority is more communally organized, and brothers or clan fathers are dominant. The leading men in the family are in authority and women and children are subordinate. Giving the growing child an expectation of dominant and subordinate roles in society outside the family.
The second cultural impact is anxious, competitive masculinity. I have discussed this extensively in the previous chapter. It’s premised on the fact that in a patriarchal society, men avoid the entanglements of early childcare. The outcome is that men are keen to distance themselves from the nurturing roles that women inevitably occupy. To establish their masculine identity through hostility to women and in competitions with other men. To deny empathy. This analysis comes from the work of Nancy Chodorow.
Patriarchal psychology in classless societies
In all patriarchal societies, these psychic patterns are important. However, in classless societies, these psychic patterns do not lead on to class inequality. Let us consider what happens in Indigenous societies. What anthropologists call ‘hunting and gathering’ and ‘horticultural’ societies. A psychological predisposition to arrange society as leaders and followers is at least an aspect of all the different spheres of social life in Indigenous societies. In politics, ritual, religion, war, and art, there are leading men who become influential. Within the context of women’s sphere, there are leading women. In horticultural societies these leaders may be hereditary chiefs. In addition to these chiefs, particular men are war leaders, organizing conflicts with other communities.
At the same time, these leadership roles are kept in check by egalitarian political arrangements. Typically, big decisions are developed after extensive meetings of all the adult men or of the whole adult community. If there is a chief, their role is to try and find a consensus that works. The leadership of war chiefs only applies to a war party for the duration of the conflict. Back home there is prestige attached to this but no actual power.
The bottom line is that leaders in classless societies do not have any power to command people. Do this or else — with socially authorized sanctions to back up that command. They do not tell people what to do. Instead, they ask and invite. They inspire and get followers. Men who are part of a war party have volunteered, and others opt out. The big man who wants pigs for the ceremony cajoles their followers and seeks their support. It is not like a tax.
This fluidity of authority is related to the economic structures of classless societies. Each family has control over its own subsistence work and has a right to use their land. Whether we are talking about the territories of hunting and gathering bands or the gardens of settled horticulturalists. Leaders do not end up with control of the means of subsistence and cannot threaten subsistence to enforce their will. If a conflict becomes severe, the community will just split up. The disaffected parties go elsewhere to make their subsistence.
Along with this is an ethos of autonomy. People are expected to be their own boss. The outcome is that leadership shifts. It depends on the personal qualities of leading men, or leading women. So, a psychic pattern of authoritative leadership does not consolidate itself to establish an elite — with the capacity to command.
There are many avenues to express competitive masculinity in classless societies. They take the form of struggles for status and influence. For example, raiding parties in horticultural societies. A group of men leave their community and go to make war on another community. The successful raiding party gets prestige at home and establishes their virility by defeating their enemies. Men can become influential as shamans, protecting villagers from sorcery and healing illnesses. Or engaging in malevolent sorcery against others. Feuds, hosted by whole communities that ensure that the feuding parties stick to the rules of conflict. Status rivalry may take the form of competitive ceremonial gift exchange. A leading man hosts a celebratory feast and provides gifts for another community. In return, the leading men of the guest community will attempt to outdo their rivals in a payback feast. Men can get influence by developing a new ritual or dance — after communicating with ancestors or spirit beings through hallucinogens, a trance or a dream. Conflicts over jealousy and adultery are common.
In other words, competitive masculinity is expressed through struggles for leadership that do not go on to create a stratified society with different material resources for different classes.
How classless societies relate to nature
Let us now look at where the non-human natural world comes into all of this. Classless societies adapt to the non-human world, they acknowledge their dependence on nature. For example, in Australian Indigenous belief, the dream time ancestors of present people were godlike creatures from the natural world. The ancestral dingo, the rainbow snake, the emu and so on. These ancestors created the world as we now see it, the rivers, mountain ranges, waterholes. Implying nothing less than a kinship between people now living and aspects of non-human nature. Ceremonial events are often rituals of renewal. The ritual will invite a particular non-human natural species to flourish and reproduce in abundance. For example, bunya nuts, flying foxes, hakea plants. Whole sites, like a waterhole, cave, a tree or rocky outcrop can become sacred to a species and their affiliated kin group of humans. The characteristic behaviour of non-human species is given the English term ‘culture’. Just like the rituals of the human species. For example, the mating dance of the brolgas.
All this makes a very clear statement that we humans are a part of this non-human natural world and depend upon these natural species to do well. We can readily find examples with the same meaning from other Indigenous cultures around the world. Just to mention one. If a hunter in the Americas kills an animal, they thank the animal and its spirit ancestor for the gift. All these cultural phenomena of classless societies blur the distinction between human and non-human nature.
Along with all this are sets of technologies that are in fact sustainable. Meaning that they have been repeated for thousands of years without undermining the foundations of a human economy that depends on a flourishing natural world. Hunting and gathering societies move across the landscape to harvest seasonal abundance, leaving the land to recover from their impact. Patch burning is timed to leave islands of rainforest unharmed. Understory is reduced to favour grasses eaten by browsing animals. Horticultural societies rely for much of their food on tree crops and leafy perennials that complement the natural forest ecology. For example, bananas, breadfruit, coconuts, brazil nuts, hazelnuts, oaks, chestnuts. This perennial agriculture is very complex, making use of hundreds of different species. Swidden agriculture digs up gardens for root crops after clearing a patch of forest. As the soil becomes less fertile, the community moves on, leaving the forest to grow back, fertilized by the waste left over from their occupation. To come back for another round, decades later.
Gender and nature
What we can also say is that there’s no universal gender division in terms of relationship to the natural world. There is no generalized pattern in Indigenous cultures that implies that women are more closely connected to non-human nature than men. Men and women are likely to have different relationships to different aspects of the natural world. But there is no overall dichotomy.
An edited collection by Carol MacCormack and Marylin Strathern brings together five ethnographic accounts of non-European societies, all written by women anthropologists. The authors argue that in none of these societies is there a view that women are closer to nature than men.
I will briefly describe two of these societies. The Laymi of the Brazilian Highlands are described by Olivia Harris. This is a peasant culture. In so far as there is a separation of nature and culture at all, it is revealed in various spirit figures that dominate different places. The mountain peaks are male gods which are sources of thunder, hail and rain. They are sacred and powerful places that are also the source of life. The deities that are embodied in these mountains protect some domesticated animals while also being the gods of animals that ravage the flocks. So, these aspects of wild and domesticated nature are associated with male gods, not with femininity. The mountain gods also have a female counterpart, the earth mother, who is associated with cultivated land. So, this aspect of nature is associated with a female deity. The spirits of the dead, which are associated with fertility, live in the wild mountainous places. Fertility is associated with the masculine mountain gods. Men, as ritual specialists, have more contact with these mountain gods and with ancestor spirits. Women are seen as more vulnerable to harm from these spirits. There is no easy way to map masculinity and femininity on to nature and culture in this society. Aspects of the natural world are associated with both sexes.
In so far as the Laymis see any humans as closer to nature, to the wild, it is the young. From birth until they first begin to speak, children are seen as essentially wild, and it is not until marriage that people become fully human. Women are not seen as closer to nature on account of their reproductive powers. While men dominate social life, there are many spheres of culture in which women represent and create key symbols of Laymi society – through their weaving and creation of songs, for example. In all, we can see this as a culture that reveres and also fears various powers of nature. At the same time, these are not particularly associated with women. Some deities are male and some female. In terms of humans, it is the young who are most seen as close to nature and the married who are seen to most embody human culture.
Jane Goodale describes the Kaulong of New Britain. As Goodale sees it, the Kaulong envisage their most human or cultured place as their permanent settlement, a cleared area in the forest where a permanent house marks the place where ancestors are buried and where the descent group was founded by its original father. It is where unmarried people live, and it is quite common for men to delay marriage till later in life. This central place is also the place where pre-eminently social activities such as feasts, and the giving of status goods, are carried out. Further away from this place are the gardens, with the gardens of the married couples furthest into the forest and separated from each other in isolation. The forest is also a place where foods are gathered – so all three areas are occupied by human culture to a certain extent. In terms of beliefs about spirituality, the Kaulong clearly see their dead ancestors as spirits. But the forest is also home to demons and other spirits which may be dangerous to humans. Kaulong men fear pollution from women through marriage and so they avoid marriage. On the other hand, because they can only replace themselves and their descent group through marriage it is an unfortunate necessity. Sexual intercourse is seen as animalistic. Goodale interprets the dispersion of married couples into the forest as a sign of their wild status. There is no link between these categories of wild versus human – and the gender categories of male versus female. Both men and women are most ‘cultured’ when they are unmarried and living in their clan house. They are most ‘wild’ when they are married and living further away in the forest. Both men and women participate in actions which involve the transformation of natural objects into cultural products. They are both involved in bringing up children and in that way bringing children into culture. Both men and women are involved in the production of status goods through gardening. The people who are considered closest to nature, are not women but married couples, precisely the people that the Laymi regard as most human.
The Kaulong culture is patriarchal in that men are the managers of descent groups and make many decisions which affect the whole group. Men are more likely to gain status through their productive activities although women also do this to some extent. When a man dies his wife is often strangled by her male kin, as it is considered that their marriage links them as indissoluble partners. The Kaulong live harmoniously with the natural world in terms of food production; they are not destroying their forest.
Conclusions
Accordingly in classless societies, men have customary relationships to particular aspects of nature, and women have different relationships. But there is no global pattern which affiliates men to culture and women to nature. Patriarchy is not a template for a universalized masculinist dissociation from nature. As some ecofeminists have argued. For example, Maria Mies, who sees separation from nature as coming out of men’s role in hunting. From within Western civilisation, it is easy to think that women’s closeness to nature is an inevitable outcome of women’s role in birth and reproduction. What we realize when we look at Indigenous classless societies is that this connection is by no means an obvious one. To understand why it seems to be so compelling from a Western perspective we need to look at the psychic landscape created by class society.