Trying to understand ourselves, Homo Sapiens, as a
species is an endlessly fascinating topic.
The first lesson to be learned from such an endeavor is that what history
can tell us about ourselves is what can be learned over the last few thousands
of years, a period when human evolution was mainly cultural, not physical. If we try to look back tens of thousands of
years, we merely know that humans emerged from Africa and spread throughout
Eurasia and evolved changes in physical characteristics that are geographical
in nature. We have chosen to refer to
these changes as racial characteristics as though they were fundamental in
nature. Over the past few centuries this
geographical separation has broken down.
The cultural mixing of the “races” and modern genetic studies have led
to the conclusion that we are all best described as simply being one
species. So, if perhaps the last hundred
thousand years of evolution has not produced significant genetic diversification,
one is justified in concluding that who we fundamentally are was determined
over the millions of years of evolution that occurred during our development in
Africa—a period about which we know almost nothing.
One must assume that we existed in small bands that
survived as hunter-gatherers. One can
try to extrapolate back in time by evaluating what we know about such bands
that were encountered before their existence was contaminated by modern
cultures. One can also attempt to
extrapolate forward in time by assuming that we share common characteristics
with the animals with which we coevolved.
Both approaches are fraught with uncertainties, partly because
researchers are generally unable to dismiss current cultural biases from such
evaluations. For example, male
anthropologists tend to create a history dominated by presumed male
characteristics and activities, while female anthropologists tend to arrive at
a different reading of human nature and the role of the genders in human
development. There is good news in this
uncertainty. If one is depressed by
humanity’s current state, who we are today is not necessarily indicative of who
we could be tomorrow.
Here the choice will be made to determine a few characteristics
that seem to be fundamental from animal evolution combined with those that are
consistent with what is know from studies of primitive hunter-gatherer
societies. Following that path, the
basic characteristics at play in human development seem to be a need for social
interaction, a preference for kin over non-kin, a desire for sexual autonomy,
and a recognition that the gene pool must be continually enriched.
Living in groups of perhaps several dozen individuals
requires a simple but strict social organization. Individuals seeking food on their own would eventually
hit a stretch of bad look and fail to accumulate enough food to support
themselves. Such individuals would
survive by having access to surplus food acquired by others. Sharing of necessary materials was obligatory
and efficient. There was little of
lasting value that would tempt some to accumulate “wealth” superior to that of
others. Little is known about the
details of interactions between the sexes, but one suspects that neither was
inherently dominant. While males were likely
more physically powerful, the gathering of the females was likely more
efficient than the hunting of the males at providing nourishment for the group.
Humans and animals—mammals at least—share the same body
organs and body chemistry. Consequently,
one expects the intense maternal bond to infants to have always existed in
human history. Current human males only
produce small amounts of the bonding chemicals so effective in females, leading
them to exhibit varying degrees of paternal support for offspring. This is probably an improvement over time
given that the male kinship influence in our nearest neighbors, the
chimpanzees, extends to merely being willing to practice infanticide only on
other male chimps’ offspring. Otherwise
they play no role in raising infants. Little is known about extended families, but
females eventually developed lives that extended well past their childbearing
periods. This is unusual in the world of
animals. It is not clear whether natural
selection truncated their childbearing time or extended their longevity (or
both), but the kinship between an aged mother and daughter would provide the
daughter with a dependable babysitter while she foraged for food, or for
another to assist in the foraging.
There seems to be a universal desire on the part of
females to have considerable say in which male they choose to mate with. The attitude of males is generally to mate
with any female, or, perhaps, every female.
Whether or not the female manages to protect her options will have a
significant effect on the evolution of the species. Chimpanzee males dominate the females and
compete within themselves for access to the females. This nonselective approach does little to enhance
specific female characteristics, but it ensures a healthy component of the
characteristics of dominant males in the gene pool. For most bird species, the female has gained
dominance in breeding. Male birds no
longer have a penis with which they could attempt to force copulation on an
uninterested female, and the females select males on the basis of their
aesthetic preferences. Male
characteristics are therefore highly dependent on those female choices. It was the peahens who designed the peacock we
have today. And then there are a few
species of duck who have yet to resolve this conflict between the sexes. After many millions of years of evolution,
male ducks are still developing bigger, more powerful, and more complex penises
in order the penetrate unwilling females.
Meanwhile, the females are developing complex vaginal passages to
prevent penetration except when she assumes a particular posture that she will
only assume for her selected mate. This
can be a nasty business. Humans seem to
have arrived at a compromise in which both genders have participated in mate
choice. Breasts in mammals recede when
they are not needed for breastfeeding.
Human female breasts are permanently on display, presumably a choice
favored by males. Males have developed
large, prominently (and vulnerably) displayed genitalia, seemingly for the sole
purpose of providing females something about which to speculate. And then there is loss of a specific mating
period in human females, allowing sex to go on when desired, with or without
procreation. It is not clear how mate
selection managed that trick.
Our ape relatives know, one way or the other, that
inbreeding is not a good idea. Within a
small group the hazards of inbreeding would develop eventually unless there
were interchanges of males and/or females with other groups. Humans had to develop means by which these
interchanges could occur. In very early
times, the exchanges may have been relatively random with individuals wandering
off looking for new opportunities. At
some point, as societies grew more complex, the benefits of kinship within a
group would be extended to other groups.
This could be accomplished by exchange of gifts with members of other
groups in order to establish good will that might prove advantageous at some
future time. A more effective approach
to developing a broader-based support structure would be to provide a son or
daughter to another group as a spouse to cement a relationship with another kin
group. This type of exchange likely
evolved into our custom of marriage.
Until very recently, perhaps ten to fifteen thousand
years ago, there was no reason to expect any deviation from this picture where
both sexes contributed more or less equally to society. That would begin to change as humans became
more sedentary and began to cultivate crops, domesticate animals, and form
states to control these activities. James
C. Scott is Sterling Professor of Political Science and codirector of the
Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University.
His book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States will serve as a guide to what will
happen next.
Human population was
growing. Scott provides the population
estimate of about two to four million worldwide in 10,000 BCE. Small bands would become bigger bands over
time, and regions could be found where relatively large numbers of humans could
settle in and live off an abundance of plant and animal life. Mesopotamia, unlike today, was one of those regions
in that era. The curious thing about the
time was that people in that period understood the techniques for cultivating
crops and herding animals, but they resisted doing so on a large scale. Today one assumes that moving in that
direction was the inevitable direction for the evolution of civilization, but
it would be several thousand years before humans would consent to, or be
coerced into, participating in an agricultural economy and the states that
would run it.
“The
first evidence of cultivated plants and of sedentary communities appears
roughly 12,000 years ago. Until
then—that is to say for ninety-five percent of the human experience on earth—we
lived in small, mobile, dispersed, relatively egalitarian, hunting and
gathering bands. Still more remarkable,
for those interested in the state form, is the fact that the first small,
stratified, tax-collecting walled states pop up in the Tigris and Euphrates
Valley only around 3,100 BCE, more than four millennia after the first
crop domestications and sedentism. This
massive lag is a problem for those theorists who would naturalize the state
form and assume that once crops and sedentism, the technological and
demographic requirements, respectively, for state formation were established,
states/empires would immediately arise as the logical and most efficient units
of political order.”
Just as humans—and
chimpanzees—were smart enough to realize that inbreeding was dangerous and
should be avoided, they also appeared to realize that organizing into dense
human and animal populations would lead to disease, discord, and suppression of
their freedom. They were correct in this
assumption as the history presented by Scott shows. In fact, the contrast between the good life
they lived as hunter-gatherers compared to the horrors experienced in a
state-dominated agricultural economy has been viewed as the origin of the Adam
and Eve story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
When the food supply was
plentiful, the life of the hunter-gatherer could involve plenty of time for
relaxation and socializing. They had a
variety of food types available and enjoyed what we would view as a healthy
diet. An agricultural system based on
the growing of grain and livestock rearing involved much more labor and a
highly restricted diet. Either declining
environmental conditions or coercion would be required to capture them in such
a system.
“’Domiciled’ sheep, for example,
are generally smaller than their wild ancestors; they bear telltale signs of
domesticate life: bone pathologies typical of crowding and a narrow diet with
distinctive deficiencies. The bones of
‘domiciled’ Homo Sapiens compared with those of hunter-gatherers are also
distinctive: they are smaller; the bones and teeth often bear the signature of
nutritional distress, in particular, an iron-deficiency anemia marked above all
in women of reproductive age whose diets consist increasingly of grains.”
“Evidence for the relative
restriction and impoverishment of early farmers’ diets comes largely from
comparisons of skeletal remains of farmers with those of hunter-gatherers
living nearby at the same time. The
hunter-gatherers were several inches taller on average. This presumably reflected their more varied
and abundant diet.”
Consider
that we began with a picture of humans living in small bands where wealth was
not accumulated, and individuals were more or less equal in status. The dynamic of a small band demands that
members look out for each other and share their individual bounties when
appropriate. Would anyone use those same
words to describe life in one of the early states? What the “expulsion from Eden” did was
deliver humans into a hierarchical society where class mattered, and there were
always elites who accumulated wealth through their control of the
workforce. We went from living in a
world of relative equality to one of rampant inequality. We started in a place where wealth was barely
even a concept to one in which it is worth enslaving humans in order to acquire
it. What was appearing in this era were
the realities of economics in a capitalist system. The very early states being formed were more
akin to corporations than kingdoms. The
state/corporation directed a captive workforce to produce a limited range of
products for trading with others. The
goal was to increase the wealth of the elite (shareholders?). The workforce was maintained by sending out
raiding/recruiting parties to enslave those captured to replace workers who had
either escaped or died in the frequent disease epidemics. Humans would have to become a domesticated
species.
“Over and above the drudgery of plough agriculture, the
military, ceremonial, and urban needs of the new state centers required forms
of labor in terms of both kind and scale that had no precedent. Quarrying, mining, galley oaring, road
building, logging, canal digging, and other menial tasks may have been, even in
more contemporary times, the sort of work performed by convicts, indentured
laborers, or a desperate proletariat.
It’s the sort of work away from the domus that ‘free’ men—including
peasants—shun. Yet such dangerous and
heavy work was necessary to the very survival of the earliest states.”
It
is not surprising that the role of women would change during this long
imposition of civilization. One could say
that they became more valuable because they could produce offspring, therefore
they had to be kept under control.
“Women
and children were particularly prized as slaves. Women were often taken into local households
as wives, concubines, or servants, and children were likely to be quickly
assimilated, though at an inferior status.
Within a generation or two they and their progeny were likely to be
quickly assimilated, though at an inferior status. Within a generation or two they and their
progeny were likely to have been incorporated into the local society—perhaps
with a new layer of recently captured slaves beneath them in the social order.”
“Women
captives were at least as important for their reproductive services as for
their labor…women slaves of reproductive age were prized in large part as
breeders because of their contribution to the early state’s manpower machine.”
There are any number of
explanations for why women could have lost their status relative to men. Civilization introduced the concept of warfare
into the human condition, something men would be better at. Economic changes introduced wealth and the
temptation to steal it, something men would be better at. Massive amounts of manual labor were
needed. Men would do the work, therefore
women must be focused on producing the men.
The list could go on and on. What
is clear is that at some point women became valuable commodities: they could be
collateral for a loan, they could provide income when made available for marriage,
they were valuable as concubines, servants or prostitutes. This commoditization of females became
explicitly expressed in marriage transactions.
Within the ranks of the wealthy, it became the tradition to give the
bride plus a dowry to the groom’s family as both a means of indicating the wealth
of her family and as a way of purchasing ties to the groom’s family. For the poor and less wealthy the tradition
of bridewealth was practiced. In this
case, the groom or his family paid the bride’s family to obtain their daughter
as a wife. This latter tradition seems
suspiciously close to a purchase agreement.
Here we will consider David
Graeber’s take on the rise of patriarchy in this period. It is presented in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The
economics of advancing “civilization” has been a persistent topic here and Graeber’s
explanation fits well within that theme.
He provides this perspective drawn from the earliest of recorded
history.
“In the very early Sumerian
texts, particularly those from roughly 3000 to 2500 BC, women are
everywhere. Early histories not only
record the names of numerous female rulers, but make clear that women where
well represented among the ranks of doctors, merchants, scribes, and public
officials, and generally free to take part in all aspects of public life. One cannot speak of full gender equality: men
still outnumbered women in all aspects of public life.”
“Over the course of the next
thousand years or so, all this changes.
The place of women in civic life erodes; gradually, the more familiar
patriarchal pattern takes shape, with its emphasis on chastity and premarital
virginity, a weakening and eventually wholesale disappearance of women’s role
in government and the liberal professions, and the loss of women’s independent
legal status, which renders them wards of their husbands. By the end of the Bronze Age, about 1200 BC,
we begin to see large numbers of women sequestered away in harems and (in some
places at least) subjected to obligatory veiling.”
The practices of dowry and bridewealth were active in
these Sumerian times, but they were tending to become more nearly an economic matter.
“…as time went on, this payment…often
began to take on the qualities of a simple purchase. It was referred to as ‘the price of a virgin’—not
a mere metaphor, since the illegal deflowering of a virgin was considered a
property crime against her father.
Marriage was referred to as ‘taking possession’ of a woman, the same
word one would use for the seizure of goods.
In principle, a wife, once possessed, owed her husband strict obedience,
and often could not seek a divorce even in cases of physical abuse.”
Economic inequality, as we might say today, was enormous,
with most people falling into the category of “poor.”
“In Nuzi, for instance, ‘the
brideprice was paid in domestic animals and silver amounting to a total value
of 40 shekels of silver’—to which the author dryly adds, ‘there is some evidence
that it was equal to the price of a slave girl.’ This must have been making things
uncomfortably obvious. It’s in Nuzi,
too, where we happen to have unusually detailed records, that we find examples
of rich men paying cut rate ‘brideprice’ to impoverished families to acquire a
daughter who they would then adopt, but who would in fact be either kept as a
concubine or nursemaid, or married to one of their slaves.”
It would be the existence of
debt that would literally turn women into an economic commodity that could be
bought and sold.
“A
Mesopotamian husband couldn’t sell his wife either. Or, normally he couldn’t. Still, everything changed the moment he took
out a loan. Since if he did, it was
perfectly legal…to use his wife and children as surety, and if he was unable to
pay, they could then be taken away as debt pawns in exactly the same way that
he could lose his slaves, sheep, and goats.
What this also meant was that honor and credit became, effectively, the
same thing: at least for a poor man, one’s creditworthiness was precisely one’s
command over one’s household, and (the flip side, as it were) relations of
domestic authority, relations that in principle involved a responsibility for
care and protection, became property rights that could indeed be bought and
sold.”
What normally happens when women become commodities to be
passed around is that many will find their best bet for economic survival is in
prostitution. Graeber quotes from the
historian Gerda Lerner.
“Women might end up as
prostitutes because their parents had to sell them into slavery or because
their impoverished husbands might so use them.
Or they might become self-employed as a last alternative to enslavement.”
“By the middle of the second millennium
B.C., prostitution was well established as a likely occupation for the
daughters of the poor. As the sexual
regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the
virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the
family. Thus, commercial prostitution
came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the needs of men. What became problematic was how to
distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable
women.”
To establish why it would be critical to the honor—and
creditworthiness—of a father that his daughter could not be mistaken for being
one of the many non-respectables, Graeber includes a picture of the activities that
were available in these ancient cities—Biblical-scale debauchery.
“From early times, Sumerian and
Babylonian temple complexes were surrounded by far less glamorous providers of
sexual services—indeed, by the time we know much about them, they were the
center of veritable red-light districts full of taverns with dancing girls, men
in drag (some of them slaves, some runaways), and an almost infinite variety of
prostitutes. There is an endlessly
elaborate terminology of types of sex worker whose subtleties are long since
lost to us. Most seem to have doubled as
entertainers: tavern-keepers doubled as musicians; male transvestites were not
only singers and dancers, but often performed knife-throwing acts. Many were slaves put to work by their
masters, or women working off religious vows or debts, or debt bondswomen, or,
for that matter, women escaping debt bondage with no place else to go.”
One means of separating the respectable women from those
who were not, that is, separating women who could not be bought or sold from
those who could, was to begin the practice of veiling women.
“The most dramatic known attempt
to solve the problem, Lerner observes, can be found in a Middle Assyrian law
code dating from somewhere between 1400 and 1100 BC, which is also the first known
reference to veiling in the history of the Middle East—and also, Lerner
emphasizes, first to make the policing of social boundaries the responsibility
of the state.”
“The code carefully
distinguishes among five classes of women.
Respectable women (either married ladies or concubines), widows, and
daughters of free Assyrian men—‘must veil themselves’ when they go out on the
street. Prostitutes and slaves…are not
allowed to wear veils. The remarkable
thing about the laws is that the punishments specified in the code are not
directed at respectable women who do not wear veils, but at prostitutes and
slaves who do. The prostitute was to be publicly
beaten fifty times with staves and have pitch poured on her head; the slave
girl was to have her ears cut off.”
Thus, we have seen how patriarchy gradually developed
over time as societies evolved, finally arriving at the most restrictive forms
in the early Middle East. A distaste for
the corrupt and ungodly practices that could be found in the major cities of
the time, and misogyny, would be imbedded in our cultural heritage via
transmission in the scriptures of the major religions that emerged from this
area: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
“The world’s Holy Books—the Old
and New Testaments, the Koran, religious literature from the Middle Ages to
this day—echo this voice of rebellion, combining contempt for the corrupt urban
life, suspicion of the merchant, and often, intense misogyny. One need only think of the image of Babylon
itself, which has become permanently lodged in the collective imagination as not
only the cradle of civilization, but also the Place of Whores.”
It seems that at around the same period in both India and
China women’s freedoms were also gradually being restricted. This implies that there was some grand universal
mechanism at work that is, perhaps, masked by the particular details of the
history of a given region. Graeber
provides this attempt at an explanation: “the growing scale and social importance
of war.”
“Certainly, the more
militaristic the state, the harsher its laws tended to be toward women. But I would add another, complementary argument. As I have emphasized, historically, war,
states, and markets all tend to feed off one another. Conquest leads to taxes. Taxes tend to be ways to create markets,
which are convenient for soldiers and administrators. In the specific case of Mesopotamia, all of
this took on a complicated relation to an explosion of debt that threatened to
turn all human relations—and by extension, women’s bodies—into potential
commodities. At the same time, it
created a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic
game, who over time felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to make
clear that their women could in no sense be bought or sold.”
The interested reader might find the following articles
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