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A matriarchy is a tradition (and by extension a form of government) in which power lies naturally with senior
females of a community. In a matriarchy children are identified in terms of their mother (matrilinearity), rather than their
father, and extended families and tribal alliances form along female blood-lines. The term is sometimes extended to refer to
"government by women", although this is more technically termed gynarchy.
In the present-day world, traditional matriarchal societies are rare, if not nonexistent. Anthropologist Donald Brown's list
of "human universals" (i.e. features shared by all current human societies) includes men being the "dominant element" in public
political affairs (Brown 1991, p. 137). Feminist Joan Bamberger notes that the historical record contains no reliable evidence of
any society in which women dominated (Bamberger 1974). The Trobriand
Islands were considered a matriarchy by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski: the dispute this view has engendered is discussed at that entry.
Whether matriarchal societies might have existed at some time in the distant past is controversial. The controversy began in
reaction to the book by Johann Jakob Bachofen Mother
Right: An Investigation of the Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World in 1861. Several
generations of ethnologists were inspired by his pseudo-evolutionary theory of archaic matriarchy. Following him and Jane Ellen Harrison, several generations of scholars, arguing usually
from myths or oral traditions and neolithic female cult-figures, suggested that many ancient societies were matriarchal, or even
that there existed a wide-ranging matriarchal society prior to the ancient cultures of which we are aware (see for example
The White Goddess by Robert Graves).
More recent archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas, arguing for a
widespread matriarchal culture in pre-Indo-European Old Europe of the Neolithic, have made missteps while attempting to overcome
skepticism in what has been until recently an overwhelmingly masculine field.
One area where written myths are available from an early period is the Aegean
culture-zone, where the Minoan Great Goddess was worshipped in a society where women and men were apparently equals. Modern self-described
"Goddess women" are too quick to assume that any culture that worships a Mother Goddess must be a matriarchy, but there are traces, under the
insistently patriarchal Olympian mythology of classical Greece, of earlier matrilineal systems. See the entries for Alcimede or for Hyas for examples.
Another famous legendary matriarchy (and gynarchy) on the edges of the Greek cultural horizon was Amazon society, which took shape in the imaginations of classical Greeks, based on reports of Scythian female status and even female warriors. Some professional historians, however, claim
that the "evidence" in the form of myths or oral traditions is too murky to conclude anything from. Some people use this lack of
solid evidence as a basis for believing that there has never been a matriarchal society.
Belief in a matriarchy, and its replacement by andrarchy or "patriarchy" can be linked to the historical
"inevitabilities" which the nineteenth century's concept of
progress through cultural evolution introduced into anthropology.
They formed the curious and rather racist notion that some primitive peoples did not
grasp the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy. They therefore had no clear notion of paternity, according to this hypothesis; women produced children mysteriously, without necessary links to the man
or men they had sex with. When men discovered paternity, according to the hypothesis, they acted to claim power to monopolize
women and claim children as their own offspring. The move from primitive matriarchy to patriarchy was a step forward for human
knowledge.
This belief system was the result of errors in early ethnography, which in
return was the result of unsophisticated methods of field work. When strangers
arrive and start asking where babies come from, the urge to respond imaginatively is hard to resist, as Margaret Mead might
have discovered in Samoa. In fact, while prior to genetics there have been many
different explanations of the mechanics of pregnancy and the relative contributions of either sex, no human group,
however primitive, is unaware of the link between intercourse and pregnancy. The fact that each child has one unique father has
come more recently, however; Greek and Roman writers thought that the seed of two men might both contribute to the character of
the child. By the time these mistakes were corrected in anthropology, however, the idea that a matriarchy had once existed had
been picked up on in comparative religion and archaeology, and was used as the basis of new hypotheses that were unrelated to the
postulated ignorance of primitive people about paternity.
Regardless of actual historical fact, many cultures have myths about a time when women were dominant. Bamberger (1974)
examines several of these myths from South American cultures, and concludes that, by portraying the women from this period as
evil, they often serve to keep modern-day women under control.
Matriarchy is distinct from matrilocality.
- Compare: patriarchy
References
- Bamberger, Joan. (1974). '"The Myth of Matriachy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society," in Women, Culture, and
Society, edited by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, pp. 263-280. Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press.
- Brown, Robert. (1991). Human Universals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
- Marija Gimbutas (1991). "The Language of the Goddess".
External Links
- "The archaeology of the Goddess" : a balanced skeptical assessment
- Cattle ownership makes it a man's world New Scientist (1. October 2003): A new
study claims to demonstrate that early female-dominated societies lost their power to men when they started herding cattle.
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