Gruntled Center (Beau Weston): Social Equality Brings Out More Sex Differences – It Does Not Eliminate Them
Michael, did you notice this line in the NYT aritcle:
“Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian.
Interesting hypothesis, and I wonder what the real support for throwing monotheism in that repressive mix is…given the fact that the Judeo/Christian tradition has always affirmed a complementarian view of men and women.
It certainly has taken a more woman friendly view than surrounding cultures. But also challenge the notion of egalitarian peaceful hunters and gatherers. In explaining why hunting and gathering societies move toward centralized authority, Jerrod Diamond offers this paragraph as his third of four factors in “Guns, Germs, and Steel”:
“3. Use of monopoly force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones. Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t; it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.” Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger.” (277)
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