So I should probably begin with an apology to my long-term readers. I was really intending to offer interesting links for things to read every month, but as the months went on, the more I looked, the more obvious it became that the Internet is basically a giant midden filled with the detritus of a decaying civilization it seemed as though it somehow got harder and harder to find any interesting links to read.
The good news is that finally I have enough to warrant a links post, but the downside is that I won’t be able to do these every month going forward. In case there isn’t another one for the entire year, well, this may turn out to be a year’s worth of reading. Make it count, folks!
This time around, we’ve got links to articles and books on prehistoric life, further attempts to soften Tove’s otherwise well-researched attitudes about prehistoric peoples and give Kasimir some ammunition in his arguments about patriarchy, a few related articles of news for those of you who are more into the present, and finally a couple of short stories for those of you who are just so very, very tired of it all.
Kinship Before the Plough
“Man mates much like other mammals do, but he makes much more fuss about it.“
One of the first books on anthropology and kinship I ever read was Pierre Van Den Berghe’s Human Family Systems, which I want to strongly recommend to my readers now that I’ve found it online. Really—go download this now! Van den Berghe provides an excellent introduction to kinship systems, about which most people know woefully little. Yes, obviously most people know about patrilineal kinship, where lineages are traced through the father. Unfortunately, as I’ve argued elsewhere, patrilineal societies lead to screwed up marriage systems, bride capture,1 and, over deep evolutionary time, domestication syndrome in human women. Once you realize this, matrilineal kinship starts to look pretty good as an alternative.
What is this alternative like, then? Well, if you just want a quick introduction, Britannica has a well-written article on matrilineal societies. No, whatever anyone else tries to tell you—matrilineal societies really weren’t matriarchal. Men were still stronger than women, and by and large prehistory was a time when strength still counted for a great deal. But one feature of matrilineal societies is that they didn’t rely on animals which could be amassed as wealth to buy wives. This means that getting food in a matrilineal society entailed foraging, hunting, and fishing, or simple farming methods that don’t rely on the plow, known as horticulture.
Farming Before the Plough
When thinking about the distant past, people seem to think primarily of agricultural civilizations, or, before them, hunter-gatherers. But society can’t go directly from foraging for food to domesticated oxen pulling metal ploughs. In between the earlier foraging societies and the eventual rise of plough agriculture, there must have been something.
That something was (wait for it) horticulture—farming before the plough. Horticultural societies represent a kind of missing link between the stultifying illiteracy of hunter-gatherers and the deadening inequality of agrarian empires, when people fed themselves from crops raised in gardens, supplemented by hunting, fishing, and later on, domesticated animals. Whenever people talk about what life was like “in the olden days,” you should wonder whether they are aware of the thousands of years spent under horticulture, when matriclans roamed the landscape, sowing fields and harvesting their crops before moving on.
The previous link is my favorite brief introduction to the topic by Britannica, and it’s the one I recommend. Yes, I know some of you love Wikipedia, but Wikipedia’s article on horticulture only discusses modern gardening, and their article on hoe-farming is pretty sparse, as well as being a total undersell of the rad subsistence system better known as (that’s right) horticulture.
But if you’re wanting a more scholarly alternative to the Britannica article, there’s a good article up at UC Davis on Horticultural Societies.
Or for readers with an interest that veers more into the humanities: try Tacitus’ Germania. This is one of my favorite historical texts, where Tacitus describes the world of the northern barbarians before the fall of Rome. Even fairly late into the Iron Age, Northern Europe remained primarily pastoralist and horticulturalist, because of the heavy clay soils which prevented Mediterranean agricultural methods from seeing wide application there.2 This is what everybody was doing in the days before Christianity, basking in the relative freedom of the left half of the complexity curve. And I’m not the only one to notice the barbarian cultures held onto matrilineal features much longer than the Romans:
Sisters’ children mean as much to their uncle as to their father. Some peoples regard this blood-tie as even closer and more sacred than that between son and father, and in taking hostages make it the basis of their demand, as though they in this way secure loyalty more surely and have a wider hold on the family.
I know this makes them sound pretty pugnacious, but Tacitus reassures us that, like most horticulturalists, they weren’t fighting all the time:
When they are not engaging in war, they spend much time in hunting, but more in idleness… the best and bravest warriors doing nothing, having handed over control of their home, hearth, and property to the women, the old men, and the weakest members of the family. For themselves they vegetate, by that curious incongruity of temperament which makes of the same men such lovers of slumber and such haters of quiet.”3
Life After the Plough
Fast forward a few thousand years and some interesting things are going on. My readers overseas may not be aware that abortion is no longer legal in most Midwestern or Southern States since 2022. An interesting piece of news in the aftermath: a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that nearly 520,000 rapes “were associated with” 64,565 pregnancies across 14 states. Since I guess Americans aren’t comfortable with straightforward language, I’ll follow suit and tell you it’s been understood for some time that roughly one in twenty American women “experience a pregnancy” after rape or sexual coercion.4 Unfortunately the rapists themselves may not be fooled by this kind of language: “Ninety-one percent of the estimated rape-related pregnancies took place in states without exceptions for rape.” People like to say “rape is actually about power,” but, well, people like to say a lot of things. Question for my pro-life readers: I know abortion stops a beating heart, but are you really sure you want rape to be a viable reproductive strategy?
On a lighter note: Here’s An Honest Diversity Statement by a Harvard history professor who writes—with considerable patience and panache—the kinds of things the rest of us would say much more bluntly at work every day and all the time if we didn’t fear termination, cancellation, or defenestration.
Horror Fiction
Tired of being so tense all the time? Get off of social media, give your eyes a rest from the sludgy propoganda that modern movies have become, and take a break from the stress of the news cycle with these two stories our family just read:
H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Gamers like to talk about Lovecraft, either because they like Call of Cthulhu, a terrible classic roleplaying came roughly based on his work, or because they like Arkham Horror, a disappointing wildly popular board game vaguely inspired by his world, but how do they figure out he would have scorned those games, and how will they ever learn how compelling his fiction was, unless they read it themselves? So if you haven’t read Lovecraft yet, Shadow over Innsmouth is the thing to read. Yes, it’s tempting to suggest his lesser known stories to prove he can write more than just horror, but really, do people read Lovecraft in order to talk about what a compelling phantasist he is, or what biting satire he could write? No, they read Lovecraft because he wrote Shadow over Innsmouth. Freely available, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
Last of all, try out Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows. Blackwood was a little-known inspiration for Lovecraft, and this was one of his best stories. Netflix would describe The Willows as a “slow burn.” Thanks again, project Gutenberg, and happy reading!
which is sort of a euphamism for kidnapping and enslaving women
Andersen, T. B., Jensen, P. S., & Skovsgaard, C. V. (2016). The heavy plow and the agricultural revolution in Medieval Europe. Journal of Development Economics, 118, 133-149.
I’m guessing it’s mostly ‘cause they didn’t have anything to read
D'Angelo, D. V., Liu, Y., Basile, K. C., Smith, S. G., Chen, J., Friar, N. W., & Stevens, M. (2023). Rape and sexual coercion related pregnancy in the United States. American journal of preventive medicine.
I am an abolitionist and theonomist, not 'pro-life', but I certainly would be willing to discuss this issue:
>>Question for my pro-life readers: I know abortion stops a beating heart, but are you really sure you want rape to be a viable reproductive strategy?
From my perspective, I would question the definition of 'viable'. Given the fact that even in our perverse society, most rapists don't get to do it over and over and, when caught, get put somewhere where they aren't able to reproduce... is it a viable strategy? Getting married and having unprotected sex with your wife would tend to produce a LOT more children.
And as a theonomist, I believe the penalty for rape (given the rules of that system) should be death... which would seem to limit your total number of offspring somewhat.