1. Have you read Peter Turchin? He, like some others, insists that history really is going in a certain direction all the time. According to Turchin, history is a dialectic between civil war and war against outsiders. There is a process of evolution going on in favor of the larger-scale units.
The middle ages might have looked rather much like any horticultural small-scale society. But under the surface, important steps toward higher levels of internal cohesion were taken: Christianity was tearing down clan structures. Broad social cohesion was being built through a religion celebrating a victim.
2. When it comes to patrilineality and matrilineality, I need data before I believe anything at all. Unfortunately I don't have that data. I recently read about two primitive societies: The Dani of Papua New Guinea and the Tiwi of Australia. The Dani are patrilineal and were in a constant state of war with their neighbors. I have only read one book yet and it only said that husbands could be violently jealous.
The Tiwi were are matrilineal hunter-gatherers, pacified since decades when the study I read was made in the 1950s. All Tiwi females were always married. A man who wanted to marry needed to recruit a mother in law. Then he needed to support her and he would hopefully get the daughter or daughters she would give birth to as wives. The mother in law was mostly younger than the son in law. This meant that girls of about ten years were given away to men who were most often about forty years old. The Tiwi believed menstruation was caused by sexual activity, so marital sexual activity began early. When those girls reached their late teens, they often found out that young men were more attractive than their old husbands. The husbands could use older wives to spy on their younger wives. Infidelity frequently lead to duels were the legal husband was given a huge advantage.
I also read about the Canela, a formerly very war-like Amazonian people. The Canela were matrilineal. On the one hand, they were promiscuous. Recently married teenage girls were forced to have group sex with a number of men. If they refused, they were raped. When a couple had children together, they couldn't separate until the children had grown up.
And at last, the famous Yanomamö. The Yanomamö were patrilineal. They were horticulturalists. Men were very jealous and violent in order to keep their wives from having affairs. Women had very little say regarding whom to marry.
From the information I have, I see little pattern at all. The two matrilineal societies I mentioned were mostly hunter-gatherers and the two patrilineal societies were horticulturalists. But all were technologically primitive and owned little. One, the Dani, owned pigs, but the Yanomamö abhorred the thought of killing domestic animals. Still, they were patriarchal, jealous, cruel and polygynous husbands.
I'm hoping for some better data to show up, because as things are I can't see any clear patterns except that poorer and less advanced societies tend to be more matrilineal. I can't even see that men in matrilineal societies would be less jealous: Paternity certainty is always a good thing for a man, also when there is nothing to inherit. Men have always tried to get as much sexual exclusivity as possible. In very hazardous environments, sharing a child with another man might have paid off. Men have also shared women for reasons of bonding and equality. But as soon as men think they can afford it, they like to monopolize women.
I've read Turchin a little - not enough to recognize a "dialectic between civil war and war against outsiders" or "a process of evolution going on in favor of the larger-scale units" as arising outside of my own mind. He may well mean something different from what those phrases mean to me!
> When it comes to patrilineality and matrilineality, I need data before I believe anything at all... From the information I have, I see little pattern at all
OK, you have four datapoints. Since it's been at least twenty years since I've investigated this much at all, I'll be fair and say I have zero. Tove, I believe you when you say you see no pattern. And I am smart enough to know that four is better than zero, really!
But after working very hard and browsing around for eight whole minutes, I also find Sarah Lowes, who tells me she has four hundred thousand datapoints. Yes, they're all from one continent, and yes, she hasn't earned any particular trust from me through her plucky attempts to build a following on substack, or from her experience growing lettuce or laying concrete. But Tove, four hundred thousand is a big number:
"I test these hypotheses using a geographic regression discontinuity design along the matrilineal belt, which describes the distribution of matrilineal kinship across sub-Saharan Africa. Using over 50 DHS survey-waves with more than 400,000 respondents, I find that matrilineal women are less likely to believe domestic violence is justified, experience less domestic violence, and have greater autonomy in decision making – particularly in the ability to visit family and seek healthcare. Additionally, matrilineal kinship closes the education gap between male and female children, and matrilineal children experience health benefits. Using original survey and experimental data from couples along the matrilineal belt, I test how matrilineal kinship structure affects spousal cooperation. Matrilineal women contribute less to a public good with a spouse when it is easier to hide income. The results highlight how broader social structures shape women’s empowerment, investment in children, and cooperation in the household."
> Men have always tried to get as much sexual exclusivity as possible.
Now wait a minute. Men have always tried to get as much sexual *access* as possible, not exclusivity. Who ever fantasized about a woman *not* having sex with somebody else?
You keep saying these tantalizing things and I keep not really understanding what you mean. How did Homer get into Valhalla? Does logical argumentation send you into cardiac arrest, or are you instead talking about dialectric breakdown? I can see dialectric breakdown causing heart failure, definitely.
[Homeric battles] → Hegel → Dialectic processes assume a conflict ( ongoing war of battles) between thesis and antithesis, allowing a synthesis, which in turn, (on a new dawn in Valhalla when the fallen of the battles from day before rise to fight anew) → (the synthesis) becomes a thesis as it annoys (what are you looking at) somebody into the antithesis, and so on. The 'violence' here cause me to reach for my heart, paraphrasing the nazi Goering who i s supposed to have said, "when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun". As a failed poet I am sensitive to metaphors in philosophical language, but do not mind explaining the odd joke on the odd occasion of a question puncturing my autarkic solipsism.
Yes, the authors of that book are vapid and prosaic. Yes, if you follow all of their guidelines your writing will be as mundane as a box of hammers. But you will need to follow their advice *occasionally* in order to be a much better meika loofs samorzewski.
Turchin's more popular books, like War, Peace and War, are the easiest to begin with. But Anders doesn't like Turchin's books. I haven't really reached any conclusion whether he thinks they are useless or that only people who are a bit uneducated about history (like me) need them.
>>But after working very hard and browsing around for eight whole minutes, I also find Sarah Lowes, who tells me she has four hundred thousand datapoints.
OK, I give in, there is SOME pattern. Just not the strong pattern I would like to see, or the kind of pattern you described above. Women in matrilineal societies aren't free from male dominance. They are at least partially controlled by men and perform more hard and tedious work than men in both patrilineal and matrilineal primitive societies. If male dominance is on average less effective in matrilineal societies I'm not at all surprised, because there seems to be some advantage in patrilineality (otherwise formal patrilineality wouldn't have taken over the whole game in more or less the whole world when societies became more advanced).
The best pattern I can see from my (slightly more than four) data points is that at primitive stages, everything works. Patrilineality or matrilineality, it is a question of counting. Technically, people are just as related to their maternal kin as to their paternal kin, so it is not strange that different primitive societies codified their kinship rules in different ways. For example pre-modern Australia seems to have had an array of kinship systems. As far as I know, all known Australian societies were more or less heavily male-dominated (but yes, I have too little data, and it torments me).
As societies advance beyond a certain point, matrilineality mostly gets abandoned or outcompeted. Maybe for the reason that Sarah Lowes puts forward: That it counteracts social cohesion.
I thought her paper was a bit difficult to read. I really would have liked to know how many percent of women in matrilineal societies think a husband is justified to beat his wife on occasion a, b, c and d.
>>Now wait a minute. Men have always tried to get as much sexual *access* as possible, not exclusivity. Who ever fantasized about a woman *not* having sex with somebody else?
The idea that male jealousy rose as a result of private property is a Marxist-inspired myth. Sexual jealousy can be suppressed, but it definitely is there, property or not. And men in societies with no property have a formidable method to suppress female infidelity: Violence. That is exactly what happened among Australian hunter-gatherers in the 19th century, according to anthropologist Carl Lumholz.
> Just not the strong pattern I would like to see, or the kind of pattern you described above. Women in matrilineal societies aren't free from male dominance. They are at least partially controlled by men and perform more hard and tedious work than men in both patrilineal and matrilineal primitive societies.
Hey, play fair! Did I not warn you of everything you just wrote with "maybe the women don’t have it so great; mostly they do all the work gardening while you sit around until it’s time to hunt, or go on a raid?" The great thing about matrilineal societies is that the level of oppression is comprehensible to a sane modern mind, not that it's not there at all.
> there seems to be some advantage in patrilineality (otherwise formal patrilineality wouldn't have taken over the whole game in more or less the whole world when societies became more advanced).
Well, yes, in the same way there's an advantage in bilinearity, otherwise all the advanced modern societies wouldn't use bilineal descent today. The socioeconomic context determines what cultures have an advantage. My understanding is that Patriliny is the ugly strategy that works when:
1. Male reproductive success is wildly variable,
2. Your son's reproductive success depends greatly on inherited wealth, and
3. Your daughters can't run away and throw pine cones at you from the bushes.
> The idea that male jealousy rose as a result of private property is a Marxist-inspired myth. Sexual jealousy can be suppressed, but it definitely is there, property or not.
Tove, you're way more fun to talk to when you don't insist that I am a figment of my own imagination.
>>The great thing about matrilineal societies is that the level of oppression is comprehensible to a sane modern mind, not that it's not there at all.
There we have the point that I'm disagreeing over. Sara Lowes found that 23 percent fewer women said they were victims of domestic abuse in matrilineal African societies compared to patrilineal ones. 23 percent less is not much if the benchmark is standard African gender oppression. Subscribing to female babies as future wives is also not what I would call comprehensible to a sane modern mind. Also not the gang rape of teenage girls who refuse to be "sexually generous" to certain pre-determined men. I agree with you that patrilineality seems to make oppression of females even easier. But I have heard of too many examples of gender-oppressing societies said to be matrilineal to believe that matrilineality is an effective formula against gender oppression incomprehensible to the modern mind. I simply would like to know more about in how many societies, matrilineal and others, were daughters really in the position to throw pine cones at their elders.
>>Tove, you're way more fun to talk to when you don't insist that I am a figment of my own imagination.
Everyone can't write as quickly and precisely as you. I don't know whose imagination it is, but I suspect that many anthropologists have looked at the societies they studied with presumptions of total human malleability in mind, or other presumptions of their day that are now largely outdated. I'm trying to find a way around that and take in as much information as possible collected in the past without getting more than necessary of the outdated presumptions. If you know of any suitable step towards that goal, please let me know.
I'm sorry, Tove. I really should have born in mind that male possessiveness is an issue you're passionate about, and left it at that.
I'll also say that even small things like 23% can be the difference between something that makes a person think "This is a problem" and "This is normal." The current rape rate in Western societies is also disturbingly high; less of a bad thing is pretty good.
> If you know of any suitable step towards that goal, please let me know.
It's possible I might have some hints. I stress *might.* And give me a bit - please bear in mind this is just about my least favorite topic.
1. Have you read Peter Turchin? He, like some others, insists that history really is going in a certain direction all the time. According to Turchin, history is a dialectic between civil war and war against outsiders. There is a process of evolution going on in favor of the larger-scale units.
The middle ages might have looked rather much like any horticultural small-scale society. But under the surface, important steps toward higher levels of internal cohesion were taken: Christianity was tearing down clan structures. Broad social cohesion was being built through a religion celebrating a victim.
2. When it comes to patrilineality and matrilineality, I need data before I believe anything at all. Unfortunately I don't have that data. I recently read about two primitive societies: The Dani of Papua New Guinea and the Tiwi of Australia. The Dani are patrilineal and were in a constant state of war with their neighbors. I have only read one book yet and it only said that husbands could be violently jealous.
The Tiwi were are matrilineal hunter-gatherers, pacified since decades when the study I read was made in the 1950s. All Tiwi females were always married. A man who wanted to marry needed to recruit a mother in law. Then he needed to support her and he would hopefully get the daughter or daughters she would give birth to as wives. The mother in law was mostly younger than the son in law. This meant that girls of about ten years were given away to men who were most often about forty years old. The Tiwi believed menstruation was caused by sexual activity, so marital sexual activity began early. When those girls reached their late teens, they often found out that young men were more attractive than their old husbands. The husbands could use older wives to spy on their younger wives. Infidelity frequently lead to duels were the legal husband was given a huge advantage.
I also read about the Canela, a formerly very war-like Amazonian people. The Canela were matrilineal. On the one hand, they were promiscuous. Recently married teenage girls were forced to have group sex with a number of men. If they refused, they were raped. When a couple had children together, they couldn't separate until the children had grown up.
And at last, the famous Yanomamö. The Yanomamö were patrilineal. They were horticulturalists. Men were very jealous and violent in order to keep their wives from having affairs. Women had very little say regarding whom to marry.
From the information I have, I see little pattern at all. The two matrilineal societies I mentioned were mostly hunter-gatherers and the two patrilineal societies were horticulturalists. But all were technologically primitive and owned little. One, the Dani, owned pigs, but the Yanomamö abhorred the thought of killing domestic animals. Still, they were patriarchal, jealous, cruel and polygynous husbands.
I'm hoping for some better data to show up, because as things are I can't see any clear patterns except that poorer and less advanced societies tend to be more matrilineal. I can't even see that men in matrilineal societies would be less jealous: Paternity certainty is always a good thing for a man, also when there is nothing to inherit. Men have always tried to get as much sexual exclusivity as possible. In very hazardous environments, sharing a child with another man might have paid off. Men have also shared women for reasons of bonding and equality. But as soon as men think they can afford it, they like to monopolize women.
I've read Turchin a little - not enough to recognize a "dialectic between civil war and war against outsiders" or "a process of evolution going on in favor of the larger-scale units" as arising outside of my own mind. He may well mean something different from what those phrases mean to me!
> When it comes to patrilineality and matrilineality, I need data before I believe anything at all... From the information I have, I see little pattern at all
OK, you have four datapoints. Since it's been at least twenty years since I've investigated this much at all, I'll be fair and say I have zero. Tove, I believe you when you say you see no pattern. And I am smart enough to know that four is better than zero, really!
But after working very hard and browsing around for eight whole minutes, I also find Sarah Lowes, who tells me she has four hundred thousand datapoints. Yes, they're all from one continent, and yes, she hasn't earned any particular trust from me through her plucky attempts to build a following on substack, or from her experience growing lettuce or laying concrete. But Tove, four hundred thousand is a big number:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/slowes/files/lowes_matrilineal_2022.pdf
"I test these hypotheses using a geographic regression discontinuity design along the matrilineal belt, which describes the distribution of matrilineal kinship across sub-Saharan Africa. Using over 50 DHS survey-waves with more than 400,000 respondents, I find that matrilineal women are less likely to believe domestic violence is justified, experience less domestic violence, and have greater autonomy in decision making – particularly in the ability to visit family and seek healthcare. Additionally, matrilineal kinship closes the education gap between male and female children, and matrilineal children experience health benefits. Using original survey and experimental data from couples along the matrilineal belt, I test how matrilineal kinship structure affects spousal cooperation. Matrilineal women contribute less to a public good with a spouse when it is easier to hide income. The results highlight how broader social structures shape women’s empowerment, investment in children, and cooperation in the household."
> Men have always tried to get as much sexual exclusivity as possible.
Now wait a minute. Men have always tried to get as much sexual *access* as possible, not exclusivity. Who ever fantasized about a woman *not* having sex with somebody else?
whenever I hear the word "dialectic" I reach for my heart. (The word assumes a Homeric world where we wake up in Valhalla everyday).
You keep saying these tantalizing things and I keep not really understanding what you mean. How did Homer get into Valhalla? Does logical argumentation send you into cardiac arrest, or are you instead talking about dialectric breakdown? I can see dialectric breakdown causing heart failure, definitely.
[Homeric battles] → Hegel → Dialectic processes assume a conflict ( ongoing war of battles) between thesis and antithesis, allowing a synthesis, which in turn, (on a new dawn in Valhalla when the fallen of the battles from day before rise to fight anew) → (the synthesis) becomes a thesis as it annoys (what are you looking at) somebody into the antithesis, and so on. The 'violence' here cause me to reach for my heart, paraphrasing the nazi Goering who i s supposed to have said, "when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun". As a failed poet I am sensitive to metaphors in philosophical language, but do not mind explaining the odd joke on the odd occasion of a question puncturing my autarkic solipsism.
Now look, you! Just look. The difference between you and a successful poet is
* Two thirds: having rich friends, and
* One third: knowing when to be poetic.
I can't help you with the first thing, but the second thing I can definitely help you with, by providing this link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style
Yes, the authors of that book are vapid and prosaic. Yes, if you follow all of their guidelines your writing will be as mundane as a box of hammers. But you will need to follow their advice *occasionally* in order to be a much better meika loofs samorzewski.
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/worlding-the-love
Turchin's more popular books, like War, Peace and War, are the easiest to begin with. But Anders doesn't like Turchin's books. I haven't really reached any conclusion whether he thinks they are useless or that only people who are a bit uneducated about history (like me) need them.
>>But after working very hard and browsing around for eight whole minutes, I also find Sarah Lowes, who tells me she has four hundred thousand datapoints.
OK, I give in, there is SOME pattern. Just not the strong pattern I would like to see, or the kind of pattern you described above. Women in matrilineal societies aren't free from male dominance. They are at least partially controlled by men and perform more hard and tedious work than men in both patrilineal and matrilineal primitive societies. If male dominance is on average less effective in matrilineal societies I'm not at all surprised, because there seems to be some advantage in patrilineality (otherwise formal patrilineality wouldn't have taken over the whole game in more or less the whole world when societies became more advanced).
The best pattern I can see from my (slightly more than four) data points is that at primitive stages, everything works. Patrilineality or matrilineality, it is a question of counting. Technically, people are just as related to their maternal kin as to their paternal kin, so it is not strange that different primitive societies codified their kinship rules in different ways. For example pre-modern Australia seems to have had an array of kinship systems. As far as I know, all known Australian societies were more or less heavily male-dominated (but yes, I have too little data, and it torments me).
As societies advance beyond a certain point, matrilineality mostly gets abandoned or outcompeted. Maybe for the reason that Sarah Lowes puts forward: That it counteracts social cohesion.
I thought her paper was a bit difficult to read. I really would have liked to know how many percent of women in matrilineal societies think a husband is justified to beat his wife on occasion a, b, c and d.
>>Now wait a minute. Men have always tried to get as much sexual *access* as possible, not exclusivity. Who ever fantasized about a woman *not* having sex with somebody else?
The idea that male jealousy rose as a result of private property is a Marxist-inspired myth. Sexual jealousy can be suppressed, but it definitely is there, property or not. And men in societies with no property have a formidable method to suppress female infidelity: Violence. That is exactly what happened among Australian hunter-gatherers in the 19th century, according to anthropologist Carl Lumholz.
> Just not the strong pattern I would like to see, or the kind of pattern you described above. Women in matrilineal societies aren't free from male dominance. They are at least partially controlled by men and perform more hard and tedious work than men in both patrilineal and matrilineal primitive societies.
Hey, play fair! Did I not warn you of everything you just wrote with "maybe the women don’t have it so great; mostly they do all the work gardening while you sit around until it’s time to hunt, or go on a raid?" The great thing about matrilineal societies is that the level of oppression is comprehensible to a sane modern mind, not that it's not there at all.
> there seems to be some advantage in patrilineality (otherwise formal patrilineality wouldn't have taken over the whole game in more or less the whole world when societies became more advanced).
Well, yes, in the same way there's an advantage in bilinearity, otherwise all the advanced modern societies wouldn't use bilineal descent today. The socioeconomic context determines what cultures have an advantage. My understanding is that Patriliny is the ugly strategy that works when:
1. Male reproductive success is wildly variable,
2. Your son's reproductive success depends greatly on inherited wealth, and
3. Your daughters can't run away and throw pine cones at you from the bushes.
> The idea that male jealousy rose as a result of private property is a Marxist-inspired myth. Sexual jealousy can be suppressed, but it definitely is there, property or not.
Tove, you're way more fun to talk to when you don't insist that I am a figment of my own imagination.
>>The great thing about matrilineal societies is that the level of oppression is comprehensible to a sane modern mind, not that it's not there at all.
There we have the point that I'm disagreeing over. Sara Lowes found that 23 percent fewer women said they were victims of domestic abuse in matrilineal African societies compared to patrilineal ones. 23 percent less is not much if the benchmark is standard African gender oppression. Subscribing to female babies as future wives is also not what I would call comprehensible to a sane modern mind. Also not the gang rape of teenage girls who refuse to be "sexually generous" to certain pre-determined men. I agree with you that patrilineality seems to make oppression of females even easier. But I have heard of too many examples of gender-oppressing societies said to be matrilineal to believe that matrilineality is an effective formula against gender oppression incomprehensible to the modern mind. I simply would like to know more about in how many societies, matrilineal and others, were daughters really in the position to throw pine cones at their elders.
>>Tove, you're way more fun to talk to when you don't insist that I am a figment of my own imagination.
Everyone can't write as quickly and precisely as you. I don't know whose imagination it is, but I suspect that many anthropologists have looked at the societies they studied with presumptions of total human malleability in mind, or other presumptions of their day that are now largely outdated. I'm trying to find a way around that and take in as much information as possible collected in the past without getting more than necessary of the outdated presumptions. If you know of any suitable step towards that goal, please let me know.
I'm sorry, Tove. I really should have born in mind that male possessiveness is an issue you're passionate about, and left it at that.
I'll also say that even small things like 23% can be the difference between something that makes a person think "This is a problem" and "This is normal." The current rape rate in Western societies is also disturbingly high; less of a bad thing is pretty good.
> If you know of any suitable step towards that goal, please let me know.
It's possible I might have some hints. I stress *might.* And give me a bit - please bear in mind this is just about my least favorite topic.