Anthropology and Fundies

[emmiedahl]

I am taking an anthro class on gender and culture and it is impossible not to sideways glance at American fundamentalism.

A very smart person once observed that women's status in a society is directly related to women's control over the procurement and distribution of economic goods. That is, whether they work and have a say in how the products of their work are used.

I wrote a paper on the changes in the !Kung community, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari desert, as they become more settled. In traditional !Kung society, women gathered 70% of the food. They were equal parties in deciding who gets the food and other valued goods (the !Kung have a system of gifting that made up their economy). !Kung women had very high status in their communities and were considered pretty much equal to men.

The gathering life is one in which women have pregnancies naturally spaced by the rigorous physical demands of their lifestyle and also extended breastfeeding due to the lack of easily digestible food in the bush. They had children 3-4 years apart on average, and the communal lifestyle made it easy to balance childcare with other duties. They used temporary huts as housing, so there was almost no 'housework'.

That is, until they were settled by the Bantu government. Now they are stuck at home. They are having children closer together, do not live as communally, and the men work traditional jobs while the women stay at home for the most part.

Women's status is tailspinning. Just over a few decades, !Kung women have gone from being masters of their own destiny to just another victim of patriarchy.

I wonder if fundies encourage women to stay at home because they subconsciously understand that when women are independent, they become equals. Keep them at home breeding, tell them it is wrong to work, and that leaves the men in charge.

What do you guys think? I already wrote the paper and got an A+ on it, so I am not asking for homework help.

[Joykins]

There are a lot of trade-offs in the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyle, huge ones. Women's autonomy is probably the least of it. Historically the agricultural lifestyle trades off a steady food supply for higher fertility (often balanced or overbalanced by crowd diseases, etc.). With cities the problems became worse before modern sanitation made them better. With the advent of the computer age and the availablility of high paying jobs for women that do not require brute strength, the balance toward women controlling their own lives is swinging back and a lot of people (*cough*fundies*cough*) don't like it.

[emmiedahl]

The !Kung are just an example, though. In every culture, women's status is related to their ability to produce and distribute economic goods. The !Kung are an interesting case study in this theory because they are the only example that I can think of in which the women have rapidly lost their economic role in society organically.

It has happened in Afghanistan and other countries, with the same result, but there were also political and religious forces at play.

[deborahlynn1979]

I totally thought this post was going to be about Anthropologie.

[Deleted03]

This is so marxist! :P I love anthropology, should have studied that damn!

I think it's more than subconscious. You control better your children when they don't get to have unsupervised (by parents) interactions with others where they can discuss their home life, see how different it is or not. The same with women, if they talk with other women the husband can't screen, they might also get other ideas about their relationship or worse even cheat ;)

the more dependent they are on their husband income, the less they can learn essential tasks to live by themselves (my grandma was overwhelmed when she had to get all the utilities started in her apartment she had never had to do that before!)

Joykins: why would women autnomy be the least of the trade off? Would you like to go from control on your means of production to total dependence to a man's salary while having more mouths to feed? I don't understand you on that point. Yes there are other issues, but I don't think women's autonomy should just relegated to the last policy concern. This is what happens every time.

[Maggie Mae]

I totally thought this post was going to be about Anthropologie.

Me too.

[Joykins]

Joykins: why would women autnomy be the least of the trade off? Would you like to go from control on your means of production to total dependence to a man's salary while having more mouths to feed? I don't understand you on that point. Yes there are other issues, but I don't think women's autonomy should just relegated to the last policy concern. This is what happens every time.

I was speaking historically of the demographic impacts. Transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural lifestyle involved huge increases in infant/child mortality and a very large decrease in life expectancy. The agricultural revolution also caused a loss of adult height which did not return to the hunter-gatherer norms until the 20th century. (The demographic response to this was to have more children, to counterbalance the high mortality. This is probably a huge factor in gender role stratification. But, yeah, I meant that women's loss of autonomy was a secondary impact relative to early death and epidemic disease; however, you see how the whole thing interrelates).

My comment didn't have anything to do with policy concerns as I was talking about 10,000-500 years ago. However, a lot of hard-won knowledge about health and sanitation will probably spare the !Kung the worst demographic impacts of their transition, which means women's concerns should with good reason come to the fore.

[emmiedahl]

The !Kung actually have the same incidence of child mortality. While in the bush, they lost about 50% of their children before adulthood, usually to insect-borne diseases or to what sounds like dysentery--a diarrhea/fever illness that would just wipe out anyone young, old or unhealthy. They are losing children now to difference diseases, but the rate is about the same from what I have read.

The !Kung are very small, with an average height of 5 foot even when they were hunter-gatherers and first beginning to interact with the settled, Bantu-speaking tribes that encroached on their roaming territory. I read that they were sometimes mistaken for pygmies. I have not read anything about this changing, although it certainly could be happening.

When you read about the !Kung before settling, such as in Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman and other ethnographies, they enjoyed a high standard of living, with no social stratification and a pretty leisurely lifestyle. They only had to gather an average of three days per week, and that was a leisurely gathering, with women bringing their children and going in groups, talking and playing while they worked. Really, their only problems could have been easily dealt with by a few immunizations and antibiotics. They are considered an accurate representative of ancient hunter-gatherer societies, and it really paints this pleasant, placid view of early human culture. I kinda love them. It was sad to look at modern accounts of their life since settling down.

[Joykins]

50% child mortality is appalling either way you look at it.

[emmiedahl]

It is definitely appalling, and !Kung families are very close and attached to their little ones.

We tend to tell ourselves that people who lose a lot of children get used to it and don't feel it as intensely. In this case at least, that is not the truth. The women go crazy with mourning, the way you or I would. But the rate has not changed; just the way it is happening. At one point in the book referenced earlier, Nisa was reflecting on her lost children and asking, why couldn't my babies stay alive? What did I do? She was elderly at that point and many decades removed from the situation, but she still obviously was feeling the pain. It made me cry, I can't even imagine what she went through, having baby after baby and all of them dying.

[FemaleScientist]

This makes sense. If you look at the differences of a Hunter-Gatherer group and an agricultural group, they are profound. Contrary to what some people believe, in HG societies, men and women both gathered and hunted. There is even evidence that women and children may have helped to hunt wooly mammoths. It was like a family outing.

Then when you get to an agricultural society, labor becomes more intensive and specialized, people aren't nomadic anymore, you have to provide crops to many more people in a city or village, and that's probably when women had to pop out more kids due to the high labor. The labor demands of the city require more work, so now women have to stay at home cooking, popping out kids one after another, and the men get to go outside and have fun working because they're not the ones who are pregnant for 9 months, then have to breastfeed and whatnot.

I think men just happened to misinterpret this as women being slaves in the home, bearing my sons, and hey, I'm physically stronger than her so she must be beneath me. And then women's rights deteriorated from there. I think that because fundy women are encouraged to have as many kids as possible that they become trapped under the weight of 9+ kids with a husband who is too busy working to support them to even help out. It becomes hard to escape this and contribute to the paycheck because a woman doesn't have the time now anymore. I think if you take some of the kids away, give the woman more time to herself, then she will be more independent and support the income. And like you said, I think men know this and would much rather have a pretty slave to his beckon call than an independent, thinking women undermining his monstrous ego. Make them have more kids, and you'll have your perfect 50's wife.

For any who don't want to read, agricultural society = more kids = women having no time for themselves to work and must now stay at home. HG society = less kids = women participating in hunting and gathering and providing more for the small community, with the kids helping out.

[kamcho_papio]

Not to mention, the transitional aspect of moving from a foraging society to a settled society is extremely stressful. In many cases in the 20th and 21st century, foraging/HG groups who settle (through coercion or other means) suffer high rates of drug abuse, alcoholism, high death rates and plummeting birth rates that cannot be ascribed to pathologies other than depression or stress. The cultural disintegration leaves its mark in the devaluation of women and elders and even literally dislocates the men who often have to work far from home, which isolates them from family life in many ways.

So, uh, long time lurker, first time poster.

[emmiedahl]

I think patriarchy really wants to move us back to that agrarian/early industrial society and to take status away from women by taking economic power away under the guise of "Biblical Womanhood", which is a nice way of saying "putting us where we belong". That is, is in the home, where the only power you might have is what to make for dinner (although certain fundies seem to think I don't even deserve that). I think that is the *whole point* in fact. It explains the glorification of the Victorian era.

For me, the lesson I learn from the !Kung is that gender equality is a natural part of human culture. No matter how it is taken away, we trend back toward it. And that really has to chafe the hides of the people who stand to benefit from inequality.

This class is AMAZING by the way.

[FemaleScientist]

It sounds amazing. I wish we had a class like that when I was in school! I think men are just scared of what women are capable of. And going back to the kids thing... it shows that in countries where this is higher gender equality, you're lucky to see a woman have more than 4 kids (even 2). I think fundy men are also afraid of this and in a way use the quiver to justify "putting women in their place". Because less kids = more time for the woman to get out, find a job, and *gasp* commit adultery. And of course, the more worldly a woman is, the more she's going to undermine the authority of her "headship". Oh fundiedom...

[Deleted03]

It is definitely appalling, and !Kung families are very close and attached to their little ones.

We tend to tell ourselves that people who lose a lot of children get used to it and don't feel it as intensely. In this case at least, that is not the truth. The women go crazy with mourning, the way you or I would. But the rate has not changed; just the way it is happening. At one point in the book referenced earlier, Nisa was reflecting on her lost children and asking, why couldn't my babies stay alive? What did I do? She was elderly at that point and many decades removed from the situation, but she still obviously was feeling the pain. It made me cry, I can't even imagine what she went through, having baby after baby and all of them dying.

George Sand writes of how hurt she was when young she became very ill and her father who had been very close to her just totally disengaged himself from the relationship, since anyways many kids would die at that time. I'm sure it depends on culture.

[FireIsCatching89]

emmiedahl, I'm an senior anthro major in college, and you have no idea what you just started for me...Muwahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!

Ahem.

I'll behave now, I promise.

In terms of looking at things evolutionarily, and genderedly (not a word, I know), I suggest Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. As someone particularly interested in the intersection of biological and cultural anthro, that book is like my bible.

[emmiedahl]

Feel free to share your perspective! This is my first anthro class and I am not by any means an expert. I read this stuff and think LOLfundies.

[slickcat79]

A very smart person once observed that women's status in a society is directly related to women's control over the procurement and distribution of economic goods. That is, whether they work and have a say in how the products of their work are used.

I've always found that interesting. I've also heard/read that, especially in developing cultures, giving women control over family finances improves the society in general and not just women's lives. You can see improvements in education, nutrition, health, family planning, etc. It's one of the major factors behind the development of the microfinance industry, which I also think is pretty darn cool.

/random thoughts

[emmiedahl]

I have heard that too. I think one of the reasons is that women are acutely aware of children's needs. If you gave me and my husband each $100 (that is not to be used on bills), he would probably think of something fun to do with it, while I would spend it on the household and the children.

[Kitten]

Anthropology is totally fascinating. I probably would have happily majored in it, but I didn't fancy spending years begging for grants, or having to get a Ph.D. to be eligible for the most mundane jobs in the field. And I had NO interest in teaching or esoteric research.

But I did major in developmental economics (which is why I had to take a lot of anthropology courses). In one of my grad-level classes, I had the opportunity to be in a room full of people from "developing" countries all over the world. In fact, I was the only "Westerner" and native English speaker in the class (even the professor was from Romania, I believe).

We had many "energetic" discussions around "how" to achieve economic development in their respective countries - whether it was better to follow the communist/socialist "ideal" of total equality, which generally results in a much longer time ramp to increased industrial production, but ended with a society that was well-educated regardless of sex, or the "Western" model, where men dominated in the development and expansion of industry and business, enabling a faster initial "climb" to economic self-sufficiency, but inevitably requiring the reparation of social inequalities at some point, impacting the ability to sustain and grow the economy. Need I add that we were all fully cognizant of the realities of both models in practice--we discussed them as general theories of economic development.

Those who argued for the communist model felt that getting all the social inequalities out of the way at the start laid the groundwork for longterm success. No later disruption to the "social model" would be required, and the country would have the benefit of the full involvement of all its available talents and intelligence.

Those who argued for the western model felt that economic development was the primary goal of any society, and that when you have limited resources, it is better to kickstart the economy by investing deeply in a relatively small group of people, rather than spreading those resources thinly among many. Once financial stability had been obtained, they argued, it was easier to apply national resources to helping those who had been "left out" of educational and employment opportunities, because there would already be existing schools to provide education and industries to provide jobs, and everyone would benefit from having the national resources to provide social services.

There is, of course, no right answer, but the arguments that flew back and forth and the discussions that were generated really opened our eyes to the challenges of both models and the pros/cons of the choices our societies were making. Which, of course, was one of the goals of the class.

What was fascinating was that no matter which model a person advocated for, there was never any suggestion that social inequalities were right, or good for society and economic development in general. No one questioned the idea that every citizen of a society should have equal rights and opportunities - the only points under discussion was when and how best to achieve those goals and economic success.

One last thing, which really came home to me in that class, was that as Westerners, we really have no concept of what it is like to live in a "developing" country. The economic conditions can be so harsh that survival is often the only goal. It is hard to consider educating your children, boys or girls, when just being able to provide enough food for them to live to adulthood requires all your time and energy. I was often called the "naive little American" in that class, and they were right. I learned to recognize and account for my cultural bias and upbringing, and to do a better job of trying to see the world through someone else's eyes to understand their point of view, even if I didn't agree with it.

[emmiedahl]

Those who argued for the western model felt that economic development was the primary goal of any society, and that when you have limited resources, it is better to kickstart the economy by investing deeply in a relatively small group of people, rather than spreading those resources thinly among many. Once financial stability had been obtained, they argued, it was easier to apply national resources to helping those who had been "left out" of educational and employment opportunities, because there would already be existing schools to provide education and industries to provide jobs, and everyone would benefit from having the national resources to provide social services.

I agree in theory, but in reality it seems to create an elite class that never wants to let go of their advantage. This basically describes the state of the United States right now. There is a huge battle for power, with anyone who has even the slightest advantage desperate to hold onto it. You can see it in Wall Street's reaction to OWS, in the Tea Party, in the return to patriarchy.

I love living in a nation where I can be one of the poorest person I know irl and I still have my needs met. So I am hesitant to be too critical of the Western lifestyle that has bestowed this upon me. But on the other hand, I don't see the wealthy people who control our political and economic system giving up. It would be one thing if we were seeing some improvement, but we have actually become more unequal.

[Kitten]

Emmie, that was one of the arguments brought out by the people who espoused he "communist" model - that it was better to "suffer" a little longer and end up with a more equal society than to have to force the people in power to "share" later on.

The people arguing the other side (which included women, BTW), felt that was great in theory, but hard to convince people to do voluntarily when they were starving in reality, which is why communist/socialist nations so often ended up as dictatorships.

As i said, we were all aware of the "real" world - that neither side was fully right or fully wrong, and that you could validly argue many points ad infinitum. Many people will do anything to emigrate to the US, yet we don't offer national health care, paid maternity leaves with job guarantees, free elderly care, free higher education, etc., etc. So there are problems with any economic model when it's put into practice.

[deelaem]

What a fascinating discussion this is! I'd like to add another element. I think another reason men felt they needed to control women; and therefore created the concept of legal marriage, was to insure their lineage. Back in the days before DNA testing, there was no way for a man to prove his paternity other than to completely control the woman he'd paired up with. And with fundie men believing that their salvation depends on having children, it's especially important to them to control women. I think this might have gone hand-in-hand with removing the women's economic power.

[Joykins]

In terms of looking at things evolutionarily, and genderedly (not a word, I know), I suggest Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. As someone particularly interested in the intersection of biological and cultural anthro, that book is like my bible.

I second this, it is the most interesting and awesome book.

[Kitten]

Back in the days before DNA testing, there was no way for a man to prove his paternity other than to completely control the woman he'd paired up with.

This has been posited by many over the years/decades/centuries, but it is interesting to note that patriarchy is strongest in those cultures where individual wealth is "hoarded" and passed only to family members, making paternity and female virginity important issues. In cultures where wealth (and familial responsibilities) is shared more equally with the community as a whole, paternity/virginity is far less significant, and patriarchy tends not to be the dominant social structure.

In fact, in some cultures, a woman with a child (no matter whose) is considered more valuable as a wife, because her fertility has been proven. Maybe the Quiverfull/ATI/VF gang should think on that!