Ian Morris wrote:
Forager egalitarianism partially breaks down when it comes to gender hierarchy. All over the world, both sexes tend to take it for granted that men should be in charge in forager societies. I already quoted an Ona informant as saying that “the men are all captains and the women are sailors,” and Nisa, a female !Kung San forager made famous by the anthropologist Marjorie Shostak’s book named after her, apparently agreed. When an inexperienced teenage girl needed reassurance about her upcoming wedding, Nisa told her that “A man is not something that kills you; he is someone who marries you, who becomes like your father or your older brother.
Social scientists continue to argue over why men normally hold the upper hand in forager societies. After all, evolutionists point out, biology seems to have dealt women better cards. Sperm and eggs are both essential to reproduction, but sperm are abundant (the typical young man produces about one thousand per second) and therefore cheap, while eggs are scarce (the typical young woman makes one per month) and therefore expensive. Women ought to be able to demand all kinds of services from men in return for access to their eggs. To some extent, this does happen, and male foragers contribute substantially more to childrearing than male chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, or orangutans (our genetic nearest neighbors). However, some anthropologists speculate, the reason that the price women can demand almost never includes political or economic authority is that semen is not the only thing male foragers are selling. Because men are also the main providers of violence, women need to bargain for protection; because men are the main hunters, women need to bargain for meat; and because hunting together often trains men to cooperate and trust one another, individual women often find themselves negotiating with cartels of men.
Whatever the details, though, the outcome is clear enough: forager bands are male-dominated, but rarely have steep gender hierarchies. Abused wives regularly just walk away from their husbands without much fuss or criticism, and attitudes toward marital fidelity and premarital female virginity tend to be quite relaxed. As Nisa saw it, “When you are a woman, you don’t just sit still and do nothing — you have lovers”. Promiscuity certainly does cause problems, and can lead to wife-beating and fighting between male rivals for a woman’s affections, but people who are seen as overreacting to infidelity will be mocked, and sexual escapades rarely lead to permanent stigma.
The shallowness of gender hierarchies and the weakness of marital ties, like the shallowness and weakness of economic and political hierarchies, seem to be a direct consequence of the nature of foraging as a method of energy extraction. The food that women gather is vitally important, especially near the equator, where plants make up such a large proportion of most foragers’ diets, but the ethos of sharing normally means that all members of a group will have access to this. The main reason that male foragers generally care less than male farmers about controlling women — and particularly about controlling women’s reproduction — is that foragers have much less to inherit than farmers. For most foraging societies, wild foods are equally available to all, regardless of who their parents are. Consequently, material success depends much more on skill at hunting, gathering, and coalition-building than on physical property that can be passed down between generations, which in turn means that questions about the legitimacy of children matter a lot less than they do when only legitimate offspring will inherit land and capital.
That said, arguments between men over women do seem more likely to end violently among foragers than among farmers (and much more likely than among fossil-fuel users). Some anthropologists do dispute this, arguing that when male foragers fight over women they are “really” arguing about access to food or territory, with women just providing flashpoints and a convenient language for talking about more profound rivalries. No doubt there are cases in which that is true, but on the whole, foragers are so consistent in blaming violence on men’s arguments over women that it is hard not to suspect that they know what they are talking about. Among the Yanomami and Waorani (who both live in the Upper Amazon and combine horticulture and foraging), there is even evidence that men who are more violent have more sexual partners and children than men who are less violent.
Arguments over women seem to drive foraging men to violence more often than they drive farmers or fossil-fuel users to that same end because arguments of all kinds drive foragers to violence alarmingly often. The data are hotly disputed, but in the last twenty years, more and more anthropologists have recognized that the average forager in the twentieth century faced at least a 10 percent likelihood of dying violently. In some groups (the horticultural Yanomami and Waorani are the best studied), more than one man in four met a grisly end. The archaeological evidence, which is the only way we can know for sure whether such levels of lethal violence were also normal in prehistory, is particularly difficult to interpret, but the frequency of fatal traumas … is certainly consistent with the picture of high rates of violent death.
Forager bands vary in their use of violence, as they vary in almost everything, but it took anthropologists a long time to realize how rough hunter-gatherers could be. This was not because the ethnographers all got lucky and visited peculiarly peaceful foraging folk, but because the social scale imposed by foraging is so small that even high rates of murder are difficult for outsiders to detect. If a band with a dozen members has a 10 percent rate of violent death, it will suffer roughly one homicide every twenty-five years; and since anthropologists rarely stay in the field for even twenty-five months, they will witness very few violent deaths … Anthropologists certainly heard plenty of stories about killing, but they also heard plenty of foragers express fear about violence, and not until the 1990s did they put the clues together to reveal the gruesome reality.
Humans, like most animals, have evolved biologically in ways that make violence one of the tools at their disposal for settling disputes. That said, only a psychopath would try to solve every problem confronting him with violence, and would soon find himself isolated and confronted by coalitions that could respond with much greater violence … Foragers … with their shallow political hierarchies, cannot establish … governments; and although mockery, ostracism, criticism, and moving away do work most of the time … they fail often enough that more than one forager in ten dies violently. All too often, when passions run really high—particularly when people are trying to deal with unrepentant upstarts — violence can look like the least bad course of action.
While foragers rarely explicitly condone violence, they do typically recognize multiple situations in which men are expected to use force to solve problems. This might take the form of a sudden outburst of murderous rage, or it can morph into a cycle of tit-for-tat revenge killings, passed down through multiple generations. Sometimes … an entire community agrees that the only way to put down an upstart is to work together to kill him. None of these situations arises very often in a typical foraging society, but there is nonetheless general agreement that there are times when homicide is legitimate, and that people (nearly always men) who use force in these contexts should not be stigmatized.
Overall, then, most foragers share a very striking set of egalitarian values. They take an extremely negative view of political and economic hierarchy but accept fairly mild forms of gender hierarchy and recognize that there is a time and a place for violence.”
The reason these values are so widely shared by foragers is that they are fairly direct consequences of the economic and social constraints created by foraging as a method of capturing energy. In tiny groups of highly mobile hunter-gatherers, creating and maintaining steep political, economic, or gender hierarchies is very difficult, as is managing relationships without occasional resort to violence. Foragers, like everyone else, have free will, and we must assume that over the tens of thousands of years in which all humans were foragers, people tried out pretty much every permutation that can be imagined. Over time, though, most groups evolved toward the ethical equilibrium described [here], in which values conformed to material realities. The precise balancing point varies from one society to another, with geography explaining much of the variation (and particularly the anomalies we see in the relatively large, rich, and sedentary groups of the Pacific Northwest), but we can certainly identify what Weber would have called an ideal-typical set of forager values. Only in the last ten thousand years, since farming came into the world, have these values gone into decline.
The Source:
Ian Morris, Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve, Princeton 2015 [pp. 39-43]
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