There's this frustrating tendency of humanities academia to put premodern and modern hunter gatherer societies on this pedestal of having the answer to everything, and gender equality is very much one of those things.
These fields do seem to attract too many (lefty) personality types who seem to care more about their political agenda than ascertaining what actually happened (and happens) in the world. And I say that as a left-of-center liberal who's revolted by authoritarianism and the malignancies of the far-right.
Excellent article. But nobody should ever underestimate the dominant power of physical force (including both capacity for superior fighting capacity and work). Ultimately, in the struggle for survival, including procreation, physical force was always the trump card. Most women and the majority of men and almost all children were on the receiving end. Power was not rooted in sex/gender, but base biological capacity for force. The failure to appreciate this in feminist thinking is why feminism, by definition, is limited as a vehicle for understanding humanity. Women need to see themselves as smaller, less biologically forceful people.
Men may have been more likely to be killed in warfare and interpersonal violence. But patriarchy is not the same as gender parity in deaths. It is about men dominating power and status.
Extremely likely different types of violence, though. Compared to women, men would be more likely to be killed or wounded but less likely to be raped or beaten. But I think Evans's main point is that these may not have been terrific societies for women to live in even if in some ways, they had some power.
Whatever her intended point may be, the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant
LOL, wut?!? How is the violence experienced and how nice life is (or isn't) not related to gender equality (or any human relations) in the real world?!? Do you only live online/in books and have no experience in the real world interacting with other human beings?
I also wonder what definition of gender equality you have in mind, Victor, to say it is unrelated to quality of life and violence.
I am talking about gender equality as a construct, as an ideal, not as an indicator that will only ever be imprefect. PS: it is precisely one of Alice's argument that standard measures of equality are incomplete as they fail to capture vulnerability of women to make dominance and violence.
Or would you really argue that freedom from male violence isn't part of gender equality?
And note that violence experienced by men is mainly done by men, too, so there is no gender equality in violence, even IF men were more often victims for some forms of violence.
Missing here is any discussion of class. There are societies where "domestic violence" is largely confined to the lower classes. I think these become more egalitarian over time, a function of both "imitating your betters" and that downwardly mobile middle class members take their values with them when they fall in society.
I didn't mean to imply they were. But "how do we get to Denmark" seems to always have a phase where the judgement "it is so low-class to beat your wife" replaces old norms where wife-beating was normal.
We don't have a view into our more distant past. The inclination would be to assume that whatever we saw at first contact is how things went earlier in time. However, before our forced shift into agriculture, and the likely attendant increase in violence over resources, it is difficult to know what we were like. Sure, remote cultures can offer clues, but there are few fo them. Relatedly, we could ask, what percentage of cultures presented with egalitarianism and low violence? How strongly correlated is sexual violence and general violence? How about the San and the Hadza, they're often cited as prototypical hunter-gatherer. Was gender violence reported in their cultures? I felt as though I should have been able to sort through the charts to learn those kinds of things, but it appears that the data doesn't really fall into those types of bins, and I guess that was sort of the point. We only know what was reported. The question sets were limited.
Also, the Khoi-San, by the time Westerners discovered them, had been pushed to the edges of habitation (by agricultural Bantus), living in harsh environments. But most hunter-gatherers lived in more bountiful environments, like the PNW, which had a crazy quilt of Native American tribes and cultures, and they were happy to eliminate competitors for resources. It's probably more worthwhile to explore what violence and gender relations were like there.
We have, besides written accounts by others (not "we") about small scale pre-agriculture human cultures in the past, actual physical evidence like bones (and injuries caused on them), weapons, skeletons, etc. And they generally show that the pre-agriculture past was much more violent than what most people living in a developed country would be use to today.
Also, you're definitely making a big assumption there that there was more violence over resources after agriculture. Resources (hunting grounds, grazing land, etc.) mattered to hunter-gatherers and herders too! (as well as trade, etc.)
I suppose, in an absolute sense, you have to be right as human population exploded with the agricultural revolution, so there were more humans alive to be killed. But it is far from clear to me that the percentage (or odds) of any random individual dying from violence in an agricultural society is the same or greater than that of any random individual in a hunter-gatherer society.
Do you have any data/evidence/anything to buttress your claim?
There's this frustrating tendency of humanities academia to put premodern and modern hunter gatherer societies on this pedestal of having the answer to everything, and gender equality is very much one of those things.
These fields do seem to attract too many (lefty) personality types who seem to care more about their political agenda than ascertaining what actually happened (and happens) in the world. And I say that as a left-of-center liberal who's revolted by authoritarianism and the malignancies of the far-right.
Excellent article. But nobody should ever underestimate the dominant power of physical force (including both capacity for superior fighting capacity and work). Ultimately, in the struggle for survival, including procreation, physical force was always the trump card. Most women and the majority of men and almost all children were on the receiving end. Power was not rooted in sex/gender, but base biological capacity for force. The failure to appreciate this in feminist thinking is why feminism, by definition, is limited as a vehicle for understanding humanity. Women need to see themselves as smaller, less biologically forceful people.
Are men less likely to suffer violence in these societies? If not, then gender equality obtains.
Men may have been more likely to be killed in warfare and interpersonal violence. But patriarchy is not the same as gender parity in deaths. It is about men dominating power and status.
Extremely likely different types of violence, though. Compared to women, men would be more likely to be killed or wounded but less likely to be raped or beaten. But I think Evans's main point is that these may not have been terrific societies for women to live in even if in some ways, they had some power.
Whatever her intended point may be, the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant
LOL, wut?!? How is the violence experienced and how nice life is (or isn't) not related to gender equality (or any human relations) in the real world?!? Do you only live online/in books and have no experience in the real world interacting with other human beings?
I also wonder what definition of gender equality you have in mind, Victor, to say it is unrelated to quality of life and violence.
I am talking about gender equality as a construct, as an ideal, not as an indicator that will only ever be imprefect. PS: it is precisely one of Alice's argument that standard measures of equality are incomplete as they fail to capture vulnerability of women to make dominance and violence.
Or would you really argue that freedom from male violence isn't part of gender equality?
And note that violence experienced by men is mainly done by men, too, so there is no gender equality in violence, even IF men were more often victims for some forms of violence.
Missing here is any discussion of class. There are societies where "domestic violence" is largely confined to the lower classes. I think these become more egalitarian over time, a function of both "imitating your betters" and that downwardly mobile middle class members take their values with them when they fall in society.
Small scale societies did not necessarily have a class system
I didn't mean to imply they were. But "how do we get to Denmark" seems to always have a phase where the judgement "it is so low-class to beat your wife" replaces old norms where wife-beating was normal.
We don't have a view into our more distant past. The inclination would be to assume that whatever we saw at first contact is how things went earlier in time. However, before our forced shift into agriculture, and the likely attendant increase in violence over resources, it is difficult to know what we were like. Sure, remote cultures can offer clues, but there are few fo them. Relatedly, we could ask, what percentage of cultures presented with egalitarianism and low violence? How strongly correlated is sexual violence and general violence? How about the San and the Hadza, they're often cited as prototypical hunter-gatherer. Was gender violence reported in their cultures? I felt as though I should have been able to sort through the charts to learn those kinds of things, but it appears that the data doesn't really fall into those types of bins, and I guess that was sort of the point. We only know what was reported. The question sets were limited.
Also, the Khoi-San, by the time Westerners discovered them, had been pushed to the edges of habitation (by agricultural Bantus), living in harsh environments. But most hunter-gatherers lived in more bountiful environments, like the PNW, which had a crazy quilt of Native American tribes and cultures, and they were happy to eliminate competitors for resources. It's probably more worthwhile to explore what violence and gender relations were like there.
They also went slave raiding a lot (human beings, including women and children, certainly being a "resource" before agriculture was invented, of course): https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/kzmjki/how_were_wars_in_the_pacific_northwest_fought
Many wives may have been taken that way.
Some have been described as the PNW equivalent of Vikings: https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-Native-American-Tlingits-with-their-armor-and-weapons-had-a-war-with-the-Inuit-tribes-with-their-armour-and-weapons-What-would-that-look-like
More on the Haida and Tlingit:
https://militaryhistory.ca/first-nations-haida-vs-tlingit/
But the Coast Salish seem to have rejected slavery. Fascinating paper here. https://davidgraeber.org/articles/many-seasons-ago-slavery-and-its-rejection-amongforagers-on-the-pacific-coast-of-north-america/
We have, besides written accounts by others (not "we") about small scale pre-agriculture human cultures in the past, actual physical evidence like bones (and injuries caused on them), weapons, skeletons, etc. And they generally show that the pre-agriculture past was much more violent than what most people living in a developed country would be use to today.
Also, you're definitely making a big assumption there that there was more violence over resources after agriculture. Resources (hunting grounds, grazing land, etc.) mattered to hunter-gatherers and herders too! (as well as trade, etc.)
The onset of agriculture certainly did not reduce violence.
You base that assertion on--what, exactly?
I suppose, in an absolute sense, you have to be right as human population exploded with the agricultural revolution, so there were more humans alive to be killed. But it is far from clear to me that the percentage (or odds) of any random individual dying from violence in an agricultural society is the same or greater than that of any random individual in a hunter-gatherer society.
Do you have any data/evidence/anything to buttress your claim?