Fine-tuning the ontology of patriarchy

Introduction

‘Patriarchy’ is variously understood and has a variety of origin stories. At one extreme, ‘the patriarchy’ may be seen as literally a deliberate form of government established expressly to keep women dominated. More moderately, patriarchy may be understood as a general approach to governing and guiding institutions which continues to incorporate policies oppressive to women. More abstractly, patriarchy may be viewed as an ideology, as when French calls it one ‘founded on the assumption that man is distinct from the animal and superior to it’ (1985: 341). Or the term may be seen to refer to any of various social and cultural practices that happen to put limits on women, although no one ever designed the practices to do such (Foucault, 1980; Butler, 1985, 1999; Repo, 2014). Origin stories often look to empirical evidence, but part of the question here is how far into human history and prehistory one should look and how the evidence should be interpreted.

One sociological perspective on patriarchy’s origins looks to the development of the concept and practice of ‘fatherhood’ in civilizations beginning around 6,000 years ago (Kraemer, 1991). Another, epidemiological view points to upheavals of drought and famine around the same period, disrupting a long-standing peacefulness among human societies (DeMeo, 2009). A historical analysis finds the seeds of patriarchy sprouting almost 4 millennia ago in the ancient Near East, as women’s reproductive capacities and governing positions were evidently delimited (Lerner, 1987). By the beginning of the historical period, from which significant documentation of beliefs and daily practices has been handed down, it is evident that male dominance and the subjugation of women were in full swing. One anthropological proposal (Harris, 1993) sees male dominance arising because of the invention of heavy farm tools such as the plow and the introduction of hunting weapons to warfare. This anthropological view, which I discuss in a separate section, is challenged in this article by one supported by two decades’ further archaeological and ethnographic evidence.

Indeed many archaeologists and anthropologists as well as feminist philosophers have looked to relevant empirical evidence about humanity’s lengthy and formative existence as foragers. In such a socio-economic situation, humans apparently were widely egalitarian, particularly exhibiting gender parity (Kraemer, 1991). Furthermore, archaeological and historical evidence indicates that sometime during the (gradual and sporadic) development of agriculture and the gradual rise of settlements and eventually states, this social equality gave way to inequality and social hierarchy (Diamond, 1987; Wenke, 1990; Boehm, 1999; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). In fact, very recent interpretations of archaeological and anthropological data point to the early settling-down from nomadic lifestyles, development of agriculture and loss of foraging economies as marking the onset of inequality (Flannery and Marcus, 2012). If so, this process began about 10, not 6 or 4 millennia ago. Crucially, though, the issue is not a mere timeline difference but the strong possibility that this shedding of nomadism and adopting of settled agrarian existence triggered inequality. It was this transition that, as further evidence indicates (and I will present), by ushering in social inequality, concomitantly demoted women’s social status and clinched their subjugation. This scenario was repeated time and again in distant parts of the globe where settled agrarian culture – especially city culture, that is, civilization – arose, independently, without its having spread through cultural diffusion.

Hence, the origins of patriarchy, I propose, are not in later developed concepts of fatherhood, famines, or Near Eastern cultures of 3100 BCE but in the rise of settled, agrarian society in different eras in scattered parts of the world. Most important, this fact would not mean that patriarchy is innate or genetically ‘hard-wired’ in humans, as some evolutionary psychologists and other biologistic theorists may propose (Goldberg, 1973; Eagly and Wood, 1999). Rather the archaeological evidence indicates, as I document throughout this article, humans having lived hundreds of thousands of years without patriarchy. Nor would the fact mean that patriarchy is only an arbitrary cultural development. Rather, patriarchy is a phenomenon that tends to occur when, for whatever reasons – and I explore these – humans shed their nomadic foraging economies and begin settling down and controlling nature by making it grow a narrow variety but abundant amount of food.

I herein sum up the remainder of the empirical story: former ‘head men’ (counselors with no power over anyone) are replaced by chiefs, these almost always male, who have power over others. Such power-over comes with hierarchy, and with hierarchy roles are delegated, individuals are forced into these, and prestige of roles derives from its perceived contribution relative to power-over. Women, along with men of lesser roles, lose their power-to to those persons with power-over. Women, just like the land now controlled by the settlement, are perceived according to their most obvious production role, and as a group thus suffer heavily in their subjugation.

The rest of this article explores this process further, demonstrating in empirical detail how patriarchy arises out of the transition to agrarian economies. As some feminist observers have described, the control of the land – of ‘nature’ – is interlinked with the control of women (Kheel, 1993; Vance, 1993). Here I discuss how and why these two social phenomena cannot help but be interlinked. This further understanding from recent archaeological findings should then help provide a clearer understanding of ongoing patriarchy and, in better defusing it, where its vulnerabilities are. While this view of its origins may not offer the final ontology of patriarchy, it can at least serve as an example for what to aspire to in perfecting that ontology and increasing our understanding of it along with ways of handling this oppressive social condition.

While much of the article’s methodology looks to empirical research in the social sciences, the overall result is philosophical in determining the social ontology of patriarchy. Such an approach to a philosophical problem via the human sciences is not unprecedented. As Habermas writes:

I find it philosophical enlightenment when philosophers learn from recent psycholinguist investigations of the learning of grammatical rules to comprehend the causal connection in speech and language with external conditions and in this way learn to reflect on the methodological limits to the mere understanding of meaning. (1970: 8)

Classifying origin theories of patriarchy

Before setting forth this article’s proposal for patriarchy’s origins and ontology, it would be useful to put it into the context of other origin theories and thereby highlight its difference and, ideally, strengths. The theories may be broken initially into biologistic vs. cultural theories, or what is more colloquially labeled ‘nature’ vs. ‘nurture’. (This latter pair of terms is problematic, being oversimplified and confusing, so henceforward I avoid them.) Biologistic theories need not discount culture, nor need culture-based theories ignore biology. After all, humans have bodies, ¹ and these bodies play some role in cultures. At issue here, as with many discussions of patriarchy, is the degree to which apparent body type delimits social function. One early biologistic theory, Goldberg’s (1973), looked to supposed greater male physical strength on average over that of women as laying down an insuperable male dominance. A more recent biologistic theory is evolutionary psychology (Eagly and Wood, 1999), or its earlier incarnation as sociobiology (Wilson, 1975, 1979). This view often presumes the gene is the unit of evolution and is the level at which evolution takes place. ² The organism itself, and the societies established by this social species, are all described as mere means to the genes’ ends of surviving. This view generally holds that human gender divisions accord with somewhat different genetic strategies to ensure that the individual’s gene-carrying offspring live to reproduce (Dawkins, 1975). Women, with fewer gametes than men and their long concentration on a single offspring, are seen as having developed certain behavioral strategies to ensure their offspring’s survival, particularly in marked response to men’s strategies with their greater number of gametes and lack of 9-month gestation. In this tussle between the genders, men divert their mutual competition for mates by accumulating wealth and power, while women vie to ensure their offspring’s survival by seeking mates with greater wealth and power. Society is little more than a reflection of this gene-level struggle; thus, over the eons, men in their struggle for power and wealth have come to dominate women.

Culture-based theories may be divided into those that view cultures as: (1) only contingently (if overwhelmingly) having patriarchal structure due to historical accident; (2) exhibiting either patriarchal or non-patriarchal (perhaps matriarchal) patterns; and (3) necessarily having patriarchal structure, although perhaps not directly because of evolutionary-biological forces. A 4th possibility is that cultures do not necessarily tend toward patriarchy but that given certain circumstances they may so tend. All of these kinds of culture-based stories shade into one another, the literature does not equally represent them all, and actual theories may not fall clearly into any of these categories. I offer the divisions not as a definitive taxonomy but as a springboard for discussion, to help situate this article’s proposal among others.

Lerner’s (1987) theory of the rise of patriarchy in the Near East is an example of the first sort of culture-based origin story. At least through the eras up until about 3100 BCE, a variety of civilized cultures was extant until those first patriarchies took root. Apparently, once this social mode, patriarchy, developed, its sheer brute power gave it an edge over other modes and helped displace them. I believe that Lerner’s theory is distinct from the second kind here mentioned, which allows that social structures exhibit either patriarchal or non-patriarchal patterns, implying a kind of coexistence between patriarchy and other forms. Lerner seems to hold that patriarchy was a form making a clear-cut historical entry onto the human stage. Apparently a form less defined, such as a type of equality in sedentary societies, existed before. Harris (1993), examined further under a separate heading below, offers a strictly materialistic archaeological theory and, I contend, one not fitting well with archaeological and ethnographic evidence since uncovered. By contrast the theory I propose looks more to cultural processes-in-evolution, albeit it has a materialistic basis. Another, unusual if not widely held theory (Gould Davis, 1972) proposes that matriarchy was the original human social structure, when patriarchy appeared and eventually warred on matriarchy. This theory, of the second kind of culture-based theory, has traits of the first in that historical incidents led to the rise of patriarchy. Gimbutas (1974, 1991) offers an archaeological view in which an ‘old Europe’ before Indo-European incursions was largely matriarchal. (See also Stone, 1976 and Daly, 1993.)

The third kind of culture-based story shades into the biologistic but is nonetheless distinct. If no theory precisely espouses this view, it can be found at the borders of social-structural origins ³ theory and evolutionary psychology (Eagly and Wood, 1999). I bring it up primarily to contrast it with the 4th kind. By this third view, humans are not innately patriarchal. They are, though, innately social. However, because of certain practicalities of strategy for such organisms, whenever they do combine into groups, they tend toward patriarchal social structures. What distinguishes this view from biologism is that it does not impute individual capacities with any particular tendencies but finds the problem (patriarchy) arises because of tactical purposes in human organization. Such theory may then pin the problem not on women’s or men’s innate mental/emotional capacities but purely on, say, reproductive exigencies. Men rule not because they are smarter, wiser, or stronger or have more gametes. Men rule, for example, because they are not encumbered by gestation, parturition and suckling, which create too many irregularities for reliable rule. Patriarchy then falls into place.

The 4th kind of culture-based theory explicitly implies that such result of patriarchy is not inevitable in human social groups but occurs only under certain types of cultural conditions. In fact, it may be possible that an infinite number of human cultural conditions do not lead to it, but a mere few do. Unfortunately, many human groups, in various eras and parts of the globe, in time stumbled upon these conditions. Instead of saying the tendency for patriarchy is innate in humans, this view holds that under specific environmental/cultural pressures, the embodied (biological) human being begins exhibiting this trait. Analogously, it would be misleading, if not senseless, to say cancer is innate in humans. ⁴ Rather, given certain environmental pressures, certain genes are activated, leading to malignancy. Avoid those triggers, and the growth does not happen. Thus, to circumvent the growth of patriarchy, avoid those environmental – including social – conditions that trigger it.

This theory includes parts of the first two kinds of culture-based theories. Like theory-type 2, it allows that patriarchy may be only one among broad culture kinds and even may exist with other kinds. And like theory-type 1, this 4th allows that certain historical incidents set off patriarchy; and in fact, before these incidents, there was little, if any, patriarchy (or matriarchy for that matter). This theory does not deny that at some periods there might have been matriarchies, as some historians and others have concluded from archaeological and historical data (Gimbutas, 1974, 1991; Stone, 1976; Göttner-Abendroth, 1991, 1995). It merely says that upon the onset of certain types of social practices, patriarchies arose. These practices and the triggered new social structure occurred in rapid succession. Not being innate or inevitable with any human social condition, it is not necessary for the species; and undoing it should even be possible if conditions are properly altered. The theory then stands in stark contrast to the third kind of culture-based theory, which holds that patriarchy arises in any human social environments.

I now describe this theory.

Equality and the onset of inequality

Archaeologists and anthropologists widely agree that humans, and perhaps their Homo-genus ancestors, lived for hundreds of thousands to millions of years in small-scale societies (Hunter and Whitten, 1977; Wenke, 1990; Boehm, 1999; Lee and Daly, 1999; Ingold, 1999; Kelly, 2007, Wells, 2010; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). These societies were generally composed largely of extended families: parents and their children, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and second or third cousins. While gene-selection theory would hold that such band composition is explained by the ongoing struggle to survive by genes shared among these genetically tight-knitted bands, group-selection could hold that the group’s survival is the main operating force and it is primarily a matter of convenience that group members are interrelated. However, the fact of these groups’ equality does not depend on which of these theories holds true in the end. Most important here, archaeological evidence from remains of encampments, along with recent ethnographies of modern foraging groups, suggest that these cultures persisted, with a great deal of variation (Kelly, 2007), in a social condition that scientists commonly call ‘equality’ (Wenke, 1990; Boehm, 1999; Kelly, 2007; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). Although ethnographers also acknowledge that cultures such as foragers are hardly static, constantly evolving over time so that contemporary foragers have certainly changed over the 10 millennia since the onset of agriculture, these contemporary groups offer a benchmark for studying pre-agricultural cultures. The continued emphasis on equality among such contemporary foragers at least corroborates archaeological evidence pointing toward equality.

I extract from a range of literature some of the common traits exhibited by these documented egalitarian societies. ⁵ These cultures were nomadic, spending only a few months to a few years in a given location, then moving on, so they had no perennial territory or concept of land as property. For food they relied on plant products they gathered and animals they fished and hunted but planted no permanent plots. Five typical traits of their egalitarian social structure are: ⁶ (1) it allows no band member to have chronic power over others; (2) each member of the band shares in nutrition foraged and goods produced to a level commensurate with other members; (3) nomadic foragers lack the practice and concept of wealth accumulation by individuals (or even by the group); (4) there is marked gender parity, ⁷ by which women’s contributions are esteemed as significant as men’s, women have the opportunity for voice and respect in community affairs and even many gender-based divisions of labor are open to the other gender, as women often participate in hunting, men in gathering, and community members of both genders have a role in childcare; (5) these groups usually emphasize individual autonomy, the capacity to govern oneself and make a valid contribution to the group in their life goals. Autonomy was facilitated by the small scale of these societies, in that almost everyone could do most of the society’s tasks – hunting, weaving, music-making – although individuals tended to become expert at certain chores, say as a highly cherished potter or fisher. Insofar as each had some personal acquaintance with the group’s chores, there was a strong likelihood of finding a skill compatible with one’s capacities and one could thus contribute to fulfilling life goals – thereby accentuating the sense of self-governance, as one’s own life is well integrated with that of the group.

These groups are not plausibly deemed patriarchal and do not appear to be the source of eventual patriarchy of the sort so dominant today. They did not evolve into Greece, Rome, or the United States. Rather, other cultural inventions, appearing as out of nowhere – but in time, in sundry parts of the globe – rapidly undid equality and replaced it with inequality. This inequality, I shall argue, is concomitant with (though perhaps not identical to) patriarchy.

Scientists continue to debate over just why some humans here and there, around 10 millennia ago, first in the river valleys of the Middle East, felt impelled to abandon the wandering ways of Homo’s last few million years, plant seeds and build permanent houses (Wenke, 1990; Boehm, 1999; and Flannery and Marcus, 2012 discuss this complex ongoing debate). Diamond declares this move ‘the world’s worst mistake’ (1987: 64), although those who made the move could hardly have known that along with wheat they were planting the seeds of global warming, massive genocide, widespread famine, egregious poverty and thermonuclear weaponry. They could also not have done so for the sake of improved well-being of early urban life, ⁸ as longevity of agriculturalists decreased by about 30–40%, as contagious disease spiraled. It is also doubtful that they thought that, by settling down, they could accumulate the sort of luxury that would lead to achievements such as Mozart operas and analytic philosophy. Theories of just why these peoples ‘took root’ include the possibility that with increasing population pressures of the slowly mounting human population worldwide, settling and cultivating the soil offered some security. But it is not evident that population pressures were that much greater in the areas that did see settlement compared with those where foraging continued. It could be that planting and, especially, irrigating mitigate unpredictable weather patterns that make foraging unpredictable. But again the evidence does not cleanly back such theory. The exact reason for planting and settling makes little difference to this article’s proposal, which is more concerned with what happened socially when cultures did cease wandering. In all cases, when cultures set off down this social-evolutionary path, they lost the 5 traits I enumerated as typifying egalitarian forager societies. That is, these cultures became inegalitarian.

Here is how women lost out so severely with this shift. ⁹ At least two social forces were at play: (1) the drastically decreased longevity, and (2) specialization (which arose as autonomy diminished). One curious phenomenon occurred along with the decreased longevity of settled, agrarian cultures: these cultures spread rapidly. They had a competitive advantage over foraging cultures, not only because they began fashioning more sophisticated weaponry but also because of their sheer greater numbers. How could a culture experience drastically decreased longevity yet increased strength and population? The social forces that allowed such a seeming paradox were the same that degraded women’s position and esteem in these cultures. In foraging cultures, after childbirth women continued to work and lactation created certain restrictions, thus women usually gave birth only every 4 to 5 years, for a total of 4 to 5 children per woman. Because of high infant mortality and only moderate longevity (compared with that in many contemporary industrialized countries), human population grew very slowly worldwide. However, agrarian settlements bringing social inequality changed these patterns dramatically, introducing: a chief exercising control over group members, social hierarchy, intensified task specialization and diminished autonomy. Women commonly were shunted into the specialization of child-bearing and -rearing. Although often learning other tasks such as weaving, women had little access to performing other tasks, particularly those done by males. Their specialization intensified with the added pressures of decreased longevity. Agrarian societies that survived were those that at least maintained population. With the decreased longevity, particularly due to settlement life’s increased pathogenic morbidity and mortality, women needed to have babies sooner in life and more rapidly. They were not allowed to wait 4 to 5 years between births; the interval decreased to as little as 1 year. This scenario was made more likely because of the relatively stabilized sources of nutrients from crop-fields, making clocklike regularity of birthing feasible. Concomitantly with wealth accumulation of hierarchical society, concepts of property developed – ownership of, or say-so over, entities that produced and kept the society at least surviving compared with competing societies making the transition. Productive entities included not only land and tools but slaves and women. The basic traits of patriarchy were now set.

Because this theory of the origins of patriarchy is based on archaeological and anthropological evidence of what occurs with a certain kind of cultural shift, for ease of reference in the rest of this article, I call it the Archaeological Cultural-Shift (ACS) theory of patriarchy’s origins. That cultural shift, of course, is one that generally occurs over great lengths of time as cultures shift from nomadic foraging to sedentary, agriculturally based urban societies and eventually to states.

I emphasize, however, that not all agrarian groups followed the same sequence of social development (Kelly, 2007; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). Some forager groups, especially in the Pacific Northwest, settled and still hunted (fished) and gathered; but being settled, they developed territoriality, property, slaves and female subservience. Other societies settled and planted crops and developed strong values of prestige and power but little wealth accumulation. Other groups had wealth accumulation and yet the wealthy harnessed little political power. However, many groups generally followed a pattern, the world over – as in Meso-America and the Mexican Highlands, in Peru, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley – which in time developed complex social structures of wealth, inheritance, inherited power, extreme stratification and specialization, strong competition within the society and between societies, professional military, state government, formalized religion, and large scale with high populations and extensive bureaucracies. (These kinds of societies laid the groundwork for the currently prevalent forms of civilization from East to West.) The general sequence was: settlement came with wealth accumulation and power imbalance, loss of autonomy concomitant with this imbalance, specialization, and that specialization with decreased longevity meaning women were shunted to reproduction. These societies were then highly competitive among one another, growing increasingly covetous of lands and resources. Within such social structures, women’s subordination to reproduction was entrenched after centuries and institutionalized in forms of government, daily practices, marriage arrangements, and in religion and general beliefs.

However, as is apparent from these scenarios of inequality’s onset, there appears to be nothing inherent in Homo sapiens making patriarchy inevitable. When packed into close, permanent quarters, humans are susceptible to diseases and die much younger than their forager ancestors. Those settled societies that maintained population were those that had a survival edge over other societies; and maintaining population under these extreme conditions meant women having many babies before they – along with their male counterparts – died relatively young.

How, it may be objected, can one thereby cogently contend that patriarchy is not inevitable, ‘built into’, or ‘hard-wired’ in humanity? The answer is that one need not proceed to inegalitarian society to become fully human. Current ethnographies of extant egalitarian, foraging societies, supplemented with archaeological evidence, reveal that such cultures are no less human (or more immoral, say) than 1st-century AD Rome, 17th-century England, 18th-century American South, 20th century Germany, Russia, China and Cambodia, or any 21st-century industrialized cultures. Certainly, from an ethnocentric stance one may declare these peoples inferior. I cannot take the space to dispute that point but only remind readers that such a stance has epistemological and moral pratfalls. That stance still would not establish that humans must develop inequality to become fully human, because we do not know that other routes of social evolution could avoid inequality and patriarchy. Another position is to say that humans’ march into inequality and patriarchy is part of an inevitable teleological process, whatever its provenance (God, Cosmic Destiny, the Great Computer). This position is not falsifiable, and I leave it be.

Over the millennia forager groups slowly decreased in number as they: (1) socially shifted into hierarchical societies themselves; (2) were assimilated by inegalitarian societies; (3) were killed off by the same; (4) were pushed back into the habitats in which inegalitarian societies could not live, such as deserts (the San of the Kalahari), the Arctic (Inuit) and dense tropical forests (Penan of Malaysia). Although some Arctic peoples, in such harsh conditions, might have shown some signs of patriarchy, ¹⁰ other groups offer examples of humanity’s existing without patriarchy, in social conditions that would be hard to deny as equality. While there remains some, however small, opportunity to protect these cultures with their right to remain in non-patriarchal, egalitarian culture, the haunting question is whether we, in inegalitarian culture, can tweeze out the patriarchy and live in social conditions having more in common with these last remaining peoples.

Patriarchy’s tight links to inequality and hierarchy

The gendered division of labor that developed under inequality is more than a mere variation on the earlier, often intermingling forager divisions. It led to different attitudes and beliefs about nature, deity, humans’ relations to nature and deity, and humanity itself (Gaard, 1993; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). The control of nature exemplified by the invention of agriculture also appeared to affect attitudes and beliefs. As the control of nature and the new extreme divisions of labor occurred together – or so close together that it is hard to say which came first – their mutual affects on attitudes and beliefs are hard to separate.

Ecofeminists have noted the connection between the control of nature and the patriarchy (Kheel, 1993; Vance, 1993). As I have recounted, archaeologists have observed the connection between inequality and the control of nature – in this case the invention of agriculture – meaning humans’ consistently harnessing nature for an ongoing purpose. ¹¹ I have also striven to connect inequality with patriarchy and aim to consider how, once they emerge conjoined, in time they become inextricable. This tight interconnection could be critical for any programs to ameliorate the harmful social mode.

If the division of labor in the extreme, brutal conditions of early agrarian societies constricted women’s roles, then as nature became increasingly controlled, a further division developed in beliefs, specifically beliefs about humanity and nature. More precisely, since men are generally the ones doing the brunt of controlling nature, the division becomes one between men and nature. Women, as ecofeminists have observed, retain the remaining threadbare connection between humanity and nature, in birthing and nursing (Gaard, 1993). Earlier, shame – among foragers – was an emotion felt upon transgressing taboos such as amassing goods and not sharing (Lee and Daly, 1999); but in agrarian societies, shame came to be the response to the continual reminder that the body, especially the female body, was a manifestation of nature that had not yet been fully vanquished by human control. As Nussbaum (2013) observes, the body, especially the female body, with its smells and fluids came to evoke disgust at the connection of the human with the animal. The most control that could be exerted over nature in this arena was to keep women, particularly those pregnant and nursing, under the social structure’s control. The body was a constant reminder that humans had yet to conquer the nature in their own embodied selves. Insofar as their very bodies transgressed the social edict to control nature, they were ashamed – of themselves as animals, as living things.

While in agrarian societies there were female deities, some occupying high metaphysical positions, such as the Hindu feminine ultimate force Adi Shakti who laid the energy foundation of the universe (Kinsley, 1987), these respectful deifications translated into little empowerment for women in practice (Fleming, 1969; Uoko, 1969; Eller, 2000; for dissenting views see Stone, 1976; Gimbutas, 1991; Göttner-Abendroth, 1995). Tracing the relations between deities as kinds of artifacts, along with religious beliefs, and how these reflect cultural gender practices would be a worthwhile project but far beyond the limits of this article. However, even in Hinduism, Adi Shakti may be plausibly interpreted as more of an underlying principle than an operating power in the material world. She may be said to have given birth to the universe, but Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva became the ruling powers. Typically, and increasingly over time as agrarian societies grow and spread across the planet, one sees an increasing consolidation of material power in male deities’ hands (Flannery and Marcus, 2012). Again, such deific representation need not reflect an innate necessity in the human condition but instead reveal the patterns of consolidation of material power in human males in agrarian/urban societies. Pace Lerner, there is little evidence that agrarian/urban societies ever exhibited any social structure but inequality, hierarchy and male dominance within that hierarchy.

These cultural trends toward agrarian society and inequality over the millennia do not preclude the appearance in some of these societies of philosophers, such as Lao Tse, who envision potential harmony underlying humanity and nature and who encourage striving for such harmony. Christianity as well had, buried in some of its scripture, a call for human stewardship of the Earth (as in Leviticus 26: 1–5). Yet, other Christian teachings contradicted the concept of stewardship by equating the Earth with Satan, thereby it was humans’ duty to overwhelm the Earth and establish God’s Kingdom there as closely as possible until God may appear, throw out Satan for ever, and establish the everlasting Kingdom (Leiss, 1974). Such dogma had strong appeal to power-amalgamating institutions, such as the Church. It became Man’s mission to conquer the evil Earth and tame it with godly practices. By Bacon’s time, the western idea of humanity’s mission to remake Earth in an orderly, godly manner was firmly institutionalized. Bacon (1952) only had to make the one potent addition: that systematized scientific study could expedite this project.

In China and other Asian cultures as well, despite some traditions of human unity with nature, calling for harmony, institutional practices did not reflect these traditions but carried out practices of conquering nature: building dams and reservoirs, irrigation canals and ports; clearing forests for farmlands and thereby diminishing native species; and introducing machinery more effectively carrying out these processes (Rowe, 1959; Bardhan, 2010). Even now when the science of ecology is available to enlighten leaders, their disharmonious programs have not ebbed (Calkins, 2011). Inequality and patriarchy of agrarian/urban cultures continue to impose hierarchy upon humans’ relation to their surroundings: much as kings are somehow above their subjects, humans are supposedly somehow above nature and their role if not duty is to act upon nature as their desires direct them. Even democracies, which have partly diminished political hierarchies but remain socially and economically stratified with extreme inequality (Piketty, 2014), continue the conquest typifying agrarian/urban cultures (Leiss, 1974).

Before comparing the ACS theory of social ontology of patriarchy to earlier philosophical, social-ontological theories it may seem to resemble, particularly Rousseau’s and considering objections, I examine an alternative archaeological model of the patriarchy’s origins and answer objections to the model I have proposed.

An alternative archaeological model of patriarchy’s origins

Harris’ (1993) theory of the origins of male dominance in human societies differs in significant details from the present one and could lead to different potential ameliorative responses to patriarchy. By his theory, patriarchy (which he calls ‘male dominance’) was indeed not common to human foraging societies for hundreds of thousands of years; men and women apparently lived in something like the equality I have described. Harris sees two material developments that led to male dominance in human prehistory. He assumes that the basis of this tendency was the fact that, on average, men are slightly physically stronger than women. Thus, when hunting weapons were developed, in most cases men, already the primary hunters, were the ones to use them. When foraging societies became too densely populated for the available foraging resources, Harris holds, warfare developed. Men, the ready-made pawns for these wars, turned their hunting weapons against other human beings. With the increasing violence, they – already the gender more prone to violence – turned their rage against their spouses.

A second technological development was that of the plow. As long as simple hand-held tools such as hoes were used, women stayed in parity with men. But the plow, being heavy, was handled primarily by men. Women then became more displaced from food production and were relegated increasingly to domestic chores, thence seen as less important in the social structure.

This account, although tidy, is problematic on a number of counts. One is that it does not hold up well with newer archaeological and ethnographic evidence. Anthropologists have increasingly voiced that while some (particularly sedentary and materials-amassing) foraging societies did develop formal warfare, warfare among nomadic foragers was rare (Wells, 2010; Davis, 2013; Survival International, 2013; Diamond, 2012 at least acknowledges warfare was rarer among nomadic foragers than settled agrarians), although it was found among permanently settled foragers such as the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest. Even if warfare had been common among nomadic foragers, this model does not explain why there would be a breakdown in the common forager codes for sharing resources and preventing resource inequalities and social hierarchies and thus how the social hierarchies relegating women to a lower rung would come into place. By comparison, in the ACS theory, the social shifts that occur upon sedentary agriculture explain hierarchies’ onset. Second, Harris’ designation of the plow as a material contribution comes too late in the chronology. It appears that inequality and hierarchy were already developing in settled agrarian societies, whatever their agricultural tool types. Forager development of war weapons is not a necessary step in explaining onset of patriarchy; and agriculturist development of the plow is not sufficient to explain it. For both explanatory and evidentiary reasons, Harris’ theory is less sustainable than the ACS theory, even though, by looking to the archaeological and ethnographic record, the two appear related.

Resemblances to earlier philosophical social-ontological theories

While I have noted the distinctions between the ACS theory of patriarchy and other recent theories, there remains a need to distinguish it from much earlier theories of social ontology in the western tradition. Hobbes (1952) set a notable precedent in political theory by postulating both a state of nature and a basic equality among all persons. In his view, the state of nature – or the conditions humans live in without a state controlling them – is chaotic and undesirable, undermining basic human equality. The strict organizing principles of the state offer the best hope for humans to live in optimal approximation of their natural equality. Equality, as Hobbes describes it, crucially involves a general capability to fulfill one’s drives and talents. It appears then that inequality is the condition to which human society tends without a state to rein in its cupidity. This view stands in stark distinction to the ACS theory which holds that equality is the tendency of human society without authoritarian social-political organization which began with sedentary agricultural societies. Locke (1952) also looked to a state of nature, which he allowed may have actually existed before states; and emphasized the fact that humans apparently enjoyed an equality of freedom in such society. Equality, for Locke, is more of a qualifier upon freedom than a social condition in which persons’ talents may be fulfilled or, as Rousseau would later hold, material parity; that is, Locke’s concern is that in a state of nature, humans enjoyed an equal level of freedom. However, without a state there could be no assurance this condition would sustain itself. A properly formed state could offer such assurance, although certainly not the strong-armed leviathan of Hobbes’. Again, while freedom and autonomy are important characteristics in pre-state societies according to the ACS theory I offer, the state does not necessarily guarantee these.

Perhaps the clearest candidate predecessor to the ACS theory is Rousseau’s, particularly his Second Discourse, On the Origins of Inequality (1997). Although Rousseau wrote before systematic, scientific anthropology got its start in the early 19th century, his method was almost prescient in its drive to uncover the evolution of human society from pre-state to state. In approaching his work it is notable that he distinguishes two kinds of inequality: ‘natural or Physical’ (ibid.: 131), which includes differences in physical strength or mind; and ‘moral or political inequality’ which is established by convention and includes discrepancies in wealth, power, prestige and personal merit. One of the discourse’s aims is essentially to show how this first type was overwhelmed by this second type, or how ‘Nature was subjected to Law’ (ibid.). His tracing of the origins of inequality shares much with the ACS theory. Perhaps the most telling passage to this extent, if in a symbolic way, is: ‘The first man, who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say, this is mine … was the true founder of civil society’ (ibid.: 161). I say ‘symbolic’ because this passage may be said to sum up the set of processes mentioned above by which humans abandoned their nomadic ways, settled and began assembling into larger communities leading to states and to cultivating the land whose steady protection motivated what we now consider property laws. Rousseau conjectures pre-state peoples, whom he calls ‘Savages’, ¹² who very loosely resemble foragers, in that they are ‘Hunters and Warriors’ (ibid.: 162), living in freedom and in a condition of basic material equality, ‘roaming in the woods’. Apparently, they took their food from the land (as agriculture has not yet been invented), with no tyrants exerting power over them and with some kind of gender parity, in that ‘the ways of the two Sexes’ (ibid.: 164) are ‘but one’. (That is, it seems there was no significant difference in gender activities.) Like our contemporary anthropologists, Rousseau is puzzled by just what led people to abandon this way of life and develop sedentary agricultural and state societies. Anthropologists look to physical factors such as population densities (Kelly, 2007), how sedentary families can secretly store goods and thus slowly establish wealth and power, or how well a region’s flora can be cultivated (Diamond, 2012). However, Rousseau looks to moral explanations. Given that some people were living ‘together in a common dwelling’ (1997: 164), they grew tamer, and gathered outside their houses in groups to sing, and it was then that ‘Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a price’ (ibid.: 166). This point is then the first stage of seeking social prestige, what Rousseau calls ‘amour-propre’, essentially the construction of oneself according to norms of prestige. Because of the disparities of natural inequality, moral inequality started slowly becoming legitimized through allowance of differing social prestige. The ‘stronger did more work; the more skillful used his work to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to reduce his labor’ (ibid.: 170). With disparities in labor came disparities in needs: ‘the moment one man needed the help of another, as soon as it was found to be useful for one man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared’ (ibid.: 167). Furthermore, by Rousseau, it seems people voluntarily gave up their freedom and equality: ‘All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom’ (ibid.: 173).

Just as Rousseau’s explanatory causes for why people gave up equality differ from those of anthropologists, so does his narrative of pre-state equality and the shift to sedentary cultures’ inequality differ from the ACS theory. For one matter, his method is explicitly non-empirical. In the Discourse’s ‘Exordium’ he states: ‘The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not to be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings … to form conjectures based solely on the nature of man’ (1997: 132). By contrast, the ACS theory has aimed for empirical accuracy, while allowing for normative interpretation. Furthermore, Rousseau’s conjecture of pre-state ‘Savages’ differs significantly from the picture offered herein of foragers. He holds that Savages had little use for reason, implies their language was simpler (‘crude, imperfect’ languages [ibid.: 163]) and likens them, if in a somewhat respectful way, to animals. ¹³ By contrast, the ACS theory assumes that foraging people are as fully human as non-foragers such as those in industrialized societies, can reason as soundly as the latter, and speak languages as complex as the latter. Most important for the theory itself, Rousseau does not clearly endorse the 5 characteristics stated above for an egalitarian society: (1) as for no chronic power over others, the Discourse implies this is the case but does not investigate its centrality; (2) the Discourse does not provide the key band- wide sharing of goods and (3) misses how tribes expressly forbid the practice and concept of wealth accumulation by individuals or even by the group; (4) it mentions only in passing a vague kind of gender parity, without investigating the centrality of this marked gender parity among many foragers; and (5) while Rousseau mentions the freedom enjoyed by Savages, he misses foragers’ emphasis on individual autonomy, the capacity to govern oneself and make a valid contribution to the group in their life-goals. The most important difference, of course, is that Rousseau misses altogether the notion of the patriarchy. He does speak of the rise of ‘Paternal love’ (1997: 164), ‘Paternal authority’ (ibid.: 177) and ‘Paternal power’ (ibid.), which Rousseau appears to favor, finding these ‘gentle’ and contrasted with despotism. ¹⁴ Apparently, Rousseau finds the kind of rule emanating from masculine authority as not oppressive but benign. With his view of the supposed natural difference of the genders, he could plausibly be construed as an agent of patriarchy, not its critic. It is hard to find in his derivation of inequality an account of the rise of patriarchy, as he continually asserts the natural ascendancy of males in power and the natural subservience of women. This basic difference in his derivation of inequality’s origins from that of the present article’s ACS-based ontology can at least help set in relief how very different in substance and aim are these two theories. His theory does not affirm the strong tie between the rise of inequality and the rise of oppressive patriarchy.

However, he nonetheless should be acknowledged for having attempted a social ontology of inequality, within an incipient anthropological approach, that set a precedent for later bona fide anthropological investigations into the nature of equality.

Objections

Many reasonable objections to my analysis are possible, but an article of this size can respond only briefly to the most pressing ones. The first is that this ACS analysis is not consistent with other highly respected genealogies tracing the origins of patriarchy, such as Lerner’s (1987). Lerner seemed to find that before the period when she discerns the onset of patriarchy, about 3100 BCE in the Near East, women had much more respectable positions than they did until recently in modern democracies, and yet the civilizations Lerner describes were agrarian, urban and inegalitarian. There have been proposals and suggestions that the ancient Minoan civilization on Crete was, in fact, matriarchal (Hawkes, 1968; Stone, 1976; see also Marimatos, 2004; Gere, 2009). Such historical findings would, if true, falsify the hypothesis that the onset of settled agrarian/urban inegalitarian societies brought about patriarchy. It would appear that such civilizations could exist without patriarchy, and even (in Minoa, for example) inequality could exist consistently with matriarchy.

My first response is that these reputed historical findings have been updated by further archaeological work, as I have detailed. This work at best shows that a great majority of cultures happening upon agriculture simultaneously resort to inequality and patriarchy. Earlier historians such as Lerner either had no access to or did not consider such archaeological and ethnographic data, which could put the isolated periods examined into a larger framework for interpreting where such cultures as that of the Near East 3100 BCE stand in the patterned development of inequality and patriarchy.

Second, the historical findings in question could be hastily drawing the conclusion that in such a civilization, some women – and one must consider whether this happened only in the upper classes – had some rights, such as property ownership, which women may not have enjoyed by the culture’s earlier, simpler agrarian predecessors. Thus, this early urban civilization may well have developed some equivalent of human rights extended to (some?) women, and then from a still undesignated source – perhaps invaders – patriarchy set in. Nothing in my proposal disallows the possibility that earlier civilizations, through establishing laws and practices, could have shed some of the agrarian inequalities of earlier versions of the culture – and subsequently lost these rights.

Third, even if these cultures were matrilineal, matrilinearity in inegalitarian cultures does not imply equality or matriarchy (Hunter and Whitten, 1977; Kelly, 2007; Flannery and Marcus, 2012). As for matriarchy in ancient Minoa, this characterization of Minoa remains controversial (Castleden, 1990; Gere, 2009), and it is not apparent that women throughout the society had equal standing with males in power. Artworks may have portrayed women as having substantial presence and prestige, but these pictorials need not have translated into an experienced equality or even a dominant position for all women in the society. (See Fleming, 1969; Uoko, 1969.) (By comparison, if future historians were to have only our magazine covers and ads as evidence of women’s presence, it may appear that women are much more highly esteemed than males since they appear more frequently in such media.)

Fourth, I have not proposed the route to patriarchy as a linear one. Cultures, like organisms – steadily evolving phenomena – appear to evolve in linear straight lines, as if they are going somewhere. The concept of linearity or even progress in this social evolution is entirely irrelevant to this proposal. Civilization is not seen as some kind of crowning peak of evolution. Likewise, cultures have been documented as evolving into somewhat inegalitarian practices, and then developing afterward to simpler, egalitarian ways more akin to their earlier practices (in what some observers may misrepresent as ‘devolution’, by which a culture devolves from a more ‘advanced’ state it reached, ‘back’ to a more ‘primitive’ one) (Flannery and Marcus, 2012). For reasons I cannot venture to explore here, cultures that do stumble upon settled agrarian practices do seem to stumble upon inequality; and for hundreds of times in the story of humanity cultures seem to make these stumbling transitions. Most important, they appear to undergo these stumbling moves by a number of different patterns, as I have mentioned: sometimes allowing wealth accumulation without prestige, sometimes prestige without wealth accumulation, or power-over-others without wealth. I have not asserted that there was a simple linear pattern that all followed. However, the overall effect, for a great majority of cultures that do happen upon agriculture, is that over time, on average, they adopt wealth-accumulation, power-over-others (oligarchy) and inequality, with patriarchy eventually (and sometimes rapidly) emerging.

Fifth, patriarchy may not be a necessary accompaniment to inequality. I do not see a way to make a plausible necessary connection between inequality and patriarchy in sedentary agrarian societies, other than by proposing a biologistic theory by which, when humans lose their nomadic foraging ways and develop agriculture, a ‘patriarchy gene’ is triggered. While some may find such a theory attractive, I must reiterate that I am not asserting it or any other theory of necessary connection. Without the constraint of biologism, there is little reason against asserting that matriarchy may coexist with inegalitarianism. However, so far, among repeated cases in prehistory and history, the onset of inequality in sedentary agrarian societies has been coupled with patriarchy.

Another objection is that the ACS analysis is too generalized, making something like a clean linear narrative of the development of civilizations from nomadic band societies, when the actual situations were messier, not all following such a clean path from nomadic culture to settled, agrarian/urban, inegalitarian patriarchies. I have answered this objection implicitly in the preceding. Some societies do seem to have returned to simpler social forms after having tested their toes in the waters of inequality (Flannery and Marcus, 2012). In fact, a major thrust of this article is that human societies, especially egalitarian foraging ones, are quite varied and have their own idiosyncratic evolution. However, most cultures that have happened upon agrarian/urbanism seem to have remained stuck, a phenomenon worth exploring.

A third objection is that the ACS theory puts an onus on populations to throw off the yoke of patriarchy. It is implied that contemporary societies might have to move forward in a very different direction than their route has otherwise appeared to destine them. Instead of continuing down the path of competitiveness, specialization, personal-wealth amassing, power-over and unrestrained resource use, societies may have to move forward to diminishing population and resource use, cultivating cooperation, nurturing actual autonomy instead of specialization, and ceasing personal-wealth accumulation. This type of progression would be too difficult to achieve; most people simply would not want to bother, much less assent to the moral advantage of doing so. In response, this objection’s worry is not whether the ACS theory offered is correct but whether a culture’s or nation’s virtue can take on a burden of change. If their virtue is not up to handling that burden, that lack reflects not upon the validity of the route to change but upon the moral character of those who should change.

A related objection maintains that the ACS-based analysis could lead to complacency about patriarchy, if not material to help justify its continuance in contemporary and future societies, particularly if, as seems likely, people do not want to work toward building a more just society by developing, say, simpler lifestyles and lowering population to levels at which humans could more readily realize equality and let patriarchy wither away. We should not allow the dangers of such outcome by accepting an ACS theory. The end of better outcomes justifies the means of barring this analysis. My response is similar to that for the previous objection. Interpreting this ontology of patriarchy as justification for the patriarchy that persists in contemporary industrialized societies does not reflect on its moral integrity but reflects on those interpreting it to allow such justifications. The point of this examination has been to trace, according to the best data accumulated until now, the origins of patriarchy the better to understand the ontology of this social condition and thereby derive the most plausible and effective ways of eradicating it. The article has thereby had two major thrusts: (1) a descriptive or empirical one, which can be taken on its own merit, but which I have spent so much time on for (2) a prescriptive or normative implication, of intensifying the need to eradicate patriarchy, for which goal one may be best readied for action by best understanding one’s adversary. It is possible that better understanding one’s adversary can be used – even by the adversary – to strengthen the adversary. Such is the risk of any knowledge, the more finely tuned it is. But in this case, it would be stretching the analysis beyond normative plausibility for the adversary to say, ‘Now you understand how saturated your industrial urban culture is with patriarchy, but we know you are too complacent to effect the necessary changes to eradicate us. So you are stuck.’ The moral issue, then, is determination to change and defusing complacency.

A final objection may be made to the attempt to distinguish the article’s ontological theory from that of earlier, modern authors, particularly Rousseau. It may be said that, even if Rousseau were not explicitly tracing the origins of patriarchy, his theory of inequality’s origins in the shift from unsettled societies that claimed no property to landed, settled societies that did claim property, wealth, power and prestige, his theory is in essence the same as this article’s. One need only add the small step that patriarchy is the state of inequality. Thus, the ACS theory provides little or nothing that Rousseau, building on earlier theorists, had not already.

This objection overlooks the significant differences between the two theories as analysed in the previous section. His theory is either unclear about or does not even speak to the 5 distinct social features of the state of equality at the heart of this article’s theory. Most important, that ‘small’ step of equating inequality with patriarchy is not so small, as exemplified in the pivotal assumption that Rousseau makes about the ‘natural’ differences in the sexes’ roles. He assumes such is ‘not an unjust manmade inequality’ but a natural one (1979: 371). Without his acknowledging that this assumption is one key to the oppressiveness of inequality, his theory cannot concur that what we, at least, call ‘patriarchy’ is oppressive. That key leaves the two theories incommensurable, and this article offers an entirely different kind of contribution to social ontology.

Conclusion

The thesis has been that (1) nomadic foragers’ revoking their lifestyle for settled agrarian practices was concomitant with onset of inequality, and (2) inequality has always been patriarchal in human societies (whether it is necessarily so). In short, in the historical contingency, inequality ⇒ patriarchy (and perhaps patriarchy ⇒ inequality). ¹⁵ Remove the inequality, difficult though that may be, and patriarchy should disappear. This finding could lead one plausibly to infer that patriarchy with its severe divisions of labor and specialization over time becomes more and more inextricable from a goods-amassing cultural and physical infrastructure. Furthermore, it may be inferred that to rid a culture of patriarchy, one would need to rid it of this cultural and physical infrastructure and move forward to smaller, simpler societies in which humans of whatever gender, ethnic identity, or cosmological belief could operate as true equals. Such remedy should at least be worth exploring in further investigation. If that remedy is too onerous and most people prefer their present comforts over ridding themselves of patriarchy and inequality, then a best substitute method, taking as full account as possible of the analysis provided here, must be proposed.