Re: Love and Proyect

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 11 Jan 2002 23:49:10 -0700 (MST),
ermadog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
>And yes, I do rely on modern, feminist
>anthropologists, even though they annoy me with
>their obligatory snipes against Marx and Engels.
>Apparently, these are not radical enough for
>Louis, and others.

Well, why don't you consult some other scholars who are both feminist
and Marxist? I would in particular recommend Eleanor Leacock who
wrote the fine introduction to the International Publishers edition
of Engels's "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State."

This is what she writes about gender oppression in preclass society
in the article "Relations of Production in Band Society" that is
found in the collection "Politics and History in Band Societies",
edited by her and Richard Lee:

Debate concerning aboriginal gender roles and female-male relations
in the Canadian subarctic affords a good example of problems yet to
be resolved. Ethnohistorical reconstruction of aboriginal culture
history in subarctic Canada has resulted in consensus on the fact
that privatization of land-use followed, rather than preceded,
dependence upon fur trading with Europeans. However, there remains
considerable disagreement over issues like post-marital residence and
female autonomy. Extensive genealogical data taken in 1950 and 1951
showed that among the Montagnais-Naskapi, matrilocality had been the
ideal, but that it was being superseded by patrilocality in response
to new economic and political conditions. Recently analysed
ethnohistorical data are indicating that the same may be the case
throughout the Canadian subarctic However, these data are often
spotty and indirect and are at present far from accepted as
conclusive.

With respect to the issue of male 'dominance' versus female
'autonomy', the seventeenth-century record of women's social and
sexual independence among the Montagnais-Naskapi of the Labrador
Peninsula is rare in its explicitness. The head of the Jesuit mission
at Quebec, Paul Le Jeune, spent a winter in a Montagnais lodge in
order to learn the language and understand the culture he sought to
change, and he sent a detailed account of his experiences back to
Paris. Time and again, during his subsequent years in Quebec, he made
reference to the problems women's autonomy was causing him and to his
difficulties in attempting to introduce principles of male dominance
among the Montagnais-Naskapi.

It is my view that the egalitarianism that obtained between the sexes
among the Montagnais-Naskapi also existed among other Algonkian and
Athapaskan hunters. However, Ronald Cohen interprets Samuel Hearne's
account of his eighteenth-century trip with a Chipewyan 'band' from
Hudson's Bay to the Coppermine River as evidence that male dominance
over, or at least casual brutality toward, women was aboriginal. To
Cohen the late eighteenth century is too early for much culture
change. However, as I point out, the 'band' with which Hearne
travelled was not a hunting band at all, but a 'gang' (Hearne's term)
of middlemen in the fur trade, a group that temporarily gathered
around a man by the name of Matonabbee. Matonabbee was a full-time
worker for the Hudson's Bay Company, and he and the men in his gang
were not only occasionally abusive toward women, but also robbed and
even killed some of the people they encountered on their trip.

The behaviour of Matonabbee and his men, robbing and killing some
people, although trading fairly, even generously, with others, was
apparently not governed by cultural tradition as much as by what was
most profitable, given the exigencies of the role they had taken on
as middlemen in the fur trade. Their middleman role did afford them
access to desirable trade goods, but on the whole, according to
Hearne, yielded them no more than 'a bare subsistence', and
furthermore forced them to risk starvation periodically when
travelling through barren lands to reach the trading fort. By
contrast, Hearne described the traditional Chipewyan as living 'in a
state of plenty, without trouble or risque', and hence as happier and
more independent. Matonabbee and his gang, caught in a bind between a
company that was driving as hard a bargain as it could and people
with whom they traditionally expected to share freely, sometimes
acted with a violence that characterized colonial frontier life in
general.

As for some of the abusive behaviour toward women that Hearne
described, it smacks more of the attempt on the part of some men to
exploit them as well as other men, than it does of culturally
institutionalized assumptions of authority and superiority. Women
were important as porters; Matonabbee made it his business to acquire
as many tall strong wives as he could - seven at the time of Hearne's
trip. Yet he could do nothing to hold them against their wishes
except threaten violence. There were no established cultural
sanctions to bind them. Although the women according to Hearne were
generally hard working and good humoured, they had, as Cohen admits,
many ways of defending their interests, and some in Hearne's view
were 'as lofty and insolent as any women in the world'.

It is my understanding, then, that Hearne's eighteenth-century
account of a Chipewyan hunting 'gang' does not contradict the import
of Le Jeune's seventeenth-century account of life in a
Montagnais-Naskapi lodge. However the issue of aboriginal Chipewyan
practices certainly cannot be 'proved' in a formal sense. The
question is thereby raised: if each statement about some aspect of
social life among gatherer-hunters can be argued in this fashion, in
what sense is it possible to generalize about the socio-cultural
concomitants of gathering-hunting production relations? Can we arrive
at agreement on the major corollaries of gathering-hunting economies?
The level of agreement referred to in the opening paragraphs of this
paper attests to the possibility of a positive answer. With
historical questions, the accumulation of evidence pointing
consistently in the same direction eventually leads to consensus.

As an example of debate resolved, take collective land ownership as
an accepted characteristic of band-living gatherer-hunters. Put forth
by Morgan and Engels as basic to the 'communism in living' that once
characterized human society, the principle of collective land
ownership was challenged by anthropologists of the Boasian school and
virtually discarded. Yet further research affirmed its reality which
is now accepted. Similarly, the assumption that 'public' decisions in
gathering-hunting society were made by individual leaders or 'chiefs'
holding formal authority has increasingly given way to the
understanding that such decisions are arrived at through discussion
and adjudication. With respect to gender, studies of women's changing
social roles among gatherer-hunters are beginning to contradict
assumptions of male 'dominance' even among peoples where it seemed
quite obvious, such as Aboriginal Australians. Detailed historical
analyses to supplement field studies may soon demonstrate that such
male dominance as exists in otherwise egalitarian societies is a
function of changing relations of production reinforced by missionary
teachings, legal systems, and European role models.

In closing, I wish to stress that accurate reconstruction of the
history and the associated socio-economic changes in gatherer-hunter
societies of far more than theoretical interest. It is also of great
importance on political and ethical grounds. The descendants of
gatherer-hunters are Peoples now fighting for land rights, if not for
sheer survival, and for access to education which makes it possible
for them to choose their own life-style in the contemporary world.
Anthropologists have a responsibility, therefore, to be correct in
describing their histories. To lump as gatherer-hunters today all
peoples who were so at the time of European colonization, and to talk
of recent social and ideological features of their cultures as
uniformly characterizing a gathering-hunting mode, is to reify
culture and freeze it in a timeless mould. In such a scheme, cultures
cannot grow, but can only be whittled away through acculturation'.
The centuries through which erstwhile foragers have coped with the
conditions of colonization are thereby negated; the peoples concerned
are robbed of both their history and their culture.

Colonization characteristically brought disruption and devastation to
foraging peoples and it is necessary to point this out. However, for
ethical and political as well as scientific reasons, it is equally
necessary to note and to document the resiliency and creativity with
which different peoples moved to survive in, cope with, and take what
advantage they could of new situations in which they found
themselves. In most cases, after initial disruption, peoples
reorganized their economic lives in connection with trade and/or
seasonal or temporary labour, accepted a modicum of formal leadership
to deal with the 'outside', incorporated a measure of Christian
belief and ritual into their traditional religious practices, and
reinterpreted their definitions of male-female roles and relations,
as they welded past and present in an ongoing way of life. They
evolved new cultural forms which, although much changed from
aboriginal times, continued to be distinctively theirs. In the name
of 'modernization' and 'development', these cultures are now being
threatened as capitalist relations are fully imposed even in the most
remote hinterlands of the world.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 01/12/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org



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