Has matriarchy ever existed? Were there really societies where women ruled everything? "Attic", having studied the evidence of historians, anthropologists and sociologists, tells about the main contenders for the title of matriarchal - or close to it - societies.
Most often, matriarchy is understood as the power of women. Wikipedia defined matriarchy at the time of this writing as "a form of society in which women play a leading role, especially mothers of families." However, this definition leaves a lot of room for questions: how, for example, to correctly define leadership? If the wives of high-ranking officials have more material values than their husbands, is it women's leadership, the separation of political and economic power, or is it an epiphenomenon associated with the need for civil servants to declare their income? If in most cases the court decides to leave the child with the mother when divorcing, does this indicate a higher status of women or that most of the fathers do not consider fussing with the child worthy of a man? Both examples dealt with today's civilization,and if we try to reconstruct cultures of millennia ago, the question of the "dominant field" becomes even more confusing.
A vivid example of how difficult it is to determine the gender structure of an extinct culture can be found in the late 19th century, a Viking burial in Sweden. Scientists have found remains, among which a skeleton stood out in a rich grave with weapons, military equipment, two horses and even figures for some kind of game. The find has long been considered the burial of a noble warrior, but in the 1970s, an examination of the bones showed that they, most likely, belonged to a woman. A recent molecular genetic study has confirmed this conjecture, but a number of experts are skeptical about the idea of female warriors: it cannot be ruled out that the remains from the 19th century could be confused during storage; it is also unclear how typical of the Vikings the participation of women in military campaigns might have been.
The French researcher Pierre Bourdieu, who studied the mechanisms of social hierarchies, along with economic capital, distinguished its other types: social, cultural and symbolic. The first can be thought of as connections between people that an individual can use to obtain one or another benefit. Having high-level executives among friends is useful when looking for a job, meeting doctors helps with illness, and a large number of subscribers on social networks can be useful when selling a cabinet with self-pickup. The second, cultural, multifaceted - can represent specific knowledge and skills, and be material, being a personal library (or, for example, a personal collection of some works of art), and act institutionally, in the form of titles and titles. The third is symbolic, expressed in prestige and reputation. Poor girlbut the respected aristocracy, the wealthy but poorly educated merchants, the powerful but legally persecuted mafia bosses or pirates are all examples of social groups with different combinations of capital. And what kind of combination is "stronger" may differ from one situation to another. All this complicates to a certain extent the answer to the question whether we know matriarchal societies. But let's turn to the actual applicants.
The Amazons of Herodotus and the Amazons of Dahomey
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The Amazons are perhaps the most famous example of a "female society", the only problem is that it is difficult to unambiguously link the rather anecdotal testimony of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus with any real community. Apparently, the Amazons meant the Savromats, nomadic tribes on the territory of modern Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. As for archaeological evidence, rich female graves have come down to us, and we can confidently say that women of this people could become priestesses and, possibly, even warriors. In favor of the latter, both weapons in the burials and the notorious Greek testimonies speak.
We emphasize again: neither the words of Herodotus, nor the presence of bows or axes in the graves next to the female remains do not allow us to draw unambiguous conclusions. Herodotus also wrote about people with dogs' heads, and a number of skeletons in graves with weapons belong to girls - it cannot be ruled out that they were buried with weapons not as a sign of belonging to warriors, but as part of some kind of ceremony.
According to another version, proposed more than a hundred years ago by British researchers Lewis Farnell and John Mires, the ancient Greeks could call the inhabitants of Crete, representatives of the Minoan civilization, Amazons. The surviving frescoes indicate that this culture at least had female priestesses and rituals similar, according to the scientists mentioned, to the stories of the Greeks about the Amazons and their culture.
A group of Dahomey Amazons, photograph taken in 1891 while the group was in Paris.
And in the 19th century, women's troops, called by the Europeans "Dahomey Amazons", operated already as part of the army of Dahomey, the state on whose territory modern Benin and Togo (the western coast of Africa) are located. According to some reports, their number at some point reached six thousand people - up to a third of the entire army. Dahomey combined the creation of female armed detachments with the practice of husbands (or fathers) sending unwanted wives, and even together with their daughters, to the royal harem, so the presence of "Amazons" in general does not imply "female domination".
Perhaps, if Herodotus had been transported to our days, he would also have called a matriarchal society in which there are women serving in the army - from Soviet "night witches" to the Israeli armed forces, but from the inside, modern societies can hardly be characterized in this way.
Moso: female family
More successful examples of matriarchy can be found in cultures that have not yet reached the stage of traditional society, that is, predominantly agrarian economically and politically centralized. Friedrich Engels in his classic work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State" generally argues that it was the transition to traditional culture that was marked by the formation of patriarchy. The same theory is developed in the work "The Exchange of Women" by the anthropologist and famous feminist thinker Gail Rubin.
Moso living in the Chinese provinces of Sichuan and Yunnan (southwest of the country, Himalayas) are often described as having preserved a matriarchal order. Their marriage is matrilineal and matrilocal, women make most of the important decisions and are also involved in the manufacture of clothing and fabrics for the trade. Men are responsible for fishing, grazing and slaughtering. In addition, the Moso lifestyle does not have the usual identity of biological and social fatherhood - this social role is played by the mother's brothers, while the biological father only comes to the mother at night. The traditional Moso family, according to a 2009 study, continues to this day include a mother, children, and numerous maternal relatives. Thus, Moso society is fundamentally different from both modern Western culture with its nuclear family (spouses with children),and from the more traditional, extended (parents and grandparents of spouses, spouses, their children).
Weaver-moso in Lijiang, China.
Matrilinear marriages are also common among the Hopi and Iroquois Indians of North America, and among the Tuareg and Serers in Africa. Sereres living in Senegal, Mauritania and Gambia (the western coast of Africa), at the same time, have both patrilineal and matrilineal clans, as well as the peoples of eastern Sri Lanka. Matrilinear marriage is characteristic of the Indonesian Minangkabau. Also, here, of course, it is necessary to note the matrilineal inheritance of Jewry - belonging to this people is determined by the mother, and not by the father.
Inuit, the sun goddess and spatial reasoning
A story about peoples with a different gender structure would not be complete without mentioning the Greenlandic Inuit. The system of relations among this nation that had developed by the time of contact with Europeans assumed that work was divided equally between men and women, and that there were no purely “female” or purely “male” occupations. Women in the Inuit culture were considered more adapted to sewing and handicraft, but this did not prevent them from hunting or doing other work when necessary, which was considered primarily suitable for men.
"Madonna of the North" - Inuit woman with a child behind her back; 1912, Alaska.
The Inuit have also, in a sense, turned the symbolic opposition between "feminine" and "masculine" inside out. If in most societies "feminine" is associated with the moon, moisture and cold, then the Inuit, on the contrary, highlight the sun goddess Raspberry and the moon god Annningan. Still, according to some reports (unfortunately, this is just one study from 1966), Inuit are almost the only ones to demonstrate the absence of differences in spatial abilities between women and men - perhaps precisely because of the absence of rigidly defined gender roles.
Beyond gender
The situation with gender roles becomes even more confusing where the very concept of gender turns out to be loose (the significance of the biological factor is weakened) or even non-binary. Or, more simply, where a transition from masculine to feminine is possible, or even the existence of a "third sex".
In Albania, until the beginning of the 20th century, a girl could become an oath virgin, taking on the male role. After a public vow, she wore men's clothing, became the head of the family - often in place of her deceased father - and even gained a voice in the community. In fact, she lived like a man in everything that does not affect the reproductive and sexual spheres. In the structures of a number of North American tribes, as well as the Kamchatka Itelmens, there were similar identities, and not only for women, but also for men who decided to go through a social “sex change”.
In Altai and partly in the European part of Russia until the 19th-20th centuries. singled out "half-men", about whom they said that they took on the male role and even "got married", choosing a permanent partner. The Indonesian Bugis have five genders at all: male, female, two “reversed” identities and, finally, byssu - uniting all conceivable gender characteristics in one personality. Byssu, androgynous shamans, which is especially interesting, even successfully survived the Islamization of Indonesia (today the first country in the world by the number of Muslims). According to the observations of anthropologists, back in the early 2000s, the byssu were giving their compatriots advice on when to take the Hajj. The traditional Bugis beliefs were supplemented by Islam, just as Catholicism was superimposed on the beliefs of indigenous peoples in Latin America. And another Islamic country, Pakistan,known not only for the state religion, but also for the official recognition of the hijra - people with a biological male sex, but a female gender identity; hijra can receive documents with an “X” in the “gender” column since last year.
Looking at all these examples, it seems worthwhile to conclude that in all gender non-binary cultures, the very formulation of the question of women's leadership turns out to be incorrect - for them the boundary between genders is not as immutable as it continues to be for more “mass” cultures. The gender hierarchy, however, in such societies can persist or even be very rigid (as in Pakistan). Therefore, modern researchers prefer the term "matriarchy" more rigorous particular definitions.
Alexey Tymoshenko
