October 29, 2003
Awakened Woman's Circle is working for peace
"Overturning the masculine default":
An interview with herstorian Max Dashu
by Stephanie Hiller
Independent scholar Max Dashu founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970 after leaving Harvard, where her interest in women's studies was not supported. In 1973, she worked as historical consultant with Donna Deitch, who was doing a feminist documentary. Since then she continued to collect slides of images as testimonies to culture, documenting women's roles in society and noting the correlations between racial and class bias and the silencing of women. Max is herself a skilled artist, and three of her renditions adorn this article. She is also at work on her multi-volume book in progress, The Secret History of the Witches.Her upcoming presentations are listed on our Events page.
We visited one summer afternoon in the house in Oakland, CA that Max shares with her partner of 20 years, and talked later by phone.
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A woman always held the Moonstone of the royal Buhera clan in Zimbabwe. This opal pendant embodied the spiritual power of the Shona people. Harinda BaRozwe first acquired the sacred stone in a shamanic encounter with the Python, who coiled around her. She was then able to heal her ailing father, who had promised the throne to whoever was able to cure him. Harinda succeeded where her brothers had failed, becoming the first of the queens. She was one among many female guardians of the Moonstone in southeastern Africa. |
How was the Congress on Matriarchy?
It was intense. It was an academic conference. It was more hierarchical than academic conferences here. Only presenters had name tags and some presenters only meetings. Very formalized question and answer period, which ran into problems at times especially the most controversial presentation, by James De Meo, there just wasn't time for people to talk about it. But all conferences have this tendency to schedule serial presentations -- so that there isn't time to confer, for people to discuss among themselves.
One that I enjoyed the most was the Mosuo professor, Lamu Gatusa. He talked about how they don't have marriage, they say that they believe that it would be a very bad idea to mix survival issues with the affairs of the heart. Why would you have the roof over head and the food you eat, all those things that have to do with material survival, why would you want to let that get in the way of the beautiful feeling of romantic love? So they don't believe in mixing them. Instead the survival stuff is always keyed to people of your clan who love you and you all know each other and you trust each other. So the children always have a place and if the love affair breaks up nothing else has to change, which I thought was really beautiful.
He had a lot of other things to say as well. He talked about how they're being flooded with tourists, mostly Han Chinese, because the word has gone out about this egalitarian society. Most of the tourists have very racist ideas towards the Mosuo culture which has become sexually stereotyped as the free love people. So they have these tourists pouring in and people asking really insulting questions about private things and it's very offensive. But in some ways he presented a very optimistic view of where things were going because he said a lot of young people leave, they go to the big cities -- and then, they come back, because the don't like it out there, especially the women. And the male youth as well come back more strongly committed to their own culture.
Let's talk about your work. You've collected thousands of images, mostly of Goddess worship all over the world --
Well, it's not restricted to goddess worship although that comes in a lot, especially the more further back you go, but I'm actually doing a broader area of study: global women's history. Basically world history with women as the center point. So that takes in a whole lot of extra territory because I'm also tracking the history of patriarchy, which includes things like conquests, slavery, captives, as well as indigenous studies. I see all of those as necessary elements to any woman's history, as well as, goddess traditions, animism, shamanic arts.
Often we have people trying to generalize about women's history in ways that you lose the texture. You know, people like to say, Well when did patriarchy start? And they want a date! But you can't set one date. You can talk about a certain region and a range of dates. In South west Asia for example, 5000 years ago we can see signs of patriarchy happening. But then other places like Sumatra, parts of Colombia, the Hopi country, that stuff still hasn't happened thousands of years later. They're not less advanced, they're more advanced!
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Quilaztli Aztecs praised her as the Mother of Humankind. They also called her Cihuacoatl, Serpent Woman. The hymn Cihuacoatl Icuic extolls her coming from Colhuacán, the Place of Elders, "with her hoe, beating her drum," her hands full of good things. "Our mother is as twelve eagles, goddess of drum-beating... She comes adorned in the ancient manner with the eagle crest, in the ancient manner with the eagle crest." Aztec legends of their southern migration say that Quilaztli threw down a challenge to the war chiefs, enumerating her powers as Eagle Woman, Snake Woman, Warrior Woman and Underworld Woman. She and her supporters remained in the north. |
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So have you developed a theory about what brings on patriarchy?
It's a very complex question. There's a variety of different things we have to look at.
One is conflict. Even in egalitarian societies, you do see conflict arising. When you start getting raiding parties and you have captives, most of the slaves are female. This is not imperial slavery like in the Roman Empire where you've got mass enslavement of people. Then you see lots of men being enslaved. Early slavery was mainly based on female captivity. Once you have women taken captive, that's one thing that degrades the status of women. They become chattel.
Another factor is the link between patrilineage and property accumulation. Then you get fathers wanting to see that those who inherit from them are their offspring. A whole sexual double standard intended to impose patrilineage -- you know, illegitimate children, and sexual fidelity for women but not for men, men have many wives. When you start to get property accumulation and differentiation of class -- the more wealthy people tend to be more patriarchal, like the patricians in Ancient Rome -- patrician means the class of the fathers -- versus the plebeians, the ordinary folk. In fact you have Roman writers saying the plebeians don't know who their fathers are. And ancient Chinese writers saying the same about their own long-ago ancestors.
There are certain correspondences. You can't make a boiler plate formula about this, but you can say a communal orientation with reciprocal gift-giving economies tend to correlate with matrilineage. And the accumulation of wealth and rank society tends to correlate with patrilineal societies.
What about the introduction of metals into society?
Copper is not a big thing really, doesn't lend itself to military use. But bronze was a technological horizon that suddenly meant that the people who had bronze had weapons, and people who didn't were at a huge disadvantage. And on top of that bronze was something that was very valuable for other things, and for prestige, so there were other kinds of economic wealth that correlated to it. Military technologies certainly are a big factor.
Generally speaking, when the culture acquires the ability to make weapons, it becomes more patriarchal?
Once bronze starts to come into view you begin to see the development of military applications. There tends to be a spread of those technologies and it is very much correlated with militarization and with state and empire spreading, the spread of patriarchal thinking. That spread of bronze, along with chariots, accelerated the expansion of centralized patriarchal states. But some of this is very difficult to track because we're not necessarily dealing with written records.
I think you cannot say it was entirely peaceful before patriarchy. In the matrilineages, one of the flaws might be that people were really committed to their kin over everything else.
In native North America, where there were both matrilineal and patrilineal cultures, there was war but not war of the same kind. In Indian Givers, he [Jack Wetherford] talks about that. In Europe warfare was really brutal, it was scorched earth policy, killing and mutilation, The contrast between that style of water including lining up peons and marching them off and having these deadly battles, and the descriptions of native warfare, is pretty stark. The Indian warrior culture is much more similar to Celtic warfare, much more of a display, and there might not be that many dead. It's much more about counting coup. I'm not saying there was no killing and even there was some torture. The Iroquois who were a mother-right society used to torture captive warriors. But the women always had the right to adapt a captive, so anybody that they liked, they could keep as a clan member. So there is violence that happened among groups but it's nowhere near the same scale, and important differences in cultural values.
Does this have something to do with the size of population?
Well that's the other thing. I think that where there are written records you already have invasions by Europeans. But even before that, in their oral histories, they talk about the "white roots of peace." They have the prophet Deganawidah in a time, centuries ago, described as a time of cannibalism. There was conflict in some of the mother right societies., between groups. The cannibalism thing we do have some representations in the art, maybe 1000 years ago, showing men taking heads. We don't know though what the Iroquois society was like 3000 years ago. So far as I'm concerned this could be part of a process, because they did become a warrior-oriented society, and that's not very typical of mother right societies. How much the European conquest had to do with that is pretty much an open question.
Do you think that these women's cultures degenerated to some extent by the time they changed?
I think there's this whole alphabet of different trends and there's no absolute picture but there's correlations, and yes there is a devolutionary quality to all this, in my mind.It gets so tricky because you've got people waiting to jump on you and say, Oh, you're saying there was a golden age. I think we can take into account human failings as a fact, that conflict did exist between human groups at times. But what was the seriousness of that conflict compared to what we've seen in the last couple hundred years? It just completely pales compared to what's happening with us. There's this variety of different issues -- warfare, stratification and accumulation of wealth, captivity. And then there's another trend, which is when men begin appropriating religious leadership.
In some ways what's really suggested to me from the anthropological readings I've been doing, is that matrifocal residence (living with the woman's family) is even more crucial to women's equality than matrilineage. There are societies that I wouldn't call matrix societies anymore, but if they're patrilocal that's the deal breaker. Because what happens when a woman goes to live among her husband's kin, her rights really decline cause she's the stranger. And then a variety of different things can happen as a result, one of which is a trend to patrilineage, because there's an increasing trend for men to want to pass property to their sons, and once that happens patriarchy is not far behind. Because then they want to control the woman's sexuality, and a powerful sexual double standard arises, enforced with violence and humiliation.
I think a lot of times people oversimplify, saying patriarchy happens because of one factor, and then it spreads. One big generalization is about the idea that patriarchy was brought by invasions from outside. Sometimes it is, but a lot of times it isn't, or it's a combination. Another is the theory that patriarchy arose when agriculture came along, because agriculture allows accumulation of surplus beyond subsistence, resulting in stratification over time. There are conflicting theories that haven't been hashed out yet. Some people say no, no, the hunter gatherer societies were more egalitarian, other people say oh no, we think the agricultural ones are. Some scholars have pointed out that horticultural farms (as opposed to feudal plow societies or slave plantations) are in fact linked to matrilineal cultures. At any rate, high status of women seems to be tied to the more local cultures, egalitarian village societies , and as soon as you start urbanizing and getting specialized professions and social stratification and accumulation of wealth, you see women's status falling.
Because of the complexity of human interaction you have all kinds of mixed factors, so it's not possible to make overarching generalizations. There are migrations, invasions, mingling of peoples, one group ends up adopting the language of another group, a whole lot of possibilities that happen. When Europeans invaded the Americas, there were already some patriarchal societies in place. Those invasions only started 500 years ago but there's all kinds of historical developments before that. Look at the Incas or the Moche in Peru: what kind of impact did their patriarchy have on the peoples they conquered? There's a lot of complexity to it, and we are still trying to reconstruct a lot of this older, non-recorded history from archaeology and oral histories and linguistic data.
This was behind the James de Meo controversy at the Congress on Matriarchy. He had a single explanation and it was desertification. That's another factor (and it's been discussed by the others, especially Peggy Sanday) that scarcity could have pushed people to become militarized and build hierarchies. A militarized society, in order to be effective in a war economy, you have to have centralized command, so that correlates with all the things we know about patriarchy and classes. So you can put that in your war pile. But De Meo had the ecological factor of desertification as the absolute cause. Some people are seduced by monolithic theories like that and I think it's not going to serve us well. It hands the old guard a golden weapon to hack away at the whole idea of doing a historical analysis of gender politics.
What I really couldn't stand about De Meo's presentation was that had no historical back-up. He was focusing on the Sahara as this place where patriarchy originated. Well let's see who do we have there? The egalitarian, matrilineal and matrilocal Tuareg; and the Wodaabe, who may not be egalitarian but they are a lot closer to it than classic European societies. So if patriarchy originated in the Sahara, why are they there, and why are the Hopi and the other pueblos in the southwestern desert, what are the Wayuu people doing in the Colombian desert, who are a matrilineal and matrilocal society to this day? Or you can turn it around: if patriarchy originates under desert conditions, then how do these intensely patriarchal cultures end up in places like New Guinea, which is a rain forest? And only recently conquered by outsiders? .
There's never been a hierarchical conquest society that came out of the Sahara. A thousand years ago you finally get the empire of Ghana in the western edge of the Sahara, but the irony is that it was a matrilineal empire, which was pretty much a rarity. If you want to isolate one factor, it's like when people say that the cause of the witchhunts was ergot poisoning. Have you heard this theory? That the rye gets a mold on it that contains LSD and so in wet years the rye that they use had this fungus on it and so, people who said they saw witches sitting in the tree were actually tripping. Maybe that was one factor going on in places like Salem, but those hunts could not have happened if there had not been this whole thousand year long witch persecution in Europe. The English colonists brought over a whole culture of witch-hunting with them. I think by that time, the 17th century, there wasn't a whole lot left of the real witch culture. The pagan culture had been pretty much interpenetrated by the Christian world view so you have little pieces of things or shreds that are left but you don't have a cultural whole among those people anymore. They'd already been picking off the old women for some time before that. Certainly in England they had been doing that for 150 years.
People would try to earn their scholarly chops with new theories: the witchhunts were about property; abut old and new money; no, it was about ergot poisoning. A lot of these theories had nothing to do with the status of women which is really by any account a central dynamic, a central moving force in the witchhunts. The same is true of patriarchy. If you try to boil it down to just one thing, it just doesn't work. Especially if you aren't examining women's status very closely in its own right.
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Cailleach Bheara (The hag of Béare, pron. kalyakh vayra) Munster, southwest Eire Her name was Boí ("cow"), but she was also known as Sentainne, "Old Woman." She "existed from the long eternity of the world." Her great age was venerable, a sign of power, and proverbial: "as old as the Cailleach Bhéara." She was an ancestral mother who outlived many husbands, "so that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren were peoples and races." Folk memory connects her to megalithic sanctuaries, and named some after her. The Cailleach was said to have built many of them in "one night's work." Often she carried the stones in an apron which came undone, scattering them across the land. Or she hurled boulders from hilltop to hilltop. Landscape features were also her creation, as when she turned a prize bull into a sea rock by striking him with her magic staff. |
Where do we take all this in terms of what we want to see society evolve into? What can we take from this historical knowledge to guide us to create a different culture now?
One thing I think is really critical for us is we have to be able to integrate our understanding of what the problems are so that we're not only doing a gender analysis but we're also looking at indigenous issues, class issues. All of that goes with an attempt to take apart what this gender problem has been about. They're all related. And I think that's really crucial to the success of a movement that's going to lead us out ,because we all have to get on a similar page about this, to heal the divisions between, say, women of color and white feminists. We need to start integrating our analysis in ways that really work with the available knowledge and address all of these justice issues.
So that's one part. The other part is the resurgence of Goddess spirituality, of bringing women back into the picture, to overturn the masculine default. That's very important. It also connects with other kinds of egalitarian models and with things that are not linear and rigid and that involve ecstatic states and the powers that we're able to connect with through those kinds of spiritual practices. What we're going to create isn't going to be a reconstruction of anything that went before because we're a globalized multicultural world where there's all these alliances that are being built and at the same time there are all these threats and they're getting really severe to the human life support system and to the planet on so many different levels. Our challenge is to be able to form some really solid ties that are spiritually grounded, that give us the kind of power we need to create change. Because so many splits and burnouts happened, and we need a kind of lasting strength of political justice and spiritual wisdom.
And what about men?
This is where looking at the matrix societies is really interesting. They have their honored place. But men don't get to be the boss that disposes of women's bodies . Instead the focus is on them as brothers and sons rather than as husbands and fathers. This is what was interesting about what the Mosuo man had to say at the conference. The women love their male kin and their male lovers. There doesn't have to be a contradiction. That is part of the lies that were sold to us, that men can only be done right by if they are granted some kind of hierarchical superior status or that that's the nature of men. The patriarchl worldview, from a spiritual perspective, is really an insult to men, that males must be bullies and rapists.
So as long as you have a culture that's inculcating those beliefs… I'm horrified by the way people in California just lay down and genuflect before Arnold the Predator because he is the ultimate chest pounder. They somehow think this qualifies him to be the leader and protect them from the disasters that are threatening. It's something really retrograde : He's a big man, he's gonna protect us. When in reality it's a protection racket , like under feudalism: the lord that you have to give over most of your crops to is the one that rapes your daughter. He's going to fight against, you know, that other lord, when that one wants to fight. So many people seem to think those hyper-"masculine" qualities are qualifications for leadership -- and that's so different from the American Indian and aboriginal peoples, where the chief is not the one who takes everything for himself but the one who always has to give away everything he's got as a service to the community.
There are other roles that could be envisaged for men, as defenders and technical innovators. I saw this great movie about the tree sitters up in Humboldt County where there were many men of different ages. They were taking some of those male role types of skills and putting them to the service of mother earth. They would take their skills like rock climbing to scale the trees and build platforms, these little pods up in the redwoods. This is a positive channeling for those "male-role" abilities. I think we need an incredible amount of reeducation of people about what is possible, because culture is such a determinant, including molding behavior in the young and what they identify with. Where they think they can go to get their power.
You can view more of Max Dashu's images at her web site and learn more about the Suppressed Histories Archive at http://www.suppressedhistories.net/