jane
Well-Known Member
DuncheeKnifed said:
I was going to steer clear of this thread for the sake of my nerves, but now I just have to step in. Yes, there certainly would be archaeologists and evolutionary biologists who would subscribe to evolutionary determinism to explain gender roles, but most of us living in the 21st century would not.
Unfortunately, a lot of museums have failed to update their exhibits (and not just the small museums, either), and academic archaeologists are probably last in the race to start re-examining the way we interpret and communicate information. Anthropologists would set someone straight on the matter. Or any anthropologist who'd read anything written in the last 15 years would, anyway. So you're totally right. I think it's irresponsible of any museum or venue for public display about the past to misrepresent it in such a backward way. I hope they weren't lying to you about updating the exhibit, but actually, they probably weren't. The archaeologists I've met who work in that part of the world tend to be pretty interested in looking for ways to redress the completely fucked up way that anthropology itself helped the Empire conquer and kill so many Aborigines in the first place.
There's a well-known anecdote (to archaeology geeks) involving a professor of palaeoanthropology teaching a class of students about hunter-gatherers. Many of the female students were disappointed to hear that females may have been more likely to gather, and hunting may have been done by men. They wanted there to be evidence that women were the hunters, and that men stayed home and swept the floors. The gist of it is that they valued hunting more, not because it provided more nourishment (because, probably, the bulk of most early prehistoric diets, and indeed a lot of early historic ones, was made up of plant foods), but because it was male. And the whole image of prehistory remains -- at a fundamental level -- based on a 20th-century notion of a nuclear family. It's not that men were hunters, and therefore in a better position to be the powerful in society, it's that hunting is seen as masculine and the masculine is seen as more valuable in the present, and is projected onto the past as such, when we don't actually know one way or the other.
In reality, people would have been better able to rely on plant foods than on animals you have to track and chase -- you can guarantee that you'll come home with food when you go out to gather, but not when you go out to hunt. And anyway, they probably shared a lot of the tasks. Plus, hunting and gathering wasn't all they did. Some have postulated that in order to feed a small community of hunter-gatherers, it required, in some areas, a work output of about 20 hours per week. The rest of the time they hung out and posted on the prehistoric internet. On Knapped, the prehistoric version of Thumped. So life was NOT all about work, and people would not have been solely defined nor valued based on the work that they did -- they were far more complex than that. It doesn't mean that roles might not have been gendered, but there may have been more than two genders, and other factors would have been involved, and we don't know what status divisions were like. And we never, ever, ever will.
And in Ireland, the earliest settlers had no big game to hunt, just little weaselly creatures. They probably ate a lot of fish, too, but also lots of plants. So if people want to hang onto the Man The Hunter myth in IReland to prop up male dominance, they'll be hanging onto Man The Pretty Damn Useless At Bringing Home Anything Remotely Resembling Bacon. But that's not the point.
But regardless of how ancient cultures lived, we live in the present, and the way we live is not a direct result of how people lived 10,000 years ago. There are influences from the past, yes, but those influences are not handed down undistilled. They are a combination of actual practices, and how those practices have been interpreted along the way.
Not being a prehistorian myself, I can't say a whole lot on the issue, except that you are right: the rigid gender roles prescribed by modern museums and academics are backward and on their way out (and if you want to see some really fucked up shit, look at children's books on the subject, which show almost all adult males, and no children or women doing anything that would be considered by the writers to be a 'contribution').
Any time someone brings up prehistoric cultures as support for an argument that men are somehow naturally dominant or that there is evidence for it in deepest human antiquity, I want to scream my head off until my tits fall off.
Actually, I do have a lot to say on the issue. I just think it's important to nip any evolutionary rubbish in the bud before it gets used to support an argument. Yes, there are biological differences between women and men (I even saw a mickey once in a fillum), but that can neither explain nor justify the inequalities in society. We are biologically programmed to shit in a squatting position on the ground, but it doesn't mean toilets suddenly have to become passé. The relationship between the biological and the cultural and political is complex, indirect, and constantly changing.
Dunno if I'm even making sense now. I'm off to bed.
