Review: Deconstructing "Matriarchal Myth"

The outlines of the book’s critique will be familiar to any well-read person. Feminists have invented a “golden age,” a utopian narrative fantasizing a time when women were free. Eller calls it “a universalizing story: once things were good, everywhere; now they are bad”—an account based on dualistic thinking and “a reductive notion” of who women and men are. [Eller, 56] (Wait, which is the reductive idea: that women have always been subordinate, and men dominant; or that other models have existed in human society, and that even patriarchal societies show a significant range in the degree of domination?) The simplistic charge of a “golden age” avoids having to look at evidence for a more complex picture.
Feminist historians are not the only targets of this characterization; it has also been leveled at indigenista accounts of European conquest and slavery, for looking back to a culture of reverence for Nature, in which the sacred permeates daily life. Eller makes this connection, comparing “fm’s” to people of color who embrace a positive vision of their “race.” [Eller, 76] (Actually, the primary significance of “blackness, “Raza,” and “Indian-ness” is cultural and political rather than biological.) She finds these identifications “discomfiting” because race has been a tool used against people of color. The oversimplication doesn’t serve her analysis well. Reasonable people will acknowledge that there is much more to the Afrocentric protest against erasure and distortion of African history than theories about “sun people” and “ice people.” The arguments are more usually based on culture and history, addressing the ideological underpinnings of racism.
     The Myth seems to admonish that the issue of identity under oppression should not be engaged directly; to speak of groups with common history comes too close to essentialism. On those terms, it’s hard to see how to stop the dominant groups’ ideology from continuing to define reality. As Chris Brickell comments, “the term ‘essentialism’ has become something of an epithet,” and even a term of abuse. [Brickell, 1998] Most often it is leveled at feminists, whose analysis of historical / situational patterns and behavioral conditioning is equated with biological determinism, no matter how often and explicitly they reject it.
     To hear Eller tell it, matristic historians have fixed on a theory that women’s original power was based on male ignorance of conception, and its overthrow followed men’s discovery that they had a part in generation. This claim has been made, but it’s very much a minority viewpoint. The rest overwhelmingly reject the assumption that archaic peoples were ignorant of the basics of reproduction. The sparse citations that Eller supplies don't come close to proving her contention that this explanation for patriarchal revolution “reigns supreme” over all others. [Eller, 45-46] (A rich irony here is that Bronislaw Malinowski, whose functionalist interpretation of patriarchal takeover myths Eller espouses, himself interpreted the cultural unimportance of paternity among Trobriand Islanders as ignorance of how children were conceived.) [See his Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1950, pp 52-55, 71-2]
    Eller believes that “virtually all feminist reconstructions of matriarchal society” focus on childbirth. She finds it significant that many childless women refer to birth or menstruation as central mysteries of matrix cultures. She deplores this approach as a centerpiece of "essentialism," but the feminist resacralization of women's bodies was drieven by more than a reaction to historic misogyny. The rediscovery of ancient art and surviving cultural traditions celebrating women's embodied power played a crucial part.

For Eller, this approach is a centerpiece of essentialism. [64-74] Apparently there is to be no reclaiming of female experiences which have been so deeply marked by patriarchal definition and control. Eller concedes that it’s reasonable to rehabilitate degraded categories which have been defined as feminine, but objects to continuing to define them as female. In the brave new world of deconstruction, heaps of cultural baggage calling the female “bad” and “inferior” can be disposed of at will. But the positive images associated with “woman” must also be stripped away, in hopes that doing this will somehow make oppressive realities disappear. (It's hard to imagine the world's women going along with this prescription.) Women looking for positive female images in history are just deluding themselves: “inventing” a past.
Eller throws out charges of “biological determinism,” then backs away, qualifies them, and reasserts them again as fact. At one point she says “the myth of matriarchal prehistory could almost be read to say that gender, at least as we know and experience it, is a cultural invention.” But on the next page, she asserts that even though feminist theory is reacting against the idea of biological causes for patriarchy, “yet its basic approach is to accept these biologically determined sex differences” in the guise of “timeless” femininity. Some pages down the line, it's a settled question: “Despite their claims of biological determinism and robust sex difference, feminist matriarchalists recognize the cultural determinants of gender." [63, 72-4]
No perspective on historical patterns enters into this muddled and distorted picture. The vast majority of matrix theorists say that patriarchy emerged out of historical processes, not biological necessity. Turning this problem around the other way, isn’t declaring patriarchy a historical universal a kind of biological determinism? To insist that, amidst all the luxuriant variation in human culture, that egalitarian societies never emerged, seems to be equivalent to positing male domination as an inherent trait.

    Although the book is titled The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, its true subject is anthropological theory. Having rebuked matristic historians for using ethnographic data to buttress their case, Eller proceeds to do just that. She writes that “it makes good sense” for anthropologists to use ethnography to speculate about prehistory. For her the salient point is that “Ethnographic analogies to contemporary groups with lifeways similar to those of prehistoric times ... show little sex egalitarianism and no matriarchy.” A further disproof is “the fact that matrilineal kinship systems are found at all levels of social complexity, not just in groups judged to be most like the social model we conjecture for prehistoric times.” [Eller, 95, 180, 102]
      Eller's covert assumption appears to be that modern foragers or horticulturalists can be taken as representative of some primeval order. This kind of theoretical leap has been rejected by American Indian critics, among others, as giving off more than a whiff of the racist evolutionary ideas that modern anthropologists find so embarrassing. Because the foraging peoples’ technology / economy has not changed dramatically does not mean that their social organization remained static over the millennia. They live within history, like the rest of humanity.
      Given the paucity of material evidence, how would we know if these peoples’ social structure had changed? The primary source would be their own oral histories. But these have been primarily available through anthropological mediators, due to the way information is organized in “Western” institutions. They are presented as ethnography, not as history. There has been a strong tendency to analyze the oral histories as mechanisms of societal function, rather than on their own terms. In recent decades, this type of analysis has come under heavy fire in anthropology itself.
      But it is this functionalist approach that Eller takes as she turns to the widespread legends that female power was overthrown by men who took over the primary rituals, lodges, and sacred objects. Such traditions have been recorded among Australian and Melanesian peoples, the Dogon and Mende in west Africa and the Kikuyu in the east, peoples of the northern Amazon and Tierra del Fuego, among others. [The literature on legends of masculine overthrow of female power is vast, but examples include Deborah Gewertz, 1988, which has many examples from Melanesia; Griault, 1974, for the Dogon; Yolanda and Robert Murphy, 1974, for Brazil; and Berndt, 1952, for Australia.] Eller upholds Malinowski’s functionalist thesis of “charter myths,” which interprets these legends as a means of maintaining male dominance and defining morality. [176]
     But this would be no less true if these traditions do contain a memory of actual shifts in social organization. In fact, they would be more necessary. If male dominance is universal and existed from the beginning, what need is there to justify it in “charter myths”? Eller’s suggestion that they relieve social tensions falls flat. If anything, they emphasize them. Reenactment of the takeover story involves an element of enforcement, shown by her example of men disguised as demons terrorizing nonconformist women by tearing through their property and even beating or stabbing them. Eller thinks these myths function to reconcile women to their status through a fantasy of former power, but the threat of violence and the display of male authority seem to be much more convincing reasons. [175-177]
    Eller fails to consider a possible relationship between these legends of male seizure of ritual power and the widespread ceremonies in which men imitate birth and menstruation, or wear fake breasts and other female regalia. [98] She also disregards historical patterns of men taking over spheres originally presided over by priestesses. We can roughly track the elimination of priestesses from public authority in Mesopotamia, China, and Europe. Some will argue that references to Apollo’s priests taking control of the female oracles in Greece and Anatolia are more mythical than historical. Yet the written record also reflects an escalating encroachment of male priests on female turf, even in later periods. For example, a Greek inscription of the 4th century BCE shows the high priestess of Eleusis fighting in court to stop the male priest from usurping her traditional privileges. [Zaidman, 1992, 372]
     Nor are such accounts limited to ritual offices. Columbia River legends of Tsagaglalal speak of a time when female chieftainship ended. The Aztecs remembered a challenge thrown out to the male chiefs by the female warrior Quilaztli. [See Nuttal, 1901] Historical documentation proves that such female leaders existed in many American Indian societies. [Gunn Allen, passim] In Angola, the BaChokwe say that the female ruler Ruwej was overthrown by her brothers. (Another version says that Ruwej married a BaLuba chief who took over her political functions and imposed patrilineal descent.) To preserve their matrilineal ways, BaChokwe oral history says that they split off from the BaLunda and migrated south to Angola. Among the BaLunda themselves, the name Ruwej remained as one of the titles of female officers in court councils. The names of other court offices—Mwad Mwish, First Female Pillar, and Mwad Chilab, First Courageous Woman—indicate that they originally belonged to women. [Crine-Mavar, 1974] The high Aztec office of Cihuacoatl (Serpent Woman, perhaps not coincidentally one of Quilaztli’s titles) carries similar implications: at the time of the Spanish conquest, only men held this title.
     The Myth insists that all known human societies have valued men over women, and points to anthropological studies which say that matrilineages are just as male-dominated as patrilineal societies. (Some are, but it’s the others we are concerned with here.) Sherry Ortner is cited for her claim that lower female status is “one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact.” If so, Ortner's highly theoretical paper does not demonstrate it; she assumes it as a given, offering only two shallow paragraphs on the Chinese and the Crow Indians (Absaroke) as examples. [Ortner, 1974, 67-87] She has since changed her position. [Sanday, personal communication, Sept, 2003]
     Anthropologist Barbara Joans has observed that the subject of “matriarchy” was long considered “a closed chapter” in her field, until feminists like Sally Slocum (author of “Woman the Gatherer”) opened it up. Joans thinks it likely that “some matriarchal systems” have existed. She points to the few known examples of polyandrous societies: “Had not several of them survived into the 20th century we would probably be arguing the improbability of their existence.” It would have been declared a myth “because it contradicts so much current anthropological data.” (And ideology.) [Joans, "Matriarchy: Another View," unpublished paper c. 1978]
   Eller has a basis for saying that matrilineage alone doesn't guarantee an absence of patriarchal customs. The problem with her analysis is that it’s based on an either-or proposition, with no perspective on historical shifts to patrilineage and patriarchal law. For example, Elamite inscriptions show matrilineal descent was once observed in western Iran, as it also was in ancient Korea, or according to Greek writers, in parts of western Asia Minor. These matrilineages have all been supplanted by patrilineal systems, in a common, recurring pattern. Countless folk traditions refer to an ancient era of mother-right. The oldest recorded epic of West Africa, Duga, proclaims: “Descendance from the woman, descendance from the woman has ended...” But there seem to be few examples of patrilineal systems shifting to matrilineal reckoning; the traffic is in the other direction.

In the early ‘60s, Kathleen Gough documented signs of shifts away from matrilineal descent reckoning under heavy colonial pressure. [Gough, 1962] Today indigenous matrilineages face even more intense pressures as they battle for survival on all fronts. Kathleen Sheldon of UCLA points to Vail and White's study of women's songs in Malawi: "For Tumbuka women the late nineteenth century was marked by a loss of power resulting from a shift away from matrilineal descent patterns, an issue ignored in the conventional regional histories of Ngoni raids and population migration." ["Periodization in AFrican History," H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU, 11/22/00; Leroy Vail and Landeg White, "The Possession of the Dispossessed: Songs as History among Tumbuka Women, in Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History, ed. Vail and White, 231-277 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991]

What is completely missing from Eller's book is any discussion of matrilineal/local societies with high female status, , such as the Khasi (NE India), Musuo (SW China), Tuareg (Sahara), Keres (New Mexico), Minangkabau (Sumatra), Haudenosaunee (New York/Ontario), Amahuaca (E Peru), Seri (NW Mexico), Vanatinai (Pacifica). Nor are bilateral societies with significant female spheres of power discussed. Also missing is any historical perspective—whether written, oral or archaeological—on female spheres of power in the Two Thirds World. The Myth considers indigenous women only through the lens of Western ethnography.