Patriarchy (anthropology)

Patriarchy (from Greek: "patria" meaning father and "arché" meaning rule) is the anthropological term used to define the condition where male members of a society tend to predominate in positions of power; with the more powerful the position, the more likely it is that a male will hold that position. The term "patriarchy' is distinct from patrilineality and patrilocality. "Patrilineal" defines societies where the derivation of inheritance (financial or otherwise) originates from the father's line; a society with matrilineal traits such as Judaism, for example, provides that in order to be considered a Jew, a person must be born of a Jewish mother. "Patrilocal" defines a locus of control coming from the father's geographic/cultural community. In a matrilocal society, a woman will live with her father and/or brothers after marriage, and those males will hold a higher influence on the women's offspring to the detriment of the children's father. Most societies are predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal,Verify source|date=December 2007 however "all" societies have been patriarchal.Verify source|date=December 2007Fact|date=August 2008 Britannica claims that there have been many attempts to disprove this but that the consensus is that it is unsupported by evidence; [Britannica 2007.] Verify credibility|date=August 2008 instead a peer reviewed anthropological article, reviewing current literature on the subject, says that drawing from anthropological studies, it can now be concluded that "patriarchy is not a universal feature of human societies." [Alice H. Eagly and Wendy Wood (2002) p.711]

Human societies can be described in anthropology in terms of being patriarchal, matriarchal or equiarchal (where gender is unrelated to attainment) systems. Most known societies have been defined as patriarchal by some researcherFact|date=August 2008, varying in the degree that the society allows variance from the norm.

Despite the paucity of evidence for the existence of matriarchal societies and the worldwide preponderance of patriarchal onesFact|date=August 2008, anthropologists have documented cases of egalitarianism, such as in Vanatinai. [* [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023108/0231081200.HTM Lepowsky, Maria. 1993. "Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society." New York: Columbia University Press.] ] [Ortner, Sherry. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Bonston: Beacon, 1996.] [Du, Shanshan. Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality Among the Lahu of Southwest China. Columbia UP, 2002.] Such cases disprove the claim that patriarchy is universal. Furthermore, the use of discreet, dichotomous categories (such as patriarchy and matriarchy) is in decline among anthropologists today since these categories are incompatible with the overlapping and sometimes contradictory gender ideologies and gendered practices existing in many societies. [Ortner, Sherry. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1996.]

Still, the majority of the higher economic, political, industrial, financial, religious, and social positions of the world today are held by men. There are no known exceptions to this rule recognized by the American Anthropological Association. Anthropologist Donald Brown has claimed patriarchy to be a "human universal" (Brown 1991, p. 137), which includes characteristics such as age gradation, personal hygiene, aesthetics, food sharing, rape, and other sociological aspects, claiming that patriarchy is innate to the human condition.

All advanced industrial societies are variations of patriarchy.Fact|date=August 2008 In countries such as Saudi Arabia, patriarchy is distinctly visible, and in the European nations patriarchy remains the underlying social structureFact|date=August 2008 in spite of some changes creating wider possibilities for both women and men. In both cultures, men still dominate public life.Fact|date=August 2008 In Marxist cultures, there has also been an attempt to create an impression of egalitarian organizations based on gender equality.

In China, for example, the National People's Congress consists of an equal number of men and women. There are, however, no women within the ruling Politburo of the Communist Party of China. Prior to its dissolution, the Soviet Union's Congress of People's Deputies likewise consisted, by law, of equal numbers of men and women. However, the successor Russian Duma, which unlike the predecessor Congress actually has power and is not a rubber-stamp organization, presently has only 35 woman deputies among the 450 members. [http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/Forums/Main/posts/1376.html]

History

According to English language professor Robert M. Strozier, historical research has not yet found an "initiating event" of the origin of patriarchy.Strozier, Robert M. (2002) " [http://books.google.com/books?id=fuDdNSLXPI8C Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: : Historical Constructions of Subject and Self] " p.46] Strozier in his work notes the logical consequence of such missing.Verify source|date=December 2007

Several researchers outside the field of anthropology have accepted the absence of matriarchy within history.Fact|date=December 2007 However, others outside anthropology have speculated, contra anthropological consensus,Fact|date=December 2007 that six thousand years ago (4000 B.C.E.), that the notion of fatherhood was "invented" making possible the "spread" of patriarchy. [SEBASTIAN KRAEMER B.A., M.R.C.P., F.R.C.Psych (1991) " [http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1545-5300.1991.00377.x The Origins of Fatherhood: An Ancient Family Process] " Family Process 30 (4), 377–392. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1991.00377.x] [Wilhelm Reich [1936] "The Sexual Revolution"] Alice H. Eagly and Wendy Wood (1999) [http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/facets/eagly&wood.htm The Origins of Sex Differences in Human Behavior: Evolved Dispositions Versus Social Roles] American Psychologist, v54 n6 p408-23 Jun 1999] [ [http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=11879852 Ehrenberg, 1989] ; Harris, M. (1993) "The Evolution of Human Gender Hierarchies"; Leibowitz, 1983; Lerner, 1986; Sanday, 1981] FeministFact|date=December 2007 writers have also supported the analysis of ancient societies as patriarchal.

Already in 3100 B.C.E. of Ancient Near East, some scholars see evidence of sexual domination on women, a restriction on their reproductive capacity, and their exclusion from "the process of representing the construction of history". With the appearance of the Hebrew cult, there is also "the exclusion of woman from the God-humanity covenant". [Lerner, Gerda (1986) " [http://books.google.com/books?&id=Zc318kI-TPMC The Creation of Patriarchy] " 8-11]

Neo-Marxist scholars have argued that the global emergence of patriarchy as a seemingly hegemonic pattern of social organization is a function of the capitalist mode of production [ Leacock, Eleanor. Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981.] , while structuralists have attributed it to a universal tendency for societies to organize themselves around a binary of nature/culture that is mirrored in an opposition between female and male, the former being subjugated to the latter as nature is thought to be subjugated to culture. [Ortner, Sherry. Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? In M Rosaldo and L Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974, pp.67-87.] However, this structuralist position has been revised [Ortner, Sherry. So, Is Female to Male As Nature is to Culture. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1996, pp.173-180.] , as evidence against the universality of gender inequality has surfaced. [ [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023108/0231081200.HTM Lepowsky, Maria. 1993. "Fruit of the Motherland: Gender in an Egalitarian Society." New York: Columbia University Press.] ] [Ortner, Sherry. Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Bonston: Beacon, 1996.] [Du, Shanshan. Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs: Gender Unity and Gender Equality Among the Lahu of Southwest China. Columbia UP, 2002.]

The worldwide preponderance of patriarchyFact|date=August 2008 is also often linked, among the others mentioned above, with the Kurgan hypothesis, by now widely accepted among scholars. At present, however, the historical reconstruction of this phenomenon remains contested among scholars.Fact|date=December 2007

Definition

Anthropological studies now defines patriarchy as a multidimensional condition of power/status. Whyte's 1978 comprehensive study examined 52 indicators of patriarchy, to which corresponded 10 relatively independent dimensions. The ten dimensions are: [Wood and Eagly 2002, p.711-2] [Whyte (1978) "The status of women in preindustrial societies"]
*(lack of) property control by women
*power of women in kinship contexts
*value placed on the lives of women
*value placed on the labor of women
*domestic authority of women
*ritualized female solidarity
*absence of control over women's marital and sexual lives
*absence of ritualized fear of women
*male-female joint participation in warfare, work, and community decision making
*women's indirect influence on decision makers

Appendix

Patriarchies in dispute

This appendix provides one table and one list. The table shows all patriarchal societies that have been "alleged" at one time or another to be matriarchal. The list gives, where available, quotes from the anthropologists who originally studied them (ethnographers). In nearly every case it is clear from what the women and men who studied them report, that the societies were patriarchal not matriarchal, even before changes brought by contact with western culture. What some of the societies "do" typify, however, is matrilinearity or matrilocality, "not" matriarchy, because of clear features of male dominance. This is the evidence that verifies the statements made by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Margaret Mead, Cynthia Eller and Steven Goldberg elsewhere in this article, and has been mainly located using their bibliographies. There are a lot of cultural groups in this appendix. No bias is intended against the more than 1,000 uncontroversiallyFact|date=August 2008 patriarchal cultural groups, nor against the few matrilocal or matrilineal cultural groups not mentioned here.

Table

List

ee also

* Anthropology
* Antifeminism
* Chinese patriarchy
* Gender role
* Homemaker
* Masculinity
* Nature versus nurture
* Pater familias
* Patriarch magazines
* Patriarchs (Bible)
* Sociology of fatherhood

External links

* [http://www.mensstudies.info/RMBP.htm Regional Masculinities Bibliography Project]
* [http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994220 "Cattle ownership makes it a man's world"] New Scientist (1. October 2003): Early female-dominated societies lost their power to men when they started herding cattle, a new study demonstrates
* [http://www.menweb.org/throop/books/goldberg/menrule.html Debate] Between Mark Ridley and Steven Goldberg on the The Inevitability of Patriarchy

References

*Alice H. Eagly and Wendy Wood (2002) " [http://www.psych-shs.duke.edu/faculty/publications/wood.eagly.pdf A Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Behavior of Women and Men: Implications for the Origins of Sex Differences] " [http://66.102.1.104/scholar?&lr=&q=cache:XVRUjmxVJ_wJ:www.psych-shs.duke.edu/faculty/publications/wood.eagly.pdf+] Psychological Bulletin 2002, Vol. 128, No. 5, 699–727
* Brown, Robert. (1991). "Human Universals". Philadelphia: Temple University Press
* Mead, Margaret. (1950). "Male and Female", Penguin, London.