Ungendering Civilization

Ungendering Civilization

A pioneering and provocative collection, firmly anchored by the editor’s explanation of the conceptual framework. It shows that we cannot assume the cross-cultural event that women lose status with the “rise” of civilization, a notion that has tacitly driven much gender archaeology. By drawing our attention to all the ways in which and the reasons why we cannot essentialize either “the women” or “the gender system,” the volume forces a complete re-thinking of the issue of gender in/of “civilization”. A critical contribution to a theoretically informed exploration of past human social life. (Margaret W. Conkey, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley)

Ungendering Civilization offers a much needed scrutiny of the role of women in the evolution of states, critically addressing traditional views of male and female roles. Each chapter examines a distinct body of archaeological data, from Predynastic Egypt and Minoan Crete, to ancient Zimbabwe and the Maya, to determine what can justifiably be argued from the evidence. The collection also shows that cultural evolutionism is not benign; it sustains political views about gender, race, and political economy that are not supported by research. The example of gender demonstrates how archaeologists, many of whom would probably characterize themselves as feminists, inadvertently support a sexist view of the world by labeling poorlytested assumptions as science. K. Anne Pyburn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She is the director of the Chau Hiix Project, which investigates the political economy of an ancient Maya community, and the MATRIX Project, http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/.

Ungendering Civilization

Edited by K. Anne Pyburn

First published 2004 in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London, EC4P 4EE

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 selection and editorial matter, K. Anne Pyburn; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-203-50118-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-57000-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–26057–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–26058–2 (pbk)

For Richard R.Wilk

Contents

1

2

List of contributors Preface

ix xi

Introduction: Rethinking complex society K. ANNE PYBURN

1

Gendered states: Gender and agency in economic models of Great Zimbabwe TRACY LUEDKE

47

The use and abuse of ethnographic analogies in interpretations of gender systems at Cahokia LAURA PATE

71

3

The “marauding pagan warrior” woman LENA MORTENSEN

4

Tracing women in early Sumer LAYLA AL-ZUBAIDI

5

Leaders, healers, laborers, and lovers: Reinterpreting women’s roles in Moche society CRISTINA ALCALDE

136

The benefits of an archaeology of gender for predynastic Egypt GABRIEL D. WROBEL

156

6

94

117

viii

7

Contents

All the Harappan men are naked, but the women are wearing jewelry CANDICE MARIE LOWE

179

8

Oh my goddess: A meditation on Minoan civilization SEAN P. DOUGHERTY

196

9

Ungendering the Maya K. ANNE PYBURN

216

Index

234

Contributors

Cristina Alcalde received her PhD in Anthropology in 2003 from Indiana University. She also has an MA in Latin American Studies. Her dissertation fieldwork focused on the everyday experiences and forms of resistance of poor women in abusive relationships in Lima, Peru. Layla Al-Zubaidi studied Cultural Anthropology, Archaeology and Islam Studies at the Free University, Berlin in Germany, and at Indiana University, Bloomington in the United States. She worked in archeological excavations in Europe and the Middle East and wrote her MA thesis on cultural tourism at the UNESCO World Heritage Site, Palmyra, Syria. She is currently based in Ramallah, Palestinian Territories, where she holds a position in a German Green Party political foundation, researching sustainable development, women’s rights, and freedom of expression Sean P. Dougherty has an MA in Classical Studies from Indiana University and is currently pursuing a PhD in physical anthropology at that institution. He has done field research in Belize and Egypt; his doctoral research concerns patterns of trauma among a nineteenth-century pauper cemetery population in Milwaukee, WI. Candice Marie Lowe is a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, and a doctoral candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Indiana University. She has a background in feminist theory and Central Asian Studies, particularly in the client states of the former Soviet Union. In her dissertation, “Speaking Our Name: Multiculturalism and the Struggle for National Belonging Among Afro-Creoles in Mauritius,” she explores her interests in African diaspora studies, postcolonial nationalism, multiculturalism, gender, music, and social protest formations.

x

Contributors

Tracy Luedke is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University. Her dissertation concerns healing in central Mozambique. Lena Mortensen is the Assistant Director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies and a PhD candidate in anthropology at Indiana University. She specializes in the social context of archaeology with particular interests in heritage tourism and Central America. She has several publications based on her research on the interrelations between nationalism, politics, tourism, and science in the daily operations of the Copan archaeological park in Honduras. Laura Pate is a Prehistory Research Fellow at the Glenn Black Laboratory of Indiana University. Her research interests include mortuary practices and ceramic analysis of the native American cultures of the midwestern United States. She is pursuing a PhD in anthropology at Indiana University. K. Anne Pyburn is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She writes about archaeology and ethics, gender, and the Maya. She is principle investigator of the Chau Hiix Project (Belize) and director of the MATRIX Project. http://www.indiana.edu/~arch/saa/matrix/ homepage.html. Gabriel D. Wrobel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Mississippi where he specializes in bioarchaeology and mortuary practices. He has done fieldwork in Egypt and Belize.

Preface

This book began as a seminar at Indiana University. I had an idea that we might learn something if we looked at several cultures at the point in their history when evidence of status distinctions is first recognizable in their material record. I expected that we would find little that was concrete, as indeed turned out to be the case, and that what evidence we found would show clearly that women constituted a subordinate class. Much to my surprise, we did not find clear support for this. What we did find was that most archaeologists expect to find it, and without testing the premise, simply assume that it is supported when they interpret their data. As the participants worked through the literature on gender in early states, another issue became clear. Assumptions about gender and the division of labor in ancient cultures provide an excellent example of how the typological reasoning of cultural evolutionary explanations predetermines and drastically limits what we can know about the past. So while this book addresses the issue of the role of women in the evolution of states, we also question the fundamental assumption that there is much usefulness in teleological generalizations. Discounting assumptions about the division of labor causes the typology of cultural evolutionism to unravel. On the other hand, inspecting the intellectual history of such categories as race, gender, and chiefdom is a good empirical exercise which reveals the political usefulness that accounts for their never-ending popularity among western academics. Power comes not from being at the apex of the hierarchy of types, but from the ability to name and identify the types. A typology of people, whether organizational or biological, limits scholarly awareness of variation; in fact it limits our ability to see that the categories may actually be wrong. On the other hand, when these categories are reified in the context of political power, whether in an academic department or in a colonial plantation, human possibility is molded and constrained. This book addresses an intellectual division among archaeologists interested in societies with monumental architecture and written histories. On the one side are those who equate evolutionary models of cultural change with empirical science. They hold that ignoring the impact of natural selection on social structure or the biological basis of gender differences is a

xii

Preface

refusal to face facts and a turn toward intellectual nihilism. The alleged alternative view, that there are no facts and no knowable universe, is not really espoused by any archaeologists I know. However, more and more archaeologists have started to think about the past without relying on the traditional typologies, a situation which cultural evolutionists often consider a failure to evaluate data and the dishonest use of vague and meaningless jargon. This is not the case. Dropping the conventional vocabulary of cultural evolutionism results in confusion not because it discounts what we know about the past, but because it reveals how much we do not know. Testing the assumptions that underlie cultural typologies is where the real empirical work begins. Contrary to what many of my colleagues claim, adopting a more modest view of what we know and what can be known in not an attack on science, but an attempt to do better science, or, in the case of archaeology, an attempt to do something closer to science. And identifying and addressing the political context that shapes and influences our questions about the past and determines which data we accept as confirmation, is no less empirical than identifying political processes in the past. In fact, the present provides more data to guide us. So the division is between archaeologists taking a cultural evolutionary path and those who have begun to take a different direction that cultural evolutionists see as useless and unintelligible. This book attempts to make the change of direction more intelligible, by taking cultural evolutionism apart with its own tools. While it is true that some postmodern archaeologists have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, our goal in this book is to make clear what a very great deal of bathwater is drowning a very small baby. Many readers will be thinking that cultural evolutionism is dead and not at all a part of their own research or reasoning about the past, which is exactly what I thought when I began the odyssey of this book. The idea of an evolutionary progression from simple to complex, from religion to science, from instinct to reasoning, from matriarchy to patriarchy, is very old in western culture, and comprises the fundamental assumptions we share about the way the world works. Thinking without this implicit model is extremely difficult, as evidenced by the very many papers on early states that begin with a critique of cultural evolutionary approaches and then proceed to use them (with caveats, of course). And archaeologists invariably cast their research findings in evolutionary terms when speaking with the public. Most archaeologists regard cultural evolutionism as a benign oversimplification that is useful for organizing the material to be learned in introductory courses or speaking to newspaper reporters and television executives. The goal of this book is to demonstrate empirically that cultural evolutionism is not benign, that there are patterns to its assumptions and simplifications that substantiate political views about gender, and race, and political economy that are not really supported by archaeological research.

Preface

xiii

Gender provides the example of how archaeologists, many of whom characterize themselves as feminists, inadvertently support a sexist view of the world by labeling poorly tested assumptions as science. There is a similar disconnect between archaeologists’ reconstructions of the rise of complex society and their political views on race and class in the modern world. Among the many readers of all or part of this work who gave valuable criticism and encouraging ideas are Mitch Allen, Kelly Askew, Gracia Clark, Margaret Conkey, Elisabeth Lloyd, Sarah Nelson, Chris Peebles, Robert Schmidt, April Sievert, Richard Wilk, Alison Wylie, and numerous seminar students who tested its usefulness as a text. Gender has become an important focus of scholarly research, no longer denigrated as something disgruntled women were politically motivated to tackle. The enormous quantity of literature generated in the last ten years testifies to the significance of this research for the archaeology of the twenty-first century. I hope authors whose work has been neglected or who see errors in our logic or fault our coverage of archaeological cultures will consider contributing to a second volume. K. Anne Pyburn June 2003 Indiana University

Introduction

Rethinking complex society K. Anne Pyburn

Professor Wolf at the door The ideas of a great many people are worked into the argument presented here, but I owe the greatest debt to Eric Wolf, who battled the hydra of cultural essentialism so effectively in Europe and the People Without History. In this work, Wolf first shows how western ideas about cultural purity and the discreteness of tradition were pollinated and then blossomed within the intellectual history of the discipline of anthropology. He then shows how the application of this model of isolates allowed ethnographers to see crosscultural similarities as the result of human nature rather than the result of contacts and interrelations. The result was a naive, inaccurate, and often inherently racist construction of cultural difference, promoted inadvertently by many who strove mightily to be open-minded through an unexamined belief in cultural relativism. Wolf ’s critique of anthropological constructions of culture works perfectly as a critique of anthropological constructions of gender. Like other aspects of culture that have a connection to human biology such as kinship systems or standards of physical beauty, gender relations are often treated as existing a priori outside culture and essentially immutable, just as simple societies unadulterated by western values of progress and consumption are seen to exist outside of history. From this perspective cultural expression of biological characteristics varies along an evolutionary continuum from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, but these differences are only seen to affect the terms and the details of performance. The underlying biological basis for kinship, beauty, or gender ensures that these characteristics are an important part of culture everywhere, and play virtually the same role in cultural evolution. Only the pathologies of modern civilization are said to deny the primacy of the nuclear family or the selective advantages of the division of labor. Within each culture it is the ethnographer’s job to identify timeless standards of beauty derived from phenotypic characteristics, systematic kin systems related to genetic relationships, and a gender-based division of labor necessitated by reproduction.

2

K. Anne Pyburn

It is not coincidental that aspects of culture most often associated with women are also the characteristics which imbue it with impermeability and timelessness. Women are everywhere today both empowered and controlled by biology (expressed culturally as beauty, kinship, reproduction, and the division of labor) in ways that men are not. Celebrities, media figures, and anthropologists tell us that “beauty is power,” and beauty that is culturally altered and not “natural” is stigmatized. The bond between mother and child is also considered biological and therefore inalienable, as shown by the recent examples of children forcibly returned to birth mothers after years with foster families. And journalists and scholars alike continue to see the care of children and “the home” as essentially female; stories that violate assumptions about the division of labor continue to provide the exceptions that prove the rule. The naturalized link between beauty, child-rearing, “private space,” and womanhood is sacred to western culture, and affects all the cultures participating in the modern world system. Needless to say these are folk models, but they continue to inform not only public opinion, but also scholarly research in a number of fields. Despite the fact that a number of feminist investigations have disproved the reality of such proscriptions in the present day and the recent past, a surprising number of intellectuals, including a number of feminist scholars themselves, continue to believe that the division of labor, which either subordinates women or at least separates the economic, social, and political spheres of women and men, is an historical if not a biological fact. Ultimately, the belief that all early civilizations independently developed the same division of labor has been an unexamined support for essentialist arguments about the role of women and men in the rise and functioning of the modern world (Tringham 1991). I argue that the cross-cultural parallels found in the status and treatment of women are more the result of history than of human nature or human biology. Ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological data with bearing on gender systems have come almost entirely from cultures with historically interconnected political economies. Furthermore, data considered relevant because they come from periods of early contact with “pristine” cultures, were collected either by explorers who were members of European patriarchies, or by ethnographers who were unconcerned about the bias of their own assumptions about gender. In the few cases where archaeological data are available from early nonwestern civilizations, such as the Maya or the Inca, investigation has not been aimed at questioning the universality of European gender distinctions, but at identifying the local variant. Whatever gender data are identified are construed in terms of the pre-existing essentialized model; since archaeological data are invariably sketchy for early periods, such constructions are usually seamless. In the nineteenth century, the unrestrained arguments of diffusionism eventually ran afoul of Galton’s problem, i.e. the problem of common origins and how historical links interfere with the even spread of cultural traits or

Rethinking complex society

3

assumptions about independent invention. As a result, over the past hundred years, both archaeological and ethnographic investigations have invalidated the age-area hypothesis and similarly simplistic explanations for cultural transmission, evolution, and change. Nevertheless, a trace of this perspective remains, especially in comparative investigations that look for widespread patterns in cross-cultural data sets. This problem has been addressed but not solved in the Human Relations Area Files (Murdock 1983), where the quantity of the data is expected to override investigative error and recording bias. But gender bias in the accounts of early explorers or the studies underlying the HRAF is unlikely to have been individualized or random; in fact there is a great deal of evidence that gender bias has been extremely systematic in western culture for many generations. The probability that a gendered perspective might create similar patterns in a wide variety of contexts seems extremely high. The observed patterns result not only from the assumptions of observers, but also from the patterns of exploitation employed, perhaps one might say “engendered,” during the rise of the modern world system. When Lévi-Strauss (1969) discovered that women are to nature as men are to culture, he meant to expose the cultural universals; instead he simply articulated European beliefs universally attributed to, imposed onto, and established within cultures studied, and exploited, by colonial powers. Gender relations, and scholarly analyses of gender relations, have played a very special part in the history of the world system and the rise of colonial powers [Engels (1884), Gunder-Frank (1967), Marx (1965), Wallerstein (1974)], and the history of social science and anthropology in particular is deeply embedded in the larger history of colonialism (Said 1980, Snead 1999). In particular, capitalism and capitalist projects make use of essentialized categories of people (not only genders, but also ethnic groups and economic classes or social statuses) in order to exploit local groups for profit. Any number of researchers have discussed this process; the point to be made here is that in spite of recognition of the historical patterns, feminist scholars have not entirely grasped the implications for understanding the history of women. Social anthropologists have begun to use new eyes to look at the present and the recent past (Leacock 1981), but consideration of early periods of human history remains the provenance of archaeologists, whose ideas about the origin of the modern division of labor and its role in early civilizations continue to be largely unexamined. Modern feminist writing has begun to invest intellectual energy into redefining the nature and significance of the division of labor in early cultures, without ever unequivocally demonstrating its existence. Ultimately it will be necessary to rethink many of the ethnographic models invented and given universality by inadvertently biased scholars, such as patriarchy and its non-existent parallel matriarchy, but also partriliny and matriliny and similar constructions that were embedded in an unexamined

4

K. Anne Pyburn

belief in the primordial basis of the division of labor. This project is beyond my scope here, beyond questioning of the application of such models to particular ancient cases. Feminist ethnographers have begun this work, but they are hampered by the reticence of archaeologists to attempt an unbiased observation of the only places and periods not affected by the European capitalist world system. This is the aim of this book, to start excavation of archaeological reconstructions of the division of labor in early civilized societies to begin to remove the layers of assumption that overlie the data. In some cases the removal of these layers reveals historical connections between ostensibly independent groups. In other cases, data are hopelessly mired in observer bias, so that no conclusions are possible. But there are occasional glimpses of early class-based societies that look nothing like what Engels expected. Such examples are few and likely to be hotly contested, but this is a revelation that is simultaneously a revolution.

Riding the second wave Ironically, this book about the history of women makes little attempt to summarize the history of gender studies in archaeology. The explosion of publications following immediately on Gero’s (1983) and Conkey’s work first with Spector (Conkey and Spector 1984) and then with Gero (Gero and Conkey 1991) has changed the discipline forever, but not through a single leap or a uniform movement. Summaries of contributions and trends have been provided at intervals along the way by Nelson (1997), Claassen (1997), Conkey and Gero (1991), Gustafsen and Trevalyan (2002), Bruhns and Stothert (1999), Gilchrist (1999), Hayes-Gilpin and Whitley (1998), Meskell (1995) and Wylie et al. (1994), among others. To a certain extent these developments are part of a larger change in the academy resulting from the rise of feminism as an intellectual discourse (cf. Farnham 1987, MacKinnon 1987, Schiebinger 1993, Lloyd 1995, Merchant 1980) and in anthropology in particular (Butler 1993, 1999, Haraway 1991, Harding 1986, Moore 1989, Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974, Strathern 1988, Weiner 1976, and other works). At this point a very long book would be needed to provide a comprehensive discussion of the contributions and changes resulting from gender analyses in archaeology, and no simple generalization can do justice to the breadth of the field. Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile to position the present work within the current, since approaches are now so diverse that a contribution to one may seem stagnant in another. It is probably fair to say that the river of second wave feminism (Gilchrist 1999) flowing from the processualist perspective has slowed to a rivulet. Fewer archaeologists are explicitly interested in locating female artifacts or simply adding women to a predetermined set of standardized roles. Alternative gender categories are frequently mentioned and gendering artifacts is usually seen to require more

Rethinking complex society

5

than one line of evidence. The nuanced analysis inspired by considerations of gender which focused scholarly interest on agency and intersubjectivity has led some archaeologists to go beyond gender to consider issues of sexuality and the body (Bevan 2001, Joyce 2000, Meskell 1999, Schmidt and Voss 2000), and strategies of power and identity (Gilchrist 1999, Hurst-Thomas 2000, Kehoe 1998, Schmidt and Patterson 1995, Watkins 2000). These approaches offer new ways of seeing into the past and new ways of interpreting data outside the materialist perspective of processualism. Such reflexive analyses of the political and social context of archaeological scholarship have undermined many of the basic assumptions of the New Archaeology. Nevertheless, current models of civilization, complex society, and early states still contain implicit assumptions about the universality of the nuclear family, male dominance, and gendered labor divided by public and private worlds. Scholars focusing on the development of political economy consider much postmodern discourse concerning the social context of research to be unscientific. In fact many proponents of cultural evolutionism have come to regard their stance as stemming the tide of nihilistic relativism and pseudoscience. Feminist discourse beyond the second wave and phenomenological arguments are regarded as attacks on science. The result of this divide has been that postprocessualists have failed to convey that the salient critique is not of science, but of poor science (Wylie 1996, 1997). Aged methodologies and standard interpretations have become enshrined in the field as empirical when they are nothing of the kind. Assumptions about human behavior and the role of natural selection in driving cultural change have become resistant to argument to the extent that contradictory data sets are used to support the same explanation, and research strategies that have been clearly shown to be ineffective continue to be replicated. As will be discussed below, these purportedly empirical studies invariably support the status quo, by pushing its origins into the distant past. Sexism, racism, poverty, inequality, and exploitation take on an inescapable quality when linked to very early points of origin, and these links are easy to forge when they are implicit in the research design before the research is done. On the other hand, archaeologists working on abstruse theoretical constructions with no overt applicability to policy or public discourse are also failing their discipline. Scientific analysis of origins, tradition, militarism, sustainability, and collapse are powerful tropes in the modern world system. The identification of such factors in the past of humanity or of any particular subset of humanity has the potential to impact the life chances of members. Can we ethically walk away from engagement with public awareness of human possibility? The intent of this book is to engage with assumptions about gender that underlie research on ancient civilizations. To do this it is necessary to engage

6

K. Anne Pyburn

with models of reality that most postprocessual scholars would rather simply leave behind. But the truth is that by avoiding the argument we have not abolished the false assumptions and in fact there is a resurgence of essentialist rhetoric in the wake of this abdication. In many circles such terms as civilization, states, collapse, and complex society are passé and refer to conceptions that are not so much unsupportable as uninteresting. But it is the argument of this book that evolutionary models are unsupportable in their own terms: they do not meet the standards of evidence that a positivistic stance requires. It is our belief that in order to forge new models and make new discoveries about the past, it will be necessary to take apart the old categories and arguments of cultural evolutionism. Deprived of the model all European and American children learn to think with, we may at last begin to glimpse the worlds of the past. This is, after all, the task Conkey and Gero identified as fundamental to the next wave. “Feminist scholarship in archaeology, demanding fundamental alterations in basic assumptions, first requires a painstaking retooling of definitions, data sets, textual sources, and functional assignments” (1991:7).

Women as “people without history” Wolf (1982) does not address gender directly, although he discusses how relations between men and women were affected by the economic changes encouraged and spread by European capitalism. When Wolf does discuss changes in the division of labor, his treatment is particularly instructive. For example, in discussing the economic relations that developed between Portuguese traders and the people of the Kongo (pp. 207–231), Wolf explains that Kongolese organization was matrilineal and a system of bridewealth and gifts initiated by royal lineages and redistributed to lower ranking lineages was the economic backbone of lineage power. He argues that participation in the slave trade with the Portuguese fundamentally changed this system. This new source of revenue made wealth and status objects available directly to lower ranking lineages, allowing them to compete for power with higher ranking groups and undermining the power held by ranked matrilineages. Wolf argues that matrilineality gave way to patrilineal clusters because participation in the slave trade required more manpower for slave hunting which in turn resulted in men laying claim to their own children produced by their own slaves. Wolf ’s argument rescues Kongolese men from essentialism but still leaves women without history. This happens in two ways. First, while Wolf rejects characterization of “peripheral” cultures as timeless and traditional, he accepts the existence of timeless matrilineality, a system “discovered” and recorded by European male anthropologists that allows women a visible position in social structure but still places control of most resources in the hands of men: uncles and brothers rather than fathers and husbands.

Rethinking complex society

7

Whether this might have been a biased interpretation of Kongolese culture is not discussed. Second, and more importantly, when Wolf describes the change from matrilineality to patrilineality, he attributes it to the need for more men to participate in the taking of slaves. This to him is implicitly a natural outcome of an emphasis on a violent mercantile economy. The possibility that women might have participated in warfare and raiding either directly or through economic control is not considered. Here is a classic situation that lends itself to critical questioning. A preexisting system in which women received some sort of recognition, pigeon-holed by anthropologists accustomed to an essentialized view of culture as “matrilineal,” becomes patrilineal as a result of interaction with western capitalism, in this case from Portugal. This construction goes unquestioned because the lack of participation by women in the new system is implicitly attributed to the nature of womanhood, not to the nature of the European influence. Would the Portuguese have been as comfortable trading with women as they were with men? Could the patriarchal view of the world and the essentialist European perspective of the Portuguese toward women have influenced the nature of change in lineage power? Almost certainly. Similarly in the 1920s Rattray (1923) recorded Asante complaints that since the British always disregarded their queen mothers, they stopped putting them forward in negotiations. It is beyond the scope of this book to make a case against the traditional anthropological view of Kongolese social organization or to rethink Asante matrilineal power; the point is simply to illustrate how implicit assumptions about gender shape historical constructions without ever becoming a topic of discussion.

The essence of womanhood The status of women, though clearly not uniform across time and space, is nevertheless thought to be uniformly subordinate throughout human history. In every known culture, past or present, women are portrayed as playing a lesser role in political and economic life. This generalization has inspired numerous studies to determine the significance of the “division of labor” for the origins of human culture and the rise of civilization. Traditionally, anthropologists (and others) attribute the pattern of crosscultural male dominance to biological differences between women and men, since gender domination is seen to occur in historically unrelated cultures that are believed to have only human biology or biologically based adaptive strategies in common. A recent book summarizing cross-cultural data on gender roles presents the problem perfectly (Pasternak, Ember, and Ember 1997). The three authors use Murdock’s World Ethnographic Sample (1983), his Ethnographic Atlas (1967), and snippets of ethnographic detail to characterize gender differences in a variety of societies. They conclude that in all cases women play subordinate roles to men, thereby proving that they

8

K. Anne Pyburn

have always played subordinate roles and that subordination and passivity are essential characteristics of womanhood, not culture. In politics, in economics, and in accord with ideology, women are considered in society after society to be weaker, less well organized, less important, and less likely to succeed politically and hold economic power than men. Cross-cultural similarities appear worldwide and support a seamless trajectory of cultural evolution from simple to complex navigated by genetic imperatives. So many societies are considered (or at least counted) that objections can arise only from those who “refuse to face the facts.” Whatever biases exist, we are told, are canceled out by the quantity and variety of data. A number of studies show that the contribution of women, and men’s recognition of it, has been underestimated by ethnographers (Leacock 1981). Ethnographic restudies, such as Weiner’s (1976) restudy of the Trobriands, show that the role of women has been misunderstood. More recently, Askew (1999) has shown that Swahili gender subordination is an historical legacy of Islam; Strathern (1988) has reworked perspectives on a number of societies; Ortner (1981) and Rosaldo and Lamphere (1974) have provided important overviews of the pervasiveness of assumptions about women’s roles in society. Nevertheless, these studies tend to be treated as special pleading or exceptions, and have little impact on the firmly held convictions that motivate most research into the distant past. Regardless of their empirical reality, beliefs about gender are as deeply embedded in western culture as are the tenets of science and the practices of social science, and have shaped the development of western knowledge (Lloyd 1995, Wylie 1997). These beliefs have determined not only the paths of research but also which gender would travel these paths. What we know about the history of the difference between women and men comes mostly from research by men with a particular cultural background that attracted them to the topic (Ashmore 2002). The manner in which deeply held beliefs about gender intersect with scientific analysis has been the subject of numerous discussions. Some scholars see this as a challenge to science; for example Haraway (1989) has argued that scientific reasoning is inherently gender-biased and therefore inherently male, an intellectual apartheid argument that can lead to the same assumptions as its antithesis: that the biological differences between women and men, and their consequent behaviors, make women and men incomparable and incommensurable. Grosz (1994) has argued that this is a more useful political stance than democratic arguments about the equality of the sexes, because neither the public nor the male dominated power structure of western science is receptive to the rejection of gender as a biological category that predicts ability, inclination, and ultimately social form and historical trajectories. Similarly, Gilchrist (1999) sees attempts to use data to construct a new understanding of the role of women in prehistory as falling into a masculinist trap. Gilchrist and Grosz agree that since poor science and thin scholarship in a racist or sexist context have promoted essentialism,

Rethinking complex society

9

neither science nor scholarship can be trusted as an antidote for bias. Ironically this leaves policy makers and social scientists with no basis for decision making other than preference and power; exactly the situation that postmodern feminists decry, and lay at the feet of science. Nevertheless, the fact remains that a fair amount of what has been accepted as scientific has never been examined at all (Mukhopadhyay and Higgins 1988). Furthermore, the pattern to the scientific facts that have been accepted uncritically conforms to western folklore about gender. This pattern is readily discernible in anthropology texts that purport to describe crosscultural universals by identifying similarities in ancient material culture. A good example is Barber’s (1994) book on women and weaving, which begins with the assertion that women weave everywhere because it is compatible with childcare. She then identifies string skirts in early European cultures from Gravettian to Greek, claiming them to be irresistible to men and empowering to wear, for which assertion she offers support from her own experience of wearing tassels. Such an essentialist perspective on a cultural group would be heaped with ridicule and rejection, but Barber’s book has been heralded as a truly important and scientific contribution, perhaps because this is the sort of reasoning the scientific establishment expects (and prefers) from women. The problem with this approach is simply that under the guise of induction, it fails to consider the origin or the varying context of the facts it identifies (Handsman 1991, Nelson 1997, Stone 1997). The vast majority of anthropological information about other cultures, and especially about “pristine” cultures documented early in the history of colonialism and exploration, was collected and recorded by European men. Many of these men were brilliant scholars and ethnographers, but rarely was gender the focus of their study; both the facts they selected as meaningful and the manner of their questioning reflect ideas about gender held before they went into the field. Malinowski knew that women practiced forms of wealth and status accumulation, but saw the Trobriand women’s system as a subordinate subset of the male system, not requiring direct analysis (Weiner 1976). Gregory Bateson (1958), one of the few anthropologists of his day to focus on gender, nevertheless constructed a description of a Naven ceremony as an inversion of male dominance that verifies its existence. He envisioned only two genders and assumed that female must necessarily be the marked category. The brilliance of these ethnographies is not in question, the issue is simply that they all have the same “biological” assumptions, and at least some of the cross-cultural continuity recorded was related to the common origins of the recorders as much as to the parallels in the systems they observed. And if this is true about the best studies, there can be no doubt about the perspective that pervades many of the more pedestrian studies summarized in the HRAF. In fact some of the most cherished examples were recorded by adventurers

10

K. Anne Pyburn

and merchants who not only had no reason to query their own biases, but actually had an impact on gender relations in the cultures they witnessed and exploited. Spanish, English, and Portuguese missionaries and traders actively reorganized local cultures for their own purposes, as did Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Arabs in earlier centuries of western history; it should be no surprise that they saw local gender categories and behaviors in terms of their own beliefs about women and men and their own desires for companionship and commerce. The central thesis here is that the subordination of women and the scientific identification of gender roles have histories, sometimes intertwined so that most recorded cultural similarity is homologous rather than analogous.

Animal muddles The first obstacle to arguments against human cultural universals is always western mythology about human biology. Very long traditions of philosophy and religion underlie what scientists accept as verified truth about the biological basis of gender systems. At the center of many alternative perspectives and disagreements is the perceived tension between the influences of nature (heredity) and nurture (environment) on human development that underlies much western folk wisdom. This tension has been dramatized throughout western history in everything from Oedipus Rex, to Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and “Baywatch,” and where European and Eurasian folklore is concerned, “blood will out.” The reasoning behind the argument presented here, that early state societies should be examined closely for evidence of male dominance rather than assumed to provide it, does not depend on biological arguments. Logically, there is no reason to be concerned about whether testosterone is the proximate cause of the modern world system, since our focus here is on identification of gender roles in particular societies in transition to complexity, not the ultimate causes of that transition. But experience has shown that questioning beliefs about gender is often construed as anti-science and a failure to face the facts of human biology, which make studies like this one irrelevant, unnecessary, and ignored. As one woman remarked to a CNN interviewer in response to a query about the propriety of President Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior in the White House, “We know what men are like, why is this an issue?” Consequently, a brief statement about biological models is worthwhile, even though the topic is broached with no intention of a complete discussion. In a recent summary of Gender in Archaeology, Nelson (1997) describes the way in which focusing on the origins of humans and human behavior both reifies and validates the status quo in the modern world. First of all, the decision to focus on the origin of one particular characteristic rather than another reifies that characteristic as timeless and essential in human history.

Rethinking complex society

11

So for example, the study of the origin of stone tool manufacture is deeply embedded in a system of beliefs and assumptions about what makes humans human. Stone tools have been studied mostly (though certainly not exclusively) by men (Gero 1991, Spector 1991), and the origin of tool making is usually associated with increased flexibility in human adaptation through an increased emphasis on learned behavior and reduced reliance on instinct. Tool use has long been associated with enlargement of the brain. Stone tools are also considered evidence of a male–female division of labor and the rise of male hunting behavior (Brace 1988). Justification for this assumption is usually drawn from the ethnographic present of groups where records indicate (accurately or not) that stone tools were manufactured and used by men (Sassaman 1998). Often groups that supply these data were incompletely observed and far from any “pristine” state, but the a priori assumption that men are the tool makers has long made anthropologists comfortable with this circular reasoning. Men made tools in the past, because they make them in the present; men make tools in the present because they made them in the past. The division of labor between men and women is basic to human biology; all we need is a small amount of data to show how and when the underlying genetic imperatives evolved. The important point here is that it makes a difference how an anthropologist frames a research question. It has become professionally important for physical anthropologists to identify the earliest human fossils, and anthropologists have tied the definition of humanity to the division of labor. Consequently it is commonplace among hominid specialists jockeying for professional recognition, to discover evidence of a gender-based division of labor. Not surprisingly the identification of divergent patterns of gender behavior is frequently asserted on the basis of data much too slim to rule out competing hypotheses. For example, one popular argument proposes that bipedalism arose because males ranged widely to procure food and needed free hands to carry it back to a mate. Food sharing between males and females would have arisen from a need for meat, a need for sexual access, and a need for the protection of females and young. These are certainly a possibility, but they are logical scenarios based on almost no data, and there are innumerable other ways to explain the significance of the data available on the origin of bipedalism. This type of extrapolation can only be characterized as “fast and loose.” It is more than simply ironic that the underlying motive of origins research is to understand how humans differ from other animals, since such studies invariably make broad assumptions that similar behavior indicates a common origin, especially between primates and hominids. Few anthropologists today would accept the argument that pyramids exist in Mesoamerica and Egypt because of a common origin; but it is widely accepted that polygamy and male sexual aggression among baboons and humans is explained by common biology.

12

K. Anne Pyburn

In reality, male dominance in the animal world is not nearly as simple a proposition as was once thought (Mukhopadhyay and Higgins 1988). Recent work focusing on female behavior has shown that females create and participate in social hierarchies and political scenarios (Smuts 1987). The importance of this work is not that males and females do the same thing (although they frequently do), but that scholars have privileged male behavior as political and indicating social dominance with selective consequences, while constructing female behavior as subordinate and contingent. Why would a higher death rate and more frequent acts of fatal aggression among males necessarily be equated with political dominance? What exactly is “political” in the context of a baboon troop? If the question is “what is the origin of male dominated political systems?” then the data on males are what count, and only male strategies will be taken to indicate the origin of political behavior. Clearly other questions are possible and most of the propositions that currently stand cannot rule out competing hypotheses without circular reference to the ethnographic present and problematic fossils (Marks 2002). Most of these arguments can be inverted as has begun to be shown by Falk (1998), Smuts (1987), Zihlman (1989), and others. By protecting their offspring and determining leadership in the next generation, female baboons could be said to maintain political dominance by averting physical danger while effectively making most selectively important decisions. Females might be determined to be the more political sex, since male behavior more often deteriorates into physical violence. A similar piece of circular reasoning concerns the significance of size on political and social dominance. Evidence that males are larger is considered evidence of male domination; this is particularly important to the interpretation of the fossil record, where evidence of actual behavior is scarce, but where hominid fossils suggesting sexual dimorphism have been used to argue for male dominance in the prehuman past. The reason for this emphasis of course is that human males are statistically larger and more physically powerful than human females. Surely this is the proof of a biological basis for human male dominance. The opposite possibility could be constructed from observations of bonobo (Pan paniscus) sexual behavior (De Waal 1997). In general, bonobos exhibit less sexual dimorphism, competitiveness, and aggression over food, space, and mates than do common chimpanzees, but much more frequent and varied sexual encounters between individuals of both the same and different sexes. Sexual contact, furthermore, seems to be strongly associated with contexts in which competitive behavior arises among common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), and has been argued to serve to defuse sources of friction within the group. In addition, like many other social primates, bonobos form relationships between individuals that seem to take advantage of what biological information they have: genetic relationships between females and offspring. Females form strong bonds with each other and with

Rethinking complex society

13

their offspring. Since promiscuity makes paternity unknown, only male bonds through a relationship with the mother or with siblings can have reliable selective significance. Since females can recognize their offspring, they have a better chance of maintaining a selective advantage in the next generation through cross-generation political alliances than males, who are more likely to find competitors than allies. In fact, since female bonding is so pervasive and successful and also provides sexual satisfaction, the slightly larger size of males may be a response to males’ subordinate political position, which selects for aggressive antisocial behavior. Males are forced to maintain a high degree of sexual tension, readiness, and aggression as a result of female political dominance, which results in higher male mortality and perpetuates their subjugation. Without their size and aggressiveness, males would have little impact on troop behavior or organization, and few chances to mate with females. There can be no claim that this scenario is the only correct interpretation of primate data, but it is no more speculative than more common male-centered arguments; it merely make males into the marked category. Whether animal behavior is studied for evidence of the genetic predispositions of human behavior, or to identify functional correlations between parts of a sociopolitical system that are likely to reoccur in many contexts, it is generally accepted that the best source of analogy comes from chimpanzees because they are our closest living biological relatives. As already noted, there are two kinds of chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes or common chimpanzees studied most famously by Goodall and her team (1971, 1986, 1990), and Pan paniscus or bonobos, studied by Kano (1992) De Waal (1997) and others. Both types of chimpanzee are believed to share 98 percent of their DNA with modern humans (Marks 2002) and presumably they share even more with each other, since they are more similar to each other in habitat, development, phenotype, and behavior than is either to modern humans. They are also closer in time to their common ancestor than to the ancestor they share with modern humans. Nevertheless, the two types of chimpanzee are quite distinct. As noted, bonobos are less aggressive, sexually dimorphic, competitive, and violent, and more sexually active and likely to practice food sharing than common chimpanzees. These are exactly the behaviors that have been argued to indicate the origins of human political behavior; if chimpanzees and bonobos differ this much, why should human behavior be assumed to derive in a predictable way from either? Why should chimpanzee genes, which incorporate a significant degree of species divergence, be indicative (much less definitive) of behavior among primates even more distantly related? Perhaps it is exactly the replacement of chimpanzee-style political behavior and sexuality with a learned set of alternatives that distinguishes humans as a separate species. Chimpanzees are neither living fossils nor inadequate humans; they are a separate modern

14

K. Anne Pyburn

species. They cannot show us exactly what we came from, much less what genes make modern humans do (Marks 2002). One final point is important in this context. Recently Goodall (1990) has suggested that the Gombe chimpanzees she observed exhibited some aberrant behavior as a result of the impact of her presence (she fed them) and other environmental change that is affecting their social life. If this should turn out to be so, and common chimpanzees are more like bonobos when undisturbed, it would suggest a huge amount of flexibility in those behaviors treated as most relevant to the origins of human gender systems. It seems clear that whatever the genetic commonality between humans and other primates, political and social behaviors are the most flexible and very unlikely to be determined by genes in a simple way.

Family values: the functional models Even in more modest studies (e.g. Whyte 1978), not reliant on simplified poor quality HRAF-type data or animal models, and where detailed crosscultural studies are presented as supporting the ubiquity of male dominance to a lesser degree, the assumption of inequality is still there before the data are collected. For example, Whyte states that, though no societies are dominated by women, this does not mean that men dominate women in all societies in the same ways and to the same degree. Nevertheless “Women never seem to dominate men in all of social life, but the degree of male dominance ranges from total to minimal” (p. 167). The absence of dominance is never discovered. Feminists have put forward a number of arguments to lighten the load of this observation. They tell us that child raising is just as important as politics, gathering provides more food than hunting, women provide the power behind the throne. But some scholars find these explanations frustrating. While it is sexist to assume that one role is more important simply because men play that role, it is difficult to agree that child-rearing and political power should be measured against each other and treated as alternatives – they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Why should a woman not hunt, gather, bear children, and wear the crown? There are, of course, plenty of exceptions. Boudicca, Cleopatra, and Margaret Thatcher all broke the rules of female behavior and wielded enormous political power in their own right. There are new data from Eurasian where female graves contain armor and weapons, although excavator Davis-Kimball (2002) suggests women were priestesses or transvestites rather than soldiers or third gender. These options confine female power to the metaphysical or to the imitation of men. Women have always owned property and made political decisions. There is no evidence that all women are incapable, physiologically or even within the confines of

Rethinking complex society

15

most ideologies of performing exactly the same tasks as men. But usually – statistically – they do not. Since this model treats the subordination of women as a statistical probability rather than a cultural universal, its explanation is as much functional as biological. It is not genetic limitations of size or thought patterns or hormonal imperatives that keep women out of the public sphere, it is the simple fact that women are hampered by children. Pregnancy and lactation reduce energy and mobility; small children require constant care not compatible with hunting, raiding, or campaigning. Proponents of this view argue that it is more convenient for women to gather near home, make pottery, scrape hides, and cook than go hunting with a huge belly or make a political presentation while breast-feeding. Besides, as a US politician recently said, “You don’t put your breeding stock on the firing line.” The implication here is that such inefficiency would jeopardize the biological success of the human species, and that the age-old division of labor that protected females but put men in charge is at the root of human origins. Groups that failed to develop this division would not be as competitive. This behavioral model, like the more simplistic and straightforward genetic model, drives the origin of sexism back three million years and fixes it securely in natural selection, absolving such practices from moral evaluation, just as do the more blatant genetic models. So although not necessarily encoded in DNA, to be sexist is to be human. While this is a perfectly good logical model, it does not fit ethnographic reality, past or present. Many of the observations made by male ethnographers from the United States and Europe simply applied their expectations to what they saw, assuming that the economic contribution of women was inferior to and contingent on the contribution of men. That women provide most of the food and do most of the provisioning in huntergatherer cultures was eventually noted, but somehow it was never seen to contradict the assertion that women do less economically important work because they have children. A variety of recent studies have discounted the western elite model of adult females as natural full-time caregivers (MacCormack and Strathern 1980). But the astonishing thing is the number of ethnographers, cultural studies specialists, and especially archaeologists who still begin their research with these same assumptions. Literature on the goddess culture in Europe offers a good example of this situation. Although the slimness of the data and the sexism of almost all interpretations have been pointed out repeatedly (see Russell 1998 for a wonderful summary of this literature), generalizations and assertions about the European mother goddess continue to appear. Goddess literature both by women and men has been a litmus for sexist tendencies: one scholar has recently proposed that women (expressing their female power) made bottom-heavy goddess figurines because in looking downward at themselves they would see the type of distorted image believed to be commonly made in

16

K. Anne Pyburn

early Europe. Unfortunately for this myopia theory (women were apparently unable to look at each other), the obese top-heavy figurines that have so inspired discussion are actually rather rare among collections of Paleolithic figurines, which include slim women, men, and (mostly) androgynous representations (Russell 1993). In part the belief in behavioral continuity over vast reaches of time and space has to do with the conflation of poverty with tradition, as well as a deep seated ethnocentrism among western and western-trained anthropologists (after all, an anthropological perspective is, by definition, a western perspective). All over the world, people are labeled as traditional when the truth is that they are simply poor (Pyburn 1998, Wilk 1991). People cling to old things when they do not have any new things; and they continue cheap ways when they have no access to the time, technology, and education necessary to employ more costly solutions. In modern America, the convention of living in nuclear families (which has a short history and a rather modest statistical reality) makes child care available only to those who can pay for it. Poor women and men cannot make enough money to cover the cost, so the only economic choice is for someone to stay home; the law says that must be an adult and the sociopolitical system dictates that men can make more money in the marketplace. Although the historical facts tell a very different story this is now considered the traditional mode for US families. The poor do it because they have to, and the rich, who can really live comfortably on a single income, do it because it is traditional, as evidenced for them by the behavior of the socially unreconstructed poor. This digression into what people do and consider correct in the United States is important because it is necessary to better situate prevalent models and assumptions about gender. No one who has ever lived in a village in a developing nation could believe that women stay home to take care of children rather than going to work because it is more efficient. Families in difficult economic circumstances simply cannot afford the luxury of wasting the labor of an adult female, or anyone else for that matter. Many ethnographies have made this point and Nelson (1997) discusses it elegantly. Nevertheless, the tenacity of its hold over social theory and gender studies especially among archaeologists justifies further elaboration here. Let me use an ethnographic anecdote that should make clear the fallacy of this sort of reasoning. When my daughter was a baby and I was working in Belize, I soon realized that, in contrast to my experience in the United States, it was possible to visit the homes of friends in the village where I worked and have a conversation, despite the fact that we all had small demanding offspring. In fact, as soon as I entered the door, my child would usually be snatched up by eager hands and whisked away until I was ready to leave. I was always a bit uncomfortable in these situations, because I was accustomed to knowing exactly where she was all the time and who had her. Much of the time in the village she seemed to be the center of attention for children hardly

Rethinking complex society

17

larger than herself. Naively, I thought her alien looking white hair and exotic origin must have made her an interesting curiosity to Creole children, who seemed strangely lacking in toys, either store-bought or homemade. Then I hired Debra Jones (not her real name) to take care of my child while I ran an archaeological project. Ms Jones was 23 years old and had recently graduated from Belize technical college, but had no work and was eager for a paying job. She seemed perfect if a bit overqualified for the job of baby-sitter, since she had been raised in a big family and had a mother who stayed home and kept house and cooked and “did” for eight children. Each day Ms Jones came out to the archaeological site, where I and my family and students were living, to take care of Elvia, age 4, and keep her occupied and out of trouble while I dug and my husband wrote. It was immediately clear that Ms Jones could not do this job. Elvia was constantly running after me and clinging to my knees and preventing my husband from writing anything with constant interruptions. Both Jones and Elvia were clearly bored, and I realized that Jones had no idea what to do with a 4-year-old child to occupy her. They finally settled into lessons in a school-like set up, but 4-year-olds cannot study math and reading for eight hours a day. The camp cook, also a mother from the village, allowed Elvia to help knead dough, but it was clear that she was spoiling the boss’s child, not treating her as she would have treated a child of her own. Eventually Jones partially solved the problem by bringing her younger brothers and sisters and a few miscellaneous cousins out to the site whenever they could get out of school. This worked, although the kids still seemed bored and frustrated and I could not understand why Debra Jones was too lazy to take care of one little girl, but had to bring her younger family members to do it for her. My lazy theory was rather shot down by the fact that I constantly found her volunteering in the project laboratory or the kitchen and working very hard. Since this incident I have lived with my family in a Creole village and I know what the problem was. Adults do not take care of small children. Infants are cared for by 8- to 10-year-olds (both boys and girls). Almost no one breast-feeds babies. Toddlers are watched by 5- and 6-year-olds, and by anyone who is near them (because they are so mobile and they are not herded or confined the way US children are), including the family dogs, who alert family members when the smallest children stray out of the yard. Children older than about 3 run around freely between houses in little packs, cadging food from adults and stealing it off fruit trees and out of gardens. At mealtime they expect to eat wherever they are, though they avoid houses where the food is scarce or not good and are pretty careful about wearing out their welcome. They also expect to be sent on errands or to help with chores in whatever house they are playing or eating. Some children shoot birds and small mammals with sling shots and cook them in the forest by the time they are 6 or 7.

18

K. Anne Pyburn

Belizean village children have a language dialect that only children speak and they have a culture that has little to do with adults. Interaction with adults occurs when there has been a violation of adult rules (Did you steal Miss Gloria’s shirt?), or when the adult wants something from the child (Take this plate of food to your father out in his field), or when the child wants something from the adult (Can I have money to go to town with my big brother?). There is no doubt that adults are in control, but children rarely get themselves into situations that involve adults. Most of the time, children play with, watch out for, and care for each other. I also realized that there were destroyed, neglected toys all over the place that children had played with for 15 minutes and thrown down never to pick up again. This is because possessions can cause envy and quarrels that tear the social fabric of child culture, so toys are immediately played with by everyone, usually more roughly by the children who covet them. Parents who decide a special toy must be preserved put it on a high shelf and leave it in the box. Destruction of the toys destroys jealousy. The treatment of toys is just one example of many that indicates a strong child-culture with non-adult values and motivations exists in this context. Village children have each other to play with, which is demonstrably more important to them than dolls or plastic guns provided by adults. Who needs a baby doll when you have a 3-week-old cousin whom you can hold and change and feed as much as you want? Clearly this is a case study from a single village, and things will not be exactly the same all over the world. Interestingly, a colleague of mine recently brought his Filipino wife and their six children to the US and tried to live on the salary of a visiting assistant professor. The family almost starved since the cost of child care prevented the wife from working. She was wretched and astonished that she was unable to work, since she was fully employed at home and never expected to become a household prisoner in the US. She eventually left her husband and took the children home to her village, where she could have a “normal” life holding a full-time job to support her children. At the very least, it should be clear from the foregoing that assumptions about the efficiency of a particular gender-based division of labor should be scrapped. Anthropologists cannot at the same time hold that women are incapacitated by pregnancy and childbirth and must be protected during lactation, and that women do the bulk of heavy physical labor in most cultures, because both are biologically programmed and natural. While heavy physical labor is the norm for women in most cultures, protection and coddling of pregnant and lactating women are not. Where women are excused from labor on the basis of physiological processes, it is mostly other women and children who make up the deficit.

Rethinking complex society

19

Postmodern science: resisting the bad questions One reason why the anthropologists’ conviction about the universality of male dominance has persisted is that it blinds scholars to the bad questions it generates. We ask questions that assume the answer, or construct hypotheses that cannot be ruled out with contradictory evidence. “Why are women excluded from politics?” contains the assumption that we already know they are excluded, all we need is to find it in a particular context. Any evidence to the contrary will automatically be treated as exceptional or “proving the rule.” Tautological questions are bad science in any discipline but they are especially bad for archaeologists to pose because they place weight on negative evidence. In archaeology, where symbols of wealth and power are often discovered without clear gender associations, it is not uncommon for artifacts to be casually gendered by the archaeologist according to current practice or ethnographic analogy that is implicitly or explicitly gendered. Beginning with the assumption that studying weaving is studying women certainly precludes the possibility of finding out anything new about gender; this sort of approach simply extends our beliefs into the past. There is ample evidence that counters the assumption that male dominance will be symbolized and enacted in the same or even comparable ways cross-culturally (Strathern 1988). How can we know that a particular behavior pattern necessarily indicates male dominance? An example of perceptual difficulties may be illustrated with another ethnographic example. Richard Wilk is an ethnographer who did his first field work among the Kekchi Maya of southern Belize (Wilk 1991). He tells the story of an interview that he once carried out with a village elder. The interviewee was an old man who was well respected and of high status. His equally elderly wife was ostensibly excluded from this discussion between men by staying behind the walls of her house in her “private space,” while the men conferred out front in the open. As the ethnographer began to ask the old man questions, however, the old woman made her presence known. “How long have you been married?” Wilk asked. “45 years,” said the old man, but an irritated voice from inside the house said, “47.” Without blinking, the old man said, “47.” “How many grandchildren do you have?” asked Wilk. “19,” said the old man. “21, you idiot,” said the voice from the house. “Uh, 21,” corrected the old man. “Gee,” said Wilk, beginning to feel uncomfortable, “how long have you lived in this village?”

20

K. Anne Pyburn

The old man hesitated in silence for a moment until “Since 1942,” said the voice behind the wall. “Since 1942,” said the old man, as though he had just come up with it himself. In effect, the voice behind the wall controlled this entire interview, although the visible old man behaved as if only he could hear the voice. Of course the Kekchi have been identified as patriarchal and when Wilk first told me this story, I thought the old woman was amazing to stand up to her husband after years of domination or that perhaps this was an indication of the latitude allowed post-menopausal women, but now I have changed my mind. If the man had been behind the wall, and the woman out front having her every word challenged and contradicted, I would have taken this as an indication of male domination. So if the woman is behind the wall, I see the wall as an indication of male dominance. If the woman is in front of the wall, I see the voice as an indication of male dominance. I realized that there were no conditions under which I would be able to see a woman not dominated. Unless we ask questions that can be contradicted, we cannot get anywhere by collecting more data.

Women with a past So if we reject the biological basis and the blanket functional explanations of gender subordination, where does the cross-cultural continuity come from? I have already suggested that HRAF data are profoundly affected by observer bias, but this idea deserves exemplification and expansion. This is the premise developed by Wolf (1982), who shows clearly that the origin of much cultural continuity and cross-cultural similarity is not the result of cultural isolation, but of historical contact and interaction. Both cultural universals and local idiosyncrasies, once thought to be evidence of essential humanness and racial imperatives, can be understood as reactions to exposure and subordination to a larger world. For a variety of historical reasons western scholars, historians, philosophers, and social scientists have developed a theory of cultural variety and ethnicity based on the concepts of independence and tradition. Wolf outlines this process brilliantly, showing how an essentialist concept of culture has resulted in historical reconstruction that leaves some (many) people without history. Cultures outside Europe are described as “cold,” timeless, traditional isolates, whose members are “living in the past.” This construction creates the essentialism it describes by justifying and promoting hegemonic economic and political interactions with “traditional, ahistorical” groups. According to Wolf:

Rethinking complex society

21

people of diverse origins and social makeup were driven to take part in the construction of a common world. They included the European sea merchants and soldiery of various nationalities, but also native Americans, Africans and Asians. In the process, the societies and cultures of all these people underwent major changes. These changes affected not only the peoples singled out as the carriers of “real” history but also the populations anthropologists have called “primitives” and have often studied as pristine survivals from a timeless past. The global processes set in motion by European expansion constitute their history as well. There are thus no “contemporary ancestors,” no people without history, no peoples – to use Lévi-Strauss’s phrase – whose histories have remained “cold.” (Wolf 1982, p. 385) Wolf ’s book is a treatise against cultural essentialism that makes its case through analysis of the historical data on global cultural interaction. Because of the broad sweep of the book, data tend to be generalized and summarized for particular cultures and time periods; nevertheless, his case for the mutual formation of cultural alternatives even under antagonistic conditions is compelling. Wolf shows on a case by case basis how culture after culture was dramatically affected by trade and economic relations with Europe during the fifteenth century. He makes clear that he does not mean to privilege a particular century as the only era in which interconnections between cultures occurred, but only that this was a particularly important era. The age of exploration witnessed the intensification of contacts across great areas of the globe and was the period when many of the cultures that we frequently consider historical isolates became deeply involved in a global system of interaction and exchange. And although Wolf focuses on a period in history for which we have at least some written accounts, it is clear from his data and his arguments that few cultures were ever isolates, but had interconnections and interactions beyond their borders throughout their existence. We can now turn to an ethnographic example of how the rise and institutionalization of core–periphery hegemony can play out through gender, effecting subordination of a local group by changing the status of women without seeming to threaten the status quo.

The riddle of the rodeo queen Having discussed biological and functional explanations for the political subordination of women, I now turn last to examine the historical processes of globalization. These are the mechanisms of capitalism and mercantilism that have created a homogenizing situation for gender in the modern world and at the same time blinded us to the origins of that homogeneity.

22

K. Anne Pyburn

For Marx, the hegemonic relations of capitalism were the focus of discussion. Consequently, Wolf ’s heuristic use of Marxist categories similarly embeds gender in class and political economy without further elaboration. I do not propose to challenge the writings of Marx, but there are two points to be made in this context: 1

2

Categories are not hegemonic sui generis and the assumption that all social complexity is synonymous with the subordination of women (as though they were a social class) should be questioned (Strathern 1988), not assumed. The assumption that the rise of civilization means a decline in the status of women must be questioned with archaeological data, because ethnography came too late to find more than a few “pristine” cultural isolates. Conquistadors, merchants, and missionaries were not passive observers of the people they killed and enslaved; merchants and adventurers were not following a “prime directive” like the “Star Trek” characters who are forbidden to interfere with local cultures.

Explorers who did find “virgin” cultures, such as those Europeans encountered in the New World, observed what they needed to see and what they were equipped to understand, so their observations require verification. Additionally, the observations of merchants and conquerors require scrutiny for evidence of the sort of impact their intrusion had on local systems. This is especially the case regarding gender issues, since particular assumptions about male and female differences are so deeply embedded in the psyche of Europeans, conquerors and scholars alike. And as Marx argued, gender roles were very likely to be rapidly and profoundly impacted by capitalism. We may question nineteenth-century assumptions about the archaeological past and Engels’ (1884) confidence that the status of women would always decline as a whole with the rise of economic classes, but there is no doubt about the impact of capitalism on the condition of women in the modern world system. Gender is clearly tied into this economic system and may possibly always be vulnerable to redefinition under conditions of change in political economy. But this is a question to ask of archaeological data, not a basis for assumptions about the past, much less the source of proof that an ancient people was “civilized.” “The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work” (Wolf 1982, p. 354). Concentration of capital in the dynamic European core resulted in the creation of peripheral (Wallerstein 1974) and underdeveloped areas (Gunder-Frank 1967). Wolf accepts this hegemonic dichotomy, but points out that this perspective leaves underdeveloped peripheries without history and argues that we must examine wider linkages to understand how specific cultures “were drawn into the larger system to suffer its impact and to become its agents” (p. 23). To ignore

Rethinking complex society

23

the specific historical processes involved in the incorporation of varied peoples into the world-system is to essentialize these “peripheral” cultures as “traditional,” denying them participation in the creation of world history. By the same token, to ignore the specific historical processes that incorporate women from varied cultures into an essentialized timeless model of femininity ignores the history of women’s experience. We must try to understand not only how but also why women and other culturally defined groups came to participate in their own exploitation. And besides looking at how hegemony was worked out on the basis of individual cultures, we must also try to understand how women developed certain types of resistance (Scott 1985) and how colonized and dominated groups managed to have an impact on the development of the core cultures. These are the real foci of a study that may gather new information rather than repeating essentialist categories. Focusing on the implications of Wolf ’s model for understanding the history of gender relations and gender studies brings the issues of voluntary participation in an exploitative system, modes of resistance, and reciprocal impact immediately into the foreground. Wolf ’s model suggests some ways in which essentialization and homogenization of the periphery take place, but he does not consider the special place of gender in this process. Our task must be to explain how women have become essentialized in similar but not the same ways in a variety of cultures that have remained distinct, despite the homogenizing factors of economic globalization and the world system. The crux of the argument must be to explain how women have been essentialized and victimized without casting all women as inherent, natural, genetic, complicit, or even traditional victims. The answer is that this happens in two ways: women either accept or resist essentialism and commoditization, but either way they become oriented to a single set of defining criteria. Capitalism globalizes gender roles by essentializing both gender and class; in the west, gender is usually a subset of class, with women responsible for upholding the respectability of their particular economic group (in contrast to the reputation of the group, which is more skewed toward the behavior of men). Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje (1996) provide examples of a classic context of global hegemony where women are the focus: beauty pageants. The issue that motivates cross-cultural studies of pageants is “Why women?” This common focus is an example of a cross-cultural situation that can be construed to suggest something essential, something biological about the male gaze and female attractiveness. In reality, pageants are used to establish the continuity of “essence” that they are believed to represent. Wilk (1996, 2002) describes how the rise of pageants does not simply homogenize perceptions of beauty or subordinate local conceptions of femininity and sexuality, but instead globalizes the terms of discussion and debate. Writing about the Central American country of Belize, Wilk asks why

24

K. Anne Pyburn

the Belizean liberal party (the PUP) that stands publicly against European and US exploitation of Belize, the commoditization of its citizens, and colonialist values should support beauty pageants. Is this a sign that Belize has achieved a level of political development where the division of labor reaches its highest form? Perhaps, but the evolution of beauty as a means of political expression is historical in an important way. The commoditization of women, the elevation of a focus on the “natural beauty” of local resources (which include women), identifies the new nation state with the first world exploiters, rather than the “exploited.” If “we are just as good,” as an advertisement for a locally produced drink once proclaimed in a full page advertisement in a Belizean newspaper, we value women as a natural resource rather than as producers and we use resources for leisure entertainment rather than for (re)production. We are wealthy enough to have unused land and trophy women without work or skills who starve to be beautiful (not because they have no food). So the answer is not the biological basis of the male gaze or the impact of sexual selection on the commoditization of women, but that in western culture, gender is one of the primary terms of the debate about class. What it means to be respectably modern in a global context economically and politically controlled by Europe and the United States is closely tied into a hegemonic definition of what it means to be a man or a woman. You must know what a woman is in order to compete on the world stage, you must show a very particular western type of discrimination to supply a candidate who can win the contest. But because winning involves accepting the commoditization of citizenry, winners from the periphery are acceptable to the hegemonic powers, which similarly commodify their own. Belize shows it is as powerful as the US in its own country, and proclaims itself modern and affluent enough to play by global rules. Wilk (1995, 2004) shows how participation in this global dialog in which the west sets the terms of the debate even though there is cultural exchange and disagreement creates a structure of “common difference.” Pageants provide an ironic agency to the oppressed. Asante queen mothers may have been ignored, but beauty queens get press coverage. Participation on the “global stage” gives a tiny group (or an individual woman) a chance to answer back. Competition is partly resistance; native beauties without the anorexic characteristics of global beauties may be strong local favorites symbolizing the autonomy of local values. But it is also acceptance, since the idea of such competitions is often recently absorbed; and local women may be proudly held up as beautiful enough to compete on global criteria. There is an important connection between pageants that focus on European-style beauty and those that focus on culturally embedded beauty (the most beautiful Maya woman, the most beautiful cowgirl, the most feminine transvestite), which brings us back to Wolf. These are the pageants that identify, define, and legitimize cultural essences and traditions as

Rethinking complex society

25

timeless. Through them marginalized groups both accept an ahistorical and commoditized role in the world system, but also seize this designation as a source of power. The beauty of Maya women must be measured in Mayan terms, since each culture must have its own unique and traditional take on human physiology. Demonstrating this demonstrates the continued vitality of a culture in modern terms; paradoxically such pageants validate peripheral cultures in the global present by subordinating a local ideal to a global structure, even if the local ideal must be created for this purpose (a fact which surely makes these pageants seem even more irrelevant and benign at the local level). The terms of the debate are imposed, but the outcome looks different locally. Indigenous people triumph over the world system by commodifying women in local terms; globalization proceeds as local cultures accept the commoditization of women as a structure of common difference, as a natural part of their “traditions.” This is a classic example of Scott’s (1985) arguments about domination and resistance. Pageants legitimize social groups by attributing their system of values to the biological characteristics of beauty and thereby naturalizing them, by making them intelligible to the world system by translating their organization into the global vocabulary of common difference, and by giving them access to a wide audience, a global one if they are extremely successful. Western patriarchy sees local pageants as “cute,” “charming,” and utterly appropriate evidence of subordination. Local groups see them as subversive or expressions of autonomy, despite their acceptance of globalizing frames of evaluation and a commodifying stance toward participants. And of course, the men who are in charge do not feel their power and control are threatened by the subordination of women. In fact, in many cases both historical and recent, the commoditization of women has been a means to increase national political power and economic development through the disempowering of women. The sacrifice of female autonomy is made to seem acceptable to women and men who have been convinced that this is a natural expression of both genders. The anthropological interpretation of Venus figurines as “primitive” expressions of a male gaze follows these same principles, since it provides such a clear example of the manner in which an aesthetic standard of quality associated with biologically female characteristics has been used to essentialize culture. Paleolithic standards of beauty must by definition be the most primitive of all; the opposite pole of the continuum that ends in modern anorexia. But rather than evidence for the biological origin of human sexual aesthetics, the Willendorf and other early sexed figurines might be interpreted as proof of the extreme antiquity within European tradition of an intellectual tie between cultural integrity or even claims of superiority and a particular aesthetic sensibility focused on gender. The purportedly primitive Venuses, which have long been said to exhibit an emphasis on fertility, are probably too obese to succeed biologically in a hunter-gatherer economy, and

26

K. Anne Pyburn

may or may not have been considered erotic. Known societies privilege neither a Willendorf nor a Barbie presentation of sexuality consistently. Since Paleolithic Venus figurines are now acknowledged to be quite rare, the possibility that they were expressions of ethnicity developed within a larger realm of human interaction where many forms of aesthetic were in play should be reconsidered. It is irresistible to suggest that they may have originated one of the earliest structures of common difference pertaining to the definition of “beauty” or simply “human” rather than a definition of “woman.” Many groups apparently responded with local aesthetic expressions, since this is consistent with the wide distribution and variety in form of such objects. And in this context it is extremely interesting to note that the majority of figurines were not clearly female; in fact, the majority were not gendered at all. The insidiousness of this kind of cross-cultural participation is that it seems politically and economically harmless; what could be the harm of picking the most beautiful woman in the world, especially if she is granted a scholarship to assure her future economic well-being. Most women say they participate in beauty contests for the educational opportunities they can win (Cohen, Wilk, and Stoeltje 1996). By accepting the commoditization of women, developing nations accept competition for an honor which, if they compete successfully, gives entrée into a system of global commoditization which subordinates developing nations. Pageants serve to commodify and domesticate women, and in commodifying women men also fall into their global place, thereby dissolving the danger of the liminal by making it salable. The successful commoditization of gender situates competing nations in a class system where developing nations and economic peripheries rank low, no matter which woman wins the contest. In fact the more passionate the struggle to win, the deeper the penetration of the world system. As many authors have pointed out the labor power of women is controlled by men in a capitalistic society in a way that is very much parallel to core–periphery relations or development–underdevelopment phenomena as described by Wallerstein and Gunder-Frank. In the nature–culture dichotomy that is basic to a western world view, men are cultural, women natural. In his attempt to emphasize the “nobility” of savages, Lévi-Strauss argued, as have many other western anthropologists following Rousseau, that this dichotomy is a human universal, thus bringing all people into line with the basic western definition of decency. Violation of these boundaries is uncivilized and inhuman, it gives a “bad” impression, it makes a dangerous statement. In how many spy movies does the evil Russian female agent fail to be “natural” by using her “cultural” knowledge like a man to sabotage the supermacho American male hero? Better still, how often is she brought to heel by the American hero’s sex appeal that overwhelms her intellect by reaching her natural female instincts to love him?

Rethinking complex society

27

There is already a good case for the antiquity of this dichotomy in western cosmology and philosophy. But if Wolf is correct that western history essentializes culture incorrectly, and that culture has always been global, it seems reasonable to ask whether the essentialization of women has not been a product of this history and the globalization of the world system, carried out through innumerable hegemonic deals and relationships, exemplified in recent times by global beauty pageants. In each culture Europeans contacted they found what they expected: savages, Orientals, others. And in each culture they met, Europeans paid, rewarded, empowered, punished, destroyed, discouraged, recorded, or failed to record local customs according to their western desires, beliefs, sensibilities, and perceptions. Beauty pageants are situations in which women acquiesce to or resist globalizing processes; but both of these responses require another layer of analysis. Regardless of the response, the interaction between core and periphery, civilization and savage, men and women, results not in a monologue but in a dialogue. The precise outcome of this conversation is never exactly predetermined (Wilk 1996), since participation amounts not so much to a hegemonic relation of dominance of one by the other as to agreement on the terms of the discussion, which will not be the same in every cultural context. Here it becomes clear that there is more than one model of domination that is salient. The capitalist core, the male hierarchy of the developed nations may understand domination in one way, but the groups dominated may understand domination very differently. That is, economic domination of culture A by a core power B may make it possible for A to dominate culture C. From the perspective of A, there is now a steady market for goods allowing them political domination of a rival group. From the perspective of B, A is now a part of the empire. The point of interaction between A and B may be initiated and handled largely by B, but to A the result of allowing themselves to be dominated is increased economic and political control within the sphere of their most immediate interest. Future discussion and negotiation between A and B will be guided both by B’s hegemonic intent and by A’s similar intent toward C. To frame a less hypothetical example; among modern Belizean Creoles an important cause of divorce and strife within families is control over children. Husbands want their children raised by their maternal relatives, women want them raised by their maternal relatives, and the power struggles that ensue often last a lifetime. Embracing the essentialized role of woman as caregiver and full time stay-at-home mother may result in a female victory of control over her family in return for giving up economic equality within the family. Of course this is a stylized example, no individual case is this simple. The point is to show how domination occurs at many levels simultaneously and though adversaries must agree on the terms of debate in order to interact, the dominant core culture cannot completely control either the benefits that flow from its domination or the destruction to its own integrity that often results

28

K. Anne Pyburn

from the accommodation it must make to succeed in individual cases. In this context it is interesting to note that Belize also has a Mrs Belize pageant. Beauty pageants and other ethnographic studies of globalization show the complexity and subtlety of the interplay of capitalist processes with local categories of affiliation, competition, and gender in the modern world. Clearly there is too much variation to subsume these distinctions as class boundaries. They also show the insidiousness of the bad ethnographic question and the superfluity of the simplistic generalization. The argument that knowledge of the cross-cultural range of women’s roles and statuses is compromised by hegemony of the world system, the historical context of the recorders, and the credulity of their intellectual descendants emphasizes the importance of archaeology for understanding gender. While there can be no doubt that archaeological data are limited in ways that ethnographic data are not, I believe that we are dependent on archaeological reconstructions more than previously recognized, since they are often the exclusive record of societies outside the modern world system. If we winnow carefully the ethnohistorical biases in our records and the bad questions used in our beginning propositions, we may find that we do indeed have something new to say. At the very least, what is shown by the studies initiated here is that the pattern of gender distinctions shown among very early states is equivocal, rather strange, and very, very interesting. Engels would probably have been surprised.

The remaking of nations I began this research by rejecting belief in the primordial and genetic basis of gender inequality and attempted to approach ancient data as though current knowledge of the past were all filtered by the ahistorical lens described by Wolf. I organized a project for a group of students to investigate archaeological sources on a number of early complex societies. Each researcher approached a body of archaeological data for the first time to test the proposition made by Engels (1884) and accepted by so many subsequent authors that the rise of states and economic classes must necessarily include the domination of women and their reification as a social class. What do the data really show? The first generalization to be made is that in none of the cases examined are the data either simple or clear. While this is not surprising at first glance, since no one expected to be able to literally “dig up gender,” in light of another observation it is decidedly so. In none of the cultures examined were status distinctions difficult to identify archaeologically. Had this been the case, the culture would not have qualified for our sample of course, but the point to be made is that the absence of clear evidence of the subordination of women exists in the context of cultures famous for their representation of status distinctions in general. We found this to be true time after time. Since

Rethinking complex society

29

cultures without evidence of status distinctions do not usually get counted as states, it seems a likely possibility that the manner in which states are defined and identified archaeologically is based on sexist assumptions about what behavior counts as political, what organizations function as economic, and what material culture indicates either. The second generalization to be made concerns the situation in which we found ourselves when we attempted to reanalyze data collected and analyzed by scholars with a competing agenda, however implicit. We immediately ran into the empirical legacy of bad questions. For archaeologists studying early states, this appears embedded in the various evolutionary definitions that have been advanced to identify states. Since the domination of women is accepted from the outset of empirical research and data gathering as signifying the existence of a complex society (as opposed to a more primitive tribe or chiefdom, where roles are expected to be less rigidly and hierarchically defined), any evidence of gendered behavior is interpreted in this light. Hatch provides a classic example: some females of the Dallas culture of Tennessee “were buried with domestic utensils such as shell spoons,” (italics added), whereas some male burials “were set apart by the addition of lumps of mineral pigment . . . possibly used in connection with body painting preparatory to community ceremony which only this subset of males was permitted to attend” (1987:11). If the contexts of these artifacts had been reversed, no doubt the men would be seen as attending gendered “spoonbased” ceremonies and the lumps of pigment would have been explained as a cosmetic. Archaeologists consistently ask “How were women subordinate?” or “How subordinate were women?” but not “Were women subordinate?” At a deeper level, however, is the issue of the definitions inherent in standard models of cultural evolution, which modern archaeologists sometimes try not to use, but with little success. In these models, which organize human history into a progressive success story for technologically inclined groups, the rise of the state is the rise of organic solidarity and the shift from an ideologically based hierarchy to an economically based hierarchy. In chiefdoms rulers display pomp and circumstance to reify power and hold onto it; in states they control the means of production (Childe 1951, Brumfiel and Earle 1987). Objective as these determinations seem, they define the salient characteristics of cultures that rise to civilization in terms of roles that, in Europe, are believed to be naturally filled by men. So men, who are expected to be more mobile than women, more aggressive, and more daring, begin long-distance trade and learn to manipulate it, wage warfare, and begin specialist production and market economies. Women may weave, scrape hides, make pottery, raise children, marry and sire kings, accumulate wealth and property, fund wars and economic ventures, and marry outside their home settlements, but unless men do these things they are not historic political acts or specialist economic accomplishments. Negative evidence for

30

K. Anne Pyburn

female status is accepted as meaningful, similar blank spots in the archaeological record for men get serious investigation.

Questionable states Because of the research focus on Wolf ’s premise, all investigators participating in the project were critical of ethnographic analogy, and many rejected it outright. Furthermore, several investigators question traditional ethnographic categories, long considered determined by the incontrovertible biological realities. Matriliny defined by ethnographers as a system privileging brothers over husbands, but never really putting women in charge, cannot and should not be assumed to have been the only alternative to patriliny and patriarchy before the world system. Recollection of exactly who created these categories and on what basis and in what context they did so, is sufficient grounds for treating them as testable propositions, rather than as the only options. Similarly, the idea that multiple genders are characterized by men, women, lesbians, and homosexuals, who are either inauthentic women or inauthentic men, is ethnocentric. This construction still envisions only two genders, and only acknowledges that either could be enacted to some degree by either of two sexes. The idea of multiple genders is something much more complex indeed, that even the most sophisticated ethnographers can easily misunderstand (Jacobs et al. 1997). The possibility of such a construction in prehistory seems as great as the probability that archaeology will show clear evidence for it seems small. Nevertheless, it should be clear why western scholars of the past must remain alive to the possibilities, and not buried in their own assumptions and ethnographies inherited through the patrilineages of the discipline. To test Engels’ proposition as a scientific hypothesis, each investigator focused on a particular group at the point of its transition to complexity, to statehood, to civilization. This led to problems, since this transition is hard to identify (even controversial) in most cases and partakes of the very same evolutionary assumptions that plague gender studies. Was Zimbabwe or Cahokia or Viking Denmark really a complex society? A state? Are we seeking objective characteristics or are we measuring the Moche against Greece, or the Harappans against Washington? As serious scholars of the rise of states have long known, there are no typical cases. Even those cultures used to construct the original prototypes for the traditional model of bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states, such as Mesopotamia or Egypt, are much better known now than was the case when anthropologists and archaeologists first articulated the “scientific” version of cultural evolution. So we simply looked at a variety of relatively unrelated groups during the period when each group began to show evidence of social status distinctions based on economic differences. This seemed the closest we

Rethinking complex society

31

could come to testing Engels’ original proposition against non-European, or pre-European societies. Of course the nature of status differences in early states is invariably an issue of debate among archaeologists, even when such distinctions show up clearly in the archaeological record. Almost every case study resulted in a debate not only about the status of women, but about the status of their culture. And invariably, the stronger the public role of women, the less likely archaeologists are to characterize a culture as a civilization. Were women powerful because state organization had not developed or because the state that had developed did not subjugate them? Ultimately we were able to show that the onset of social classes with economic and political reality and a decisive signature in the archaeological record clearly corresponds to the subjugation of women as a subordinate class only in Mesopotamia, where it may have existed already. One thing these studies consistently demonstrate is that cultural evolutionism involves so much misunderstanding and essentializing of the division of labor and the significance of gender that it is high time for a revision. Another problem we faced was the obvious historical inter-relatedness of several of the civilizations investigated. While it would be ridiculous to claim cultural continuity between Mesopotamia or Greece and Viking Scandinavia, it would be equally foolish to ignore the history of Scandinavian or Zimbabwean economic and political interaction with early expansionist states, even before the transformational impacts of Christianity and Islam. Having made a case for the impact of capitalism through the world system on the role (and the perceived role) of women, yet I am not willing to assume that only industrialized capitalism can use or has used a capitalistic mechanism of dispersal and control. Another way to characterize the phenomenon might be as the “underdevelopment of women.” It is important to recall that those areas sometimes referred to as “secondary states” are cultures whose “otherness” has been used to reify anthropological and archaeological categories of political organization and gender, and therefore merit special scrutiny. Of the groups investigated, the most poorly documented by archaeology are the ancient residents of Great Zimbabwe. Among these Bantu-speaking cattle herders evidence for the rise of a market system and long distance trade intensified the primordial subordination of women – or so says the argument. In Chapter 1, Tracy Luedke looks at these data and finds that archaeologists see relationships between men changing, while relations between women and men are fixed; clearly the same essentialist bias that Wolf identified in studies of nonwestern societies and which appears in most literature on the rise of social complexity, albeit a version specific to Africa. Arguments to the contrary would immediately be taken as arguments against regarding Great Zimbabwe as civilized, and it is clear that common processualist notions of the rise of the state have a profound if implicit gender bias built into them.

32

K. Anne Pyburn

Despite the uniqueness of each complex society that we examined, there was a peculiar continuity in the evolution of the archaeological approach in each case, not so much in terminology or actual field methodology, but in the sequence of assumptions and the hypotheses chosen for investigation, and in the progression of research from essentializing everybody, to essentializing women. Scholars studying at Great Zimbabwe have regarded its inhabitants as ahistorical exactly as Wolf ’s model predicts (Beach 1998). And in particular, in discussions touching on gender, women are invariably expected to be especially culturally conservative, though this assumption may be either implicit or explicit (Connah 1987). The most recent gender research has begun to question some of the timelessness imputed to Zimbabweans by earlier scholars, and new constructions of gender and women’s roles have been considered, but these tend to be as essentialized as the alternatives they critique (Hall 1995, Lane 1995, 1998). In the end, if we truthfully answer the question “What do we know directly from archaeological data about the ancient women of Great Zimbabwe?” the answer must be “almost nothing.” If we then follow by asking whether the ethnohistoric and ethnographic records of groups used to provide analogies for Zimbabwean societies have been influenced by the world system or biased by an unconscious masculinist perspective, the answer must be “certainly.” To date, study of the remains of Great Zimbabwe has added absolutely nothing to our knowledge of women; all that has occurred is that preexisting knowledge and beliefs about women have been extended into the past, on behalf of Great Zimbabwe. As with several of the societies we investigated, the Moundbuilders show much evidence of social rank and status differentiation, but scholars cannot agree about whether the distinctions had an economic reality rather than strictly an ideological or political one. For our purposes, we decided that this did not matter and that if it was clear that only some people had longer lives or plentiful material wealth, we would consider the group eligible for inclusion. Our first problem was to ask what is known about gender in the time periods of the earliest states. After that, we could go into issues of definition and questions about Engels’ true meaning. In Chapter 2, Laura Pate finds that among the Moundbuilders, gender distinctions are not clear from archaeological data, but gendered assumptions prevail among archaeologists to the point that data relating to women’s roles are not only ignored, but avoided (Hauser 1990). Distributions of material wealth and the symbolism of status hierarchy do not follow the expected patriarchal path. Instead, there is evidence that women may have acted politically (Emerson 1997). Here we hit the wall of definition; were the Moundbuilders really a civilization? Does their failure to exhibit other earmarks of western states such as writing indicate a failure to develop a truly complex society and therefore provide an inadequate comparative example? Or have our investigations been so predetermined that evidence of these other factors has been missed or discounted? The same intellectual bias

Rethinking complex society

33

against female labor and activities biases archaeologists against seeing complexity unlike our own as complexity none the less (Galloway 1997). Is it at all realistic to see kin organization as an alternative organizing principle to political organization or economic differentiation? Looking at the public roles of Viking women in Chapter 3, Lena Mortensen finds plenty of data on the resistance and the competitive success of women in a complex society (Stalsberg 1991). Despite the powerful mythology of the masculine Viking (Jesch 1991), Viking women clearly participated as full members of their political economy (Sawyer 2000), but of course the Vikings provide a classic example of a complex society that most archaeologists do not define as a state. At the same time, to treat Viking culture as independent of western tradition and history would be ridiculous; there is no sense in which gender roles in ancient Scandinavia could be considered to have been independently invented or unaffected by the rise of the European economic world system. In fact, there is reason to believe Vikings were instrumental in spreading western values and seeding early economic and political integration, since they clearly shared the ideal of males leaving home to raid and trade while women kept the home fires burning (Dommasnes 1982). Though not properly construed as outside western tradition, the status of Vikings in modern archaeology again highlights the problems of definition involved in the investigation of states. No early culture is more swamped by masculinist preconceptions than Sumer (Wright 1996), nor has any locale inspired a more imperialist attitude (Said 1980). In fact, early Sumer has been one of the most popular loci for the instantiation of Marxist theory (cf. Rapp 1977, Zagarell 1986). Layla AlZubaidi’s examination of Sumerian women in Chapter 4 shows that their contribution to their state was almost exactly the same as that of men, though men are distinguished by degree of wealth or level of activity rather than absolute differences of opportunity or dominance (Asher-Greve 1985). As with many early states, the visibility of women in ceremonial contexts is not considered evidence of genuine authority, economic control, or political autonomy (Nemet-Nejat 1999, Pollock 1991, Winter 1987). More importantly for this study, the history of the rise of the world system may mean that the position of women in ancient Sumeria is homologous or even ancestral to their situation in modern nation states. Lambert (1987) argues that gender roles were considered part of the divine ordering of the universe – clearly the same type of naturalization of gender categories common to extant civilizations. Nevertheless, there is some question about whether the categories were naturalized by the Sumerians quite as much as by Lambert. Sumerian women were acculturated into a world system that had as much to do with creation of the modern world system as with isolation from it. Aside from the traditional lauding of Mesopotamia for all the historical “firsts” (agriculture, irrigation, writing, legal codes, trading empires) occurring there, the use of naturalized gender categories in the

34

K. Anne Pyburn

service of a hegemonic political economy (van de Mieroop 1989) may also be attributed to the Middle East, perhaps even as another “first.” Nevertheless, Al-Zubaidi’s interrogation opens the tantalizing possibility that even in Mesopotamia, gender subordination may have become the norm sometime shortly after the establishment of class distinctions. Looking at literature on the Moche of Peru in Chapter 5, Cristina Alcalde finds that the same preexisting assumptions guide most interpretations (Baudin 1961, Rodriguez López, 1994). For example, depictions of female sexuality are said to symbolize passive fertility, whereas male sexuality is said to symbolize active virility, despite the fact that Moche women are depicted in art and represented in burials as wage earners, professional curers, wealthy elites, priestesses controlling elaborate ritual events, and lesbian lovers (Benson 1972, 1988, Campana, 1994, Verano 1994). Interestingly, the transition to state-level organization is accompanied by the appearance of depictions of female supernatural beings in iconography and the burials of markedly elite women (Alva and Donnan 1993, Hocquenghem and Lyon 1980). Yet Moche women are generally said to have held inferior social roles to men. Representations of sexualized male/female pairs receive essentialist interpretations: whatever act is shown, archaeologists assume that women are not enjoying it. Population movements and a lack of identification with the ancient Moche on the part of modern residents of the Moche homeland make cultural continuity doubtful (Silverblatt 1988), yet ethnohistory and recent ethnographies continue to be used to support conclusions about gender hierarchies in the Peruvian past (Niles 1989). Despite the quality of preservation and the quantity both of remains and of the studies of them (Capel and Markoe 1996, Watterson 1991), Gabriel Wrobel in Chapter 6 finds that the information on predynastic Egypt is more equivocal than expected. Easy assumptions about subordination are contradicted with the striking amount of legal and economic independence (Robins 1993, Johnson 1996), and even political influence (Fischer 1989) afforded elite women. Instances of equal treatment of males and females in death result in the usual interpretation: kin organization. But also as usual, it is not possible to tell whether women were necessarily empowered by the reliance on kin ties, or as equal members of a complex society (Anderson 1992). While the economic and historical significance of the apparent connection between Egypt and Mesopotamia has been questioned (Hassan 1988), in the context of this book, the nature of this interaction is crucial. Since changes in gender hierarchy may be concomitant with certain economic and ideological and political exchange, in the final analysis, it may be inaccurate to regard Egypt and Sumer as utterly independent developments. As with other early civilizations, the classical focus on palaces and the artifacts of elite life has left issues of the division of labor and changes in the lives of ordinary people during the rise of a state hierarchy relatively unexplored in Egypt. Wrobel’s observations on the literature of burial data

Rethinking complex society

35

from the Predynastic period show that although evidence for status distinctions skyrocketed in this era of rising bureaucracy, clear gender distinctions were vague. Many discussions are typified by the situation at the cemetery of Tarkhan (Ellis 1992), where the discovery that more grave goods appear with female interments than with male has been met with the counter that status was indicated by the size of the burial hole, which may have been larger for men, though looting has made these measurements unreliable in many cases. Other authors have reached different conclusions based on more nuanced data sets (Bard 1992, Castillos 1982). Wrobel’s expertise as a physical anthropologist makes possible his critical analysis of numerous recent analyses of human remains from cemeteries. In every case, without the preexisting assumption that women were subordinate by the modern definition of that term, the case for the dominant role of men is seriously weakened if not altogether undermined. Archaeologists’ confidence in what is already known about the role of women has led them to overlook some crucial questions. Wrobel found human osteology a potentially useful avenue of investigation, making the case that interrogating gender can wring new data from old skeletal collections, and result not only in alternative lines of reasoning, but in better science. The most challenging case was undertaken by Candice Lowe who researched Harappa. She reports her findings in Chapter 7. The paucity of clear data on status differentiation has encouraged imaginative reconstructions of Harappan social organization. While there can be no doubt of the social complexity and stratification of cultures of the Indus Valley, the exact nature of social ranking remains unclear and many scholars have argued for an egalitarian system (Miller 1985, Wenke 1990). Others maintain that the degree of organization and specialist production, along with certain architectural details and apparent centralization of both residence patterns and trade, make political hierarchy more likely (Wright 1989, Kenoyer 1989). Data from this culture are extremely vague, but numerous statues of men and women depict men naked while women are shown wearing jewelry. There is no empirical way to be sure that the presence of decorative apparel indicates lower status than nudity; were the situation reversed, the dominance of men would certainly be asserted. The two traditional interpretations of this, either that the Harappans did not develop true civilization or that clothing on women is an indication of subordination, are both examples of assumptions that need serious testing. More recent analyses of Harappan material considering skeletal evidence and evidence from specialist manufacturing make this picture even more confused. Despite the difficulty of sexing juveniles, physical anthropological analyses of human remains from Harappa have been used to suggest that there was more stress on female children, and the presence of more dental caries among women has been used to support the idea that women had a poorer diet (in Kenoyer 1989). Of course the burial data most clearly reflect

36

K. Anne Pyburn

that more gracile children experienced greater skeletal stress, not at all an unlikely situation regardless of gender if children were treated equally, and that women’s diet was different does not rule out the possibility that it was actually of higher status, or of equal status to that of men. Analysis of specialist production has led several authors to argue that Harappans were organized by kin ties rather than by an economic or political hierarchy (Hegde et al. 1993, Kenoyer 1989, Wright 1989). Extant jajmani systems are used to provide analogy, with caveats about the likelihood of change over time. Nevertheless these studies fall into the same essentialist trap familiar from our observation of research on other groups. It is possible that the Harappan case is the exception that proves the rule, since women do appear to be relatively undifferentiated from men, and even superior in some contexts, but according to Engels a kin-based society would be expected to empower women. If production is kin based, then women’s role in the family would assure them a prominent place in the social order. I am not ready to accept a gender-based dichotomy in the sources of sociopolitical and economic power, and the data from Harappa and the Indus region are too inconclusive as yet. Improved analysis and clearer address of the issue would certainly repay the analyst. The greatest surprise regarding the societies researched came from recent work on the Agean. Association with the infamously misogynist Greeks caused us to anticipate a similarly unequal treatment of women by men among the earlier Ageans. Sean Dougherty’s discussion of Minoan culture in Chapter 8 certainly encountered the western romance with essentialized Classical cultures. The desire to see what Europeans thought was uplifting in their predecessors, although in sharp contrast with the exoticism applied to the New World and cultures to the east of Europe, nevertheless resulted in stereotyped portrayals of gender (Evans 1930) echoed in the more sophisticated but still under-examined interpretations of more recent scholars (Talalay 1994). The interplay of disciplinary history with discovery provides a more informative explanation for our view of Minos than a simple summary of extant data. Iconographic analyses have challenged the pan-European mother goddess theory, as well as the gender hierarchy so often imputed without support (Marinatos 1995). Recent work by Rehak (1998) on Bronze Age Agean art in general even indicates the possibility of a gender reversal in the iconography of early representational art that appeared with the rise of social distinctions. The portrayal of women places them in a distinctly superior position over men in much iconography of these early cultures. In my own investigations I found that Maya women, invariably constructed as “keepers of tradition,” are especially prone to being seen living in an epic past. Evidence from their daily lives is mixed casually with evidence taken from the ethnohistoric documents of Spanish missionaries during the conquest and colonization of Maya lands by Europeans, and from present day

Rethinking complex society

37

women living in modern nation states (McAnany 1995, 2001). The bias of recorders who were not only altering the Maya system as rapidly as possible, but who had promised their god to eschew the wicked influence of women, is almost never discussed, and modern practices are recorded as authentic only if they correspond to gender stereotypes (Restall 1995). Consequently, discussion of Maya gender systems invariably confirms the a priori assumptions of the investigator. As with most investigations into the archaeology of gender, the absence of evidence is the major support for the dominance of men. For example, a recent article on male dominance among the Maya argues that the prevalence of men in Maya art indicates domination of the political order by men (Haviland 1997). But where the situation is reversed, as at Harappa, few scholars argue for the domination of the political order by women. One alternative that has been discussed is the possibility that representations of men in Maya art should be understood in terms of their intended audience (Joyce 2000, 2001, 2002), and that these representations may have been intentionally provocative if not erotic. Such a construction, while not at all improbable, would certainly be the one given if most representations were female. Quantities of female representations are consistently written off as goddesses “representing” rather than wielding power, or as “pin ups” intended for a dominant male gaze (Joyce 2000). As with most osteological studies, those purporting to identify clear sex differentiation invariably make the tautological mistake of dividing the data by sex at the outset of the research and then analyzing the two resulting populations for evidence of differences. In addition, while problems of sample bias are sometimes mentioned, the repercussions of such bias are never discussed fully. If only elite populations are considered, or if they are disproportionately considered, what does this mean about the significance of the sample? And even if differences appear between male and female interments, must they necessarily be evidence of subordination, and never just evidence of difference?

In the end Marx and Engels knew only one history – the history of capitalism, the history of the world that the west told to itself. The question is not simply whether Engels was right that women are necessarily dominated by a capitalist or any other economic system, but whether historians and the agents of history and cultural change who gave us our records essentialized women and accepted the view of Marx and Engels that the domination of women was inevitable with the rise of the state. Of course scholars and politicians did and do see the low status of women this way, as a consequence of capitalistic exploitation, or as a consequence of cultural evolution. But even in situations where this is true, it is no longer interesting simply to identify gender subordination; it is time to ask for specifics and to investigate

38

K. Anne Pyburn

historical connections. And archaeologists need to continue to ask whether we are really finding clear evidence of the domination of women by men in early states. If we fail to find it, is it because the cultures we investigate were not states, not capitalists, or not sexist? Or is the problem really that the discredited but still ubiquitous theory of cultural evolution is holding up our vision of the past? The contributions summarized here are very preliminary studies. Nevertheless, the failure to find unequivocal support for the patterns of gender distinction long considered well established suggests that further investigation would be worthwhile in a broader field. Other scholars have argued that capitalism commodifies women; Wolf argues that capitalism essentializes cultures. Capitalism also essentializes women in order to commodify them, but this is an historical process that situates women outside of history in the same way as the world system creates underdeveloped peripheries. Like geographic peripheries, women are characterized as natural, traditional, fertile, uncivilized, dangerous, pacified with trinkets, and in need of government control. But women have used this liminal status outside history as a source of power and a means of survival and resistance, even though we have been unable to reset the terms of the debate to allow for the possibility that women have history. Archaeologists, even many feminist archaeologists, continue to use the inadequate tools of cultural evolutionism to think with. But we can begin to reevaluate the data; we can begin to look at prehistory for evidence of other ways of framing gender and we can insist that essentialism is wrong. Perhaps in this way we can begin to ask questions that will give more objective, more interesting, and more useful answers. Despite their sketchy and preliminary nature, and it has been extremely difficult to keep the burgeoning literature on gender from so many culture areas up to date enough to send this book to press, the following chapters strongly suggest the hypothesis that historically, class creates gender, and not the reverse.

References cited Alva, Walter and Christopher Donnan (1993) The Royal Tombs of Sipán. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Anderson, Wendy (1992) Badarian burials: Evidence of social inequality in Middle Egypt during the Early Predynastic Era. Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 29: 51–66. Asher-Greve, Julia M. (1985) Frauen in Altsumerischer Zeit. Malibu: Undena Publications. Askew, Kelly (1999) Female circles and male lines: Transformations in gender relations along the Swahili coast. Africa Today 46(3/4): 67–102. Ashmore, Wendy (2002) Encountering Maya women. In Ancient Maya Women. Ed. Traci Ardren, pp. 229–245. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Rethinking complex society

39

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland (1994) Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times. New York: Norton. Bard, Kathryn (1992) Toward an interpretation of the role of ideology in the evolution of complex society in Egypt. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 11: 1–24. Bateson, Gregory (1958) Naven, a Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baudin, Louis (1961) Daily Life in Peru under the Last Incas. London: Allen & Unwin. Beach, D.N. (1998) Cognitive archaeology and the imaginary history at Great Zimbabwe. Current Anthropology 39(1):47–72. Benson, Elizabeth (1972) The Mochica: A Culture of Peru. London: Thames and Hudson. —— 1988 Women in Mochica Art. In The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture. Ed. Virginia Miller, 63–68. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bevan, Lynne (2001) Indecent Exposure: Sexuality, Society and the Archaeological Record. Glasgow: The Cruithne Press. Brace, C. Loring (1988) The Stages of Human Evolution: Human and Cultural Origins, 3rd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Bruhns, Karen and Karen Stothert (1999) Women in Ancient America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Brumfiel, Elizabeth and Timothy Earle (1987) Specialization, Exchange, and Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Judith (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. —— (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Campana, Cristobal (1994) El entorno cultural de un dibujo mochica. In Moche: Propuestas y Perspectivas. Ed. Santiago Uceda and Elias Mujica, pp. 449–468. Trujillo: Asociacion Peruana para el Fomento de las Ciencias Sociales. Capel, Anne K. and Glenn E. Markoe (1996) Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt. Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Museum and New York: Hudson Hills Press. Castillos, Juan Jose (1982) Analysis of Egyptian Predynastic and Early Dynastic cemeteries: final conclusions. Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 12: 29–53. Childe, V. Gordon (1951) Social Evolution. London: Watts and Co. Claassen, Cheryl (1997) Women in Prehistory : North America and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Cohen, Colleen, Richard R. Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje (1996) Beauty on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge. Conkey, Margaret and Joan Gero (1991) Tensions, pluralities, and engendering archaeology: An introduction to women and prehistory. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Ed. Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, pp. 3–30, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Conkey, Margaret and Janet Spector (1984) Archaeology and the study of gender. In Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 7. Ed. Michael Schiffer, pp. 1–38. New York: Academic Press.

40

K. Anne Pyburn

Connah, Graham (1987) A question of economic basis: Great Zimbabwe and related sites. Chapter 8 in African Civilizations: Pre-colonial Cities and State in Tropical Africa: An Archaeological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis-Kimball, Jeannine (2002) Warrior Women: An Archaeologist’s Search for History’s Hidden Heroines. New York: Warner Books. de Waal, Frans (1996) Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dommasnes, Liv Helga (1982) Late Iron Age in western Norway. Female roles and ranks as deduced by from an analysis of burial customs. Norwegian Archaeological Review 15(1–2): 70–84. Ellis, Chris (1992) A statistical analysis of the protodynastic burials in the “Valley” Cemetery of Kafr Tarkhan. In The Nile Delta in Transition: 4th–3rd Millennium BC. Ed. E. C. M. van den Brink, pp. 241–258. Tel Aviv: van der Brink. Emerson, T. E. (1997) Cahokian elite ideology and the Mississippian cosmos. In Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World. Ed. T. R. Pauketat and T. E. Emerson, pp. 191–228. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Engels, Friedrich (1884) The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: International Publishers. Evans, Sir Arthur (1930) The Palace of Minos at Knossos, Vol. 3. London: Macmillan. Falk, Dean (1998) Brain evolution in females: An answer to Mr Lovejoy. In Reader in Gender Archaeology. Ed. Kelly Hayes-Gilpin and David Whitley, pp. 115–136. London: Routledge. Farnham, Christie (1987) The Impact of Feminist Research in the Academy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press Fischer, Henry G. (1989) Women in the Old Kingdom and the Heracleopolitan period. In Women’s Earliest Records From Ancient Egypt and Western Asia. Ed. Barbara S. Lesko, pp. 5–30. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Galloway, P. (1997) Where have all the menstrual huts gone? The invisibility of menstrual seclusion in the late prehistoric southeast. In Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. Ed. C. Claassen and R. A. Joyce, pp. 45–62. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gero, Joan M. (1983) Gender bias in archaeology: A cross cultural perspective. In The Socio-Politics of Archaeology. Ed. J. Gero, D. Lacy, and M. Blakey. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, Department of Anthropology, Research Reort No. 23: 51–57. —— (1991) Genderlithics: Women’s roles in stone tool production. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Ed. Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, pp. 163–193. Oxford: Blackwell. Gero, Joan M. and Margaret Conkey (1991) Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Oxford: Blackwell. Gilchrist, Roberta (1999) Gender and Archaeology: Contesting the Past. London and New York: Routledge. Goodall, Jane (1971) In The Shadow of Man. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. —— (1986) The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University. —— (1990) Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Rethinking complex society

41

Grosz, Elizabeth (1994) Bodies and knowledges: Feminism and the crisis of reason. In Feminist Epistemologies. Ed. Linda Lacoff and Elizabeth Potter, pp. 187–215. New York: Routledge. Gunder-Frank, Andre (1967) Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gustafsen, Lowell and Amelia Trevelyan (2002) Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations. Westport, CT, and London: Bergin & Garvey. Hall, Martin (1995) Great Zimbabwe and the lost city: The cultural colonization of the South African past. In Theory in Archaeology: A World Perspective. Ed. P. J. Ucko. London: Routledge. Handsman, Russell (1991) Whose art was found at Lepenski Vir? Gender relations and power in archaeology. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Ed. Joan M. Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, pp. 329–365. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Haraway, Donna (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. —— (1991) Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Harding, Sandra G. (1986) The Science Question in Feminism. Ithica: Cornel University Press. Hassan, Fekri (1988) The Predynastic of Egypt. Journal of World Prehistory 2(2): 135–185. Hatch, James W. (1987) Mortuary indicators of organizational variability among Late Prehistoric chiefdoms in the Southeastern US interior. In Chiefdoms in the Americas. Ed. Richard Drennan and Carlos Uribe, pp. 9–18. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Hauser, R. E. (1990) The two-spirit and the Illinois Indian tribe during the last half of the seventeenth century. Ethnohistory 37(1): 45–65. Haviland, William (1997) The rise and fall of sexual inequality: Death and gender at Tikal Guatemala. Ancient Mesoamerica 8(1): 1–20. Hayes-Gilpin, Kelly and David Whitley (eds) (1998) Reader in Gender Archaeology. London: Routledge. Hegde, K. T. M., R. V. Karanth, and S. P. Sychanthavong (1993) On the composition and technology of Harappan microbeads, In Harappan Civilization: A Recent Perspective. Ed. Gregory L Possehl, pp. 239–243. New Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta: American Institute of Indian Studies and Oxford and IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd. Hocquenghem, Anne Marie and Patricia J. Lyon (1980) A class of anthropomorphic supernatural females in Moche iconography. Ñawpa Pacha 18: 27–48. Hurst-Thomas, David (2000) Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. New York: Basic Books. Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (1997) Two-spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Jesch, Judith (1991) Women in the Viking Age. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press. Johnson, Janet H. (1996) The legal status of women in ancient Egypt. In Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt. Ed. Anne K. Capel and Glenn E. Markoe, pp. 175–186. New York: Hudson Hills Press.

42

K. Anne Pyburn

Joyce, Rosemary (2000) Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica. Austin: University of Texas Press. —— (2001) Negotiating sex and gender in Classic Maya society. In Gender in Prehispanic America. Ed. Cecelia Klein, pp. 109–141. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library —— (2002) Desiring women: Classic Maya sexualities. In Ancient Maya Gender Identity and Relations. Ed. Lowell Gustafson and Amelia M. Trevelyan, pp. 329–344. Westport and London: Bergen & Garvey. Kano, Takayoshi (1992) The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kehoe, Alice (1998) The Land of Prehistory. London: Routledge. Kenoyer, Jonathan, ed. (1989) Old Problems and New Perspectives in the Archaeology of South Asia. Wisconsin Archaeological Reports, Vol. 2. Lambert, Wilfred G. (1987) Goddesses in the pantheon: A reflection of women in society? In La femme dans le Proche-Orient Antique. Ed. Jean-Marie Durand, pp. 125–130. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Lane, Paul (1995) The use and abuse of ethnography in the study of the southern African Iron Age. Azania 29–30: 51–64. Lane, Paul (1998) Engendered spaces and bodily practices in the Iron Age of southern Africa. In Gender in African Prehistory. Ed. Susan Kent, pp. 179–203. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Leacock, Eleanor Burke (1981) Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lloyd, Lisa (1995) Feminism as method: What scientists get that philosophers don’t. Philosophical Topics 23(2): 37–68. McAnany, Patricia (1995) Living with the Ancestors: Kinship and Kingship in Ancient Maya Society. Austin: University of Texas Press. McAnany, Patricia and Shannon Planck, (2000) Perspectives on actors, gender roles, and architecture at Classic Maya courts and households. In Royal Courts of the Ancient Maya, Vol. 1. Ed. Takeshi Inomata and Stephen Houston, pp. 84–129. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. MacCormack, and Marilyn Strathern (1980) Nature, Culture, and Gender. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. MacFarlane, Alan (1970) Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (1987) Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Marinatos, N. (1995) Formalism and gender roles: A comparison of Minoan and Egyptian Art. In Politeia: Society and State in the Aegean Bronze Age. Ed. R. Laffineur and W.-D. Niemeier, pp. 577–584. (5th 1994: University of Heidelberg) Liège: Université de Liège, Histoire de l’art et archéologie de la Grèce antique. Austin, TX: University of Texas, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory. Marks, Jonathan (2002) What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marx, Karl (1965) Pre-capitalist Economic Formations. New York: International Publishers.

Rethinking complex society

43

Merchant, Carolyn (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution: A Feminist Reappraisal of the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Meskell, Lynne (1995) Goddesses, Gimbutas and ‘New Age’ archaeology. Antiquity 69: 74–86. —— (1999) Archaeologies of Social Life. Oxford: Blackwell. Miller, Daniel (1985) Ideology and the Harappan civilization. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 4:34–71. Miller Virginia, ed. (1988) Production. In The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture, pp. vii–xviii. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Moore, Henrietta L. (1989) Feminism and Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mukhopadhyay, C. and P. Higgins (1988) Anthropological studies of women’s status revisited: 1977–1987. Annual Review of Anthropology 17:461–495. Murdock, George, P. (1967) Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. —— (1983) Outline of World Cultures. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files. Nelson, Sarah (1997) The Archaeology of Gender. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Nemet-Nejat, Karen (1999) Women in Ancient Mesopotamia. In Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide. Ed. Bella Vivante, pp. 85–114. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Niles, Susan (1999) Women in the ancient Andes. In Women’s Roles in Ancient Civilizations: A Reference Guide. Ed. Bella Vivante, pp. 313–337. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Ortner, Sherry B. and Harriet Whitehead (1981) Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pasternak, Burton, Carol Ember, and Melvin Ember (1997) Sex, Gender and Kinship: A Cross-cultural Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Pollock, Susan (1991) Women in a men’s world: Images of Sumerian women. In Engendering Archaeology. Women and Prehistory. Ed. Margaret W. Conkey and Joan M. Gero, pp. 366–387. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Pyburn, K. Anne (1998) Consuming the Maya. Dialectical Anthropology. 23:111–129. Rapp, R. (1977 )Gender and class: An archaeology of knowledge concerning the origin of the state. Dialectical Anthropology 2: 309–316. Rattray, Robert Sutherland (1923) Ashanti. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Rehak, Paul (1998) The construction of gender in Late Bronze Age Agean art. In Redefining Archaeology: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Mary Casey, Denise Donlon, Jeanette Hope, and Sharon Wellfare, pp. 191–198. Canberra, ANH Publications, RSPAS, Australian National University. Restall, Matthew (1995) He wished it in vain: Subordination and resistance among Maya women in Post-Conquest Yucatan. Ethnohistory 42(4): 577–594. Robins, Gay (1993) Women in Ancient Egypt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodriguez López, Luis Francisco (1994) Costa Norte: Diez Mil Años de Prehistoria. Lima: Ministerio de la Presidencia. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Louise Lamphere (eds) (1974) Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

44

K. Anne Pyburn

Russell, Pamela (1998) The Paleolithic mother goddess. Fact or fiction? In Reader in Gender Archaeology. Ed. Kelly Hayes-Gilpin and David Whitley, pp. 261–268. London and New York: Routledge. Said, Edward (1980) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. Sassaman, Kenneth (1998) Lithic technology and the hunter-gatherer sexual division of labor. In Reader in Gender Archaeology. Ed. Kelly Hayes-Gilpin and David Whitley, pp. 159–171. London and New York: Routledge. Sawyer, Birgit (2000) The Viking-Age Rune-Stones: Customs and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Schiebinger, Londa L. (1993) Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Schmidt, Elizabeth (1992) Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Schmidt Peter R. and Thomas Patterson (1995) Making Alternative Histories. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press. Schmidt, Robert and Barbara Voss (eds) (2000) Archaeologies of Sexuality. London: Routledge. Scott, James C. (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press. Segobye, Alinah (1998) Daughters of the cattle: The significance of herding in the growth of complex societies in southern Africa between the tenth and fifteenth centuries AD. In Gender in African Prehistory. Ed. Susan Kent, pp. 227–233. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Silverblatt, Irene (1987) Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smuts, B. (1987) Gender, aggression and influence. In Primate Societies. Ed. Barbara Smuts, Dorothy Cheney, Robert Seyfarth, Richard Wrangham, and Thomas Struhsaker, pp. 400–412. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Snead, James E. (1999) Science, commerce, and control: Patronage and the development of anthropological archaeology in the Americas. American Anthropologist 101(2): 256–271. Spector, Janet (1991) What this awl means: Towards a feminist archaeology. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Ed. Joan Gero and Margaret Conkey, pp. 388–406. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Stalsberg, Anne (1991) Women as actors in north European Viking Age trade. In Social Approaches to Viking Studies. Ed. Ross Samson, pp. 76–83. Glasgow: The Cruithne Press. Stone, Linda (1997) Kinship and Gender: An Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Strathern, Marilyn (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sweely, Tracy, ed. (1999) Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology. London and New York: Routledge. Talalay, Lauren E. (1994) A feminist boomerang: The great goddess of Greek prehistory. Gender and History 6: 165–183. Tate, Caroline (1999) Writing on the face of the moon: Women’s products, archetypes and power in ancient Maya civilization. In Manifesting Power: Gender and the Interpretation of Power in Archaeology. Ed. Tracy Sweely, pp. 81–102. London and New York: Routledge.

Rethinking complex society

45

Tringham, Ruth E. (1991) Households with faces: The challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains. In Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. Ed. Joan Gero and Margaret W. Conkey, pp. 93–131. Oxford: Blackwell. van de Mieroop, Marc (1989) Women in the economy of Sumer. In Women’s Earliest Records from Ancient Egypt and Western Asia. Ed. Barbara S. Lesko, pp. 53–66. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Verano, John (1994) Características Físicas y Biología Osteologica de los Moche. In Moche: Propuestas y Perspectivas. Ed. Santiago Uceda and Elias Mujica, pp. 307–326. Trujillo: Asociación Peruana para el Fomento de las Ciencias Sociales. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1974) The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press. Watkins, Joe (2000) Indigenous Archaeology: American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Watterson, Barbara (1991) Women in Ancient Egypt. New York: St Martins Press. Weiner, Annette (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown, New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wenke, Robert J. (1990) Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three Million Years. New York: Oxford University Press. Whyte, Martin K. (1978) The Status of Women in Preindustrial Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wilk, Richard R. (1991) Household Ecology: Economic Change and Domestic Life among the Kekchi Maya in Belize. Arizona Studies in Human Ecology. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. —— (1995) Learning to be local in Belize: Global systems of common difference. In Worlds Apart: Modernity Through the Prism of the Local. Ed. Daniel Miller, pp. 110–134. Routledge: London. —— (1996) Connections and contradictions: From the Crooked Tree Cashew Queen to Miss World Belize In Beauty on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. Ed. C. Cohen, R. Wilk, and B. Stoeltje, pp. 217–233. New York: Routledge. —— (2004) The Olmec, Miss Universe, and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of Social Archaeology 4(1): 81–98. Winter, Irene J. (1987) Women in public: The disc of Enheduanna, the beginning of the office of EN-priestess and the weight of visual evidence. In La femme dans le Proche-Orient Antique. Ed. Jean-Marie Durand, pp. 189–201. Paris: Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations. Wolf, E. (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wright, Rita (1989) The Indus Valley and Mesopotamian civilizations: A comparative view of ceramic technology. In Old Problems and New Perspectives in the Archaeology of Southeast Asia. Ed. Jonathan Kenoyer, pp. 145–156. Wisconsin Archaeological Reports, Vol. 2. Madison: Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin. —— (1996) Technology, gender and class: Worlds of difference in Ur III Mesopotamia. In Gender and Archaeology. Ed. Rita Wright, pp. 79–110. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Wylie, Alison (1996) The constitution of archaeological evidence: Gender politics and science. In The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, Power. Ed. P. Galison and D. Stump, pp. 311–343. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

46

K. Anne Pyburn

—— (1997) Good science, bad science, or science as usual? Feminist critiques of science. In Women in Human Evolution. Ed. L. Hager, pp. 29–55. New York and London: Routledge. Wylie, Alison, Margaret C. Nelson, and Sarah M. Nelson (eds) (1994) Equity Issues for Women in Archaeology. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Number 5, Washington DC. Zagarell, Allen (1986) Trade, women, class, and society in ancient Western Asia. Current Anthropology 27 (5): 415–430. Zihlman, Adrienne (1989) Gender: The view from physical anthropology. In The Archaeology of Gender: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Chacmool Conference. Ed. Dale Walde and Noreen D. Willows, pp. 4–10. Calgary: Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary.

Chapter 1

Gendered states Gender and agency in economic models of Great Zimbabwe Tracy Luedke

African archaeology has been slow in coming to the topic of gender. This does not mean that there has not been much said and implied about gender in the writings of Africanist archaeologists. On the contrary, where gender is not explicitly addressed may be where it is most profoundly embedded in scholarly perspective and most radically reliant on assumptions and essentialisms. This seems to be the case in the scholarship on Great Zimbabwe. While very little is said about the nature of the gender roles and ideologies that may have existed on the Zimbabwe plateau, assumptions about the gendered division of labor and male primacy in political life have led to a body of scholarship which places the rise of the state firmly in the male domain. Women are at best considered pawns in the social and political maneuvering of men, signifiers of male power. This essentializing of gender roles and ideologies is particularly entrenched because it is entwined with another strand of essentializing, that which regards Africans and African cultures as timeless and unchanging, without history, incapable of innovation. The women who lived and worked at Great Zimbabwe are thus doubly essentialized, as examples of women’s timeless, economically marginal roles and as the bearers of primal African cultural systems. These assumptions are utilized in a sleight of hand in which the processes of state formation are assumed to have been the work of men alone, and the profound social changes accompanying these processes are nonetheless assumed to have had no effect on gender roles.

Theorizing gender and the state The feminist anthropology of the 1970s included a number of approaches which attempted to locate the watershed dynamic or event that might provide a universal explanation for the subordination of women. Ortner (1974) suggested the root of gender inequity lay in the universal symbolic differentiation between nature and culture. Rosaldo (1980) located it in another binary opposition, that of the public versus the private domain. A third attempt at a universal explanation was undertaken by feminist scholars drawing on Engels (Leacock 1981; Sacks 1982). These scholars built on

48

Tracy Luedke

Engels’ model in The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, which suggested that the transformation of gender ideologies which accompanied private property and state formation constituted the “world-historic defeat of the female sex.” The model was attractive to feminists in part because it allowed a way out of what di Leonardo has called the “feminist conundrum” (1991). Feminist anthropologists struggled with the contradiction between denouncing male domination in all its guises and honoring the anthropological mandate of cultural relativism. Engels’ model solved the conundrum by locating the source of women’s subordination not in cultural ideologies but in the history of global political economy. For Engels, the creation of economic and political inequalities inherent to the state was accompanied by equally profound changes in gender hierarchies within family and society. In short, women lost out, as economic opportunities gave men the leverage and the incentive to establish social control over women and children. Engels considered the family a microcosm of the larger society of which it was a part. Thus power dynamics among individual family members mirrored those between classes, such that for modern capitalist society, “in the family, [the husband] is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat” (p. 744). For Engels, this social configuration constituted only a temporary stopping point on the evolutionary road to the revolution. Ironically, while Engels describes this patriarchal stage in political economic terms, the “original” condition of “mother right” is described in essential, biological terms. Even in this most materialist of analyses, biology is the starting point; gender, and specifically women’s identities, are based in biological reproduction, and, significantly for a discussion of politics, this identity is defined as inherently communal. Thus, even in a model which attends to the gender implications of profound social and economic change, women are described as being affected by this change, not themselves effecting it (cf. Silverblatt 1988). Thus while Engels’ model in one sense resolved the feminist conundrum, it also created new theoretical problems. All of these universalizing models came under critique during the 1970s and 1980s. The elegance of explanations based on nature versus culture, private versus public, and the disempowering of women in state formation fell prey to the plethora of counter-examples, the difficulties of applying categories like “public” and “private” to the multitude of configurations and conceptions cross-culturally, and a general critique of evolutionism. This feminist theorizing and re-theorizing took place in the context of certain trends in the social sciences. A number of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s were engaging in what di Leonardo glosses as a “history and critique of science” approach (di Leonardo 1991: 20). These scholars argued for “attention to history rather than structure, for the recognition of short-term, nonrecurrent historical regularities or of sheer randomness in human affairs” (di Leonardo, 1991: 19).

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

49

In this camp was Eric Wolf ’s Europe and the People Without History (1982). Wolf recognized the effects that the assumption of and search for an unfolding narrative about the past had on anthropological scholarship. Western conceptions of history as unilineal and developmental had the effect of turning history into a “moral success story” (Wolf 1982: 5). This story assumed that the way things have arisen historically is not one of many possible trajectories of events that might have occurred, but the result of a natural and inevitable progression toward the emergence of nations and cultures whose essential identities are ahistorical. It is a process of “turning names into things”: “By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (6). The reification of cultures by anthropologists grew in part out of the methodology of fieldwork. The need to limit one’s fieldwork in time and space led to the demarcation of boundaries of an identifiable cultural whole as the limits of the researchers case study. Thus “a methodological unit of inquiry was turned into a theoretical construct by assertion, a priori” (14). Wolf, in contrast, privileges intersocietal processes over decontextualized case studies: Once we locate the reality of society in historically changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple and branching social alignments . . . the concept of a fixed, unitary, and bounded culture must give way to a sense of the fluidity and permeability of cultural sets. In the rough-and-tumble of social interaction, groups are known to exploit the ambiguities of inherited forms, to impart new evaluations or valences to them, to borrow forms more expressive of their interests, or to create wholly new forms to answer changed circumstances . . . “A culture” is thus better seen as a series of processes that construct, reconstruct, and dismantle cultural materials, in response to identifiable determinants. (387) Wolf ’s critiques are useful for thinking about all kinds of essentialisms, although Wolf himself focuses on the essentializing of culture, nation, and society and does not attend to gender. Feminist archaeologists’ critiques have recognized similar dynamics in past research, particularly with a focus on what this means for theorizing gender. Much as Wolf identified Western approaches to history as a “moral success story” (5), Conkey and Williams recognize in archaeology a “methodology of narration” (Conkey and Williams 1991: 104). The pursuit of a continuous narrative about the past informs the “origins research” (104) that is so prevalent and favored among researchers of the human past. Conkey and Williams suggest that “origins research” is fundamentally essentialist and promotes “the definitions of

50

Tracy Luedke

phenomena in terms of their putative essential features: what are the essential features of the earliest hominids, of the pristine states, of the division of labor? If, however, one holds that there are only states, in particular historical settings, or that gender relations and the division of labor are socially and culturally constructed and highly variable, then there is nothing essential to be located at a point of origin; there is nothing essential about gender nor about women’s experience” (p. 113). Conkey and Williams’ desire to get beyond archaeological essentialisms regarding the course of human history is important in relation to Engels and his critics mentioned above, for, as Conkey and Williams point out, the specific story that archaeological narratives tell privileges the rise of the state as a key, recognizable evolutionary moment. The origin of the state, the rise of “civilization,” is posited as a basic dividing line in human history, a qualitative and immutable shift in the nature of human social life (Conkey and Williams 1991: 106). Thus a critique of archaeology that takes both Wolf and Conkey to heart must pay particular attention to presentations of the “rise of the state.” The insights of Engels, Wolf, feminist anthropologists, and feminist critics of archaeology provide the framing questions for this paper’s attempt to make sense of how archaeologists and ethnohistorians have modeled socioeconomic processes and relationships at Great Zimbabwe. Following Engels I ask in what ways gender ideologies are formed or transformed in the process of state formation. From Wolf comes the impetus to uncover historically specific social identities and relations, to identify and critique the ahistorical assumptions about gender and culture that are so often employed. From Wolf and Conkey and Williams, the recognition that it is not just that essentialisms about gender and culture are parallel, but that they are intertwined, mutually constitutive, and mutually reinforcing. Archaeologists’ models for the processes which gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe bear many of the assumptions critiqued above. Like Engels and subsequent theorists, these models provide an unfolding narrative which for all its depiction of profound transformations, clings to certain assumptions about the essential natures of the individuals and social groups involved: men as public producers, women as private reproducers; men as actors, women as acted upon; men as innovative, women as static; men as central, women as incidental. Despite the shortcomings of Engels’ model, it should not be abandoned entirely. The insight that political economic transformation fundamentally entails or is perhaps even dependent upon transformations in gender roles, gender relations, and the gendered division of labor is crucial and undeniable. But less should be assumed about the “natural” state of men, women, or any other social group, either before, during, or after such political economic transformations. The question should be: what are the productive and social roles of men and women and in what ways do they precipitate and in what ways are they transformed by political economic change?

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

51

My more immediate interests in this paper are in examining the gender implications of archaeological explanations for the mechanisms that gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe, which controled much of the Zimbabwe plateau between 1275 and 1450. I am interested in the ways in which archaeological evidence is used in models of the rise of the state, in terms of what those models imply both about the role of women’s production in the transition to statehood and the shifts or continuities in women’s roles and status that accompanied that transition. I am looking as much at what is not being said as at what is being said about gender and the roles of women in these models. For despite a general lack of explicit discussion of these aspects of social relations within the state, there are telling assumptions to the models of the state being employed. Specifically, the state (and the “people” or “nation”) is implicitly gendered male by the researchers describing it; the gendering of the state is accomplished first by attributing the rise of the state to specific economic and political activities which are considered or assumed to be part of a male domain. Aspects of productive life that are known to have been or may have been equally or wholly women’s domain are denied a role in state formation. The gendering of the state is also accomplished by a discourse about patrilineality which envisions women as chattels in the system, ignoring that, if a world full of ethnographic analogies is any indication, even in the most patriarchal of patrilineal systems, women have some leverage and recourse, if only by virtue of the fact that they are valuable to the economic status of their fathers. These social scientific discourses about the nature of the Zimbabwe state are also discourses about gender. Discussions of early state formation in Zimbabwe characterize men as the innovators, as the movers in a process that is fundamentally about change, development, progress. Women and their products, on the other hand, are relegated to the position of signifying men’s economic and political power; women are the “moved” not the “movers” in these political and economic processes. In deconstructing these models, I will give particular attention to which aspects of economic life are privileged and suggest that this privileging has gender implications. Further, I will suggest that the depiction of women as static is tied to more general depictions of African cultures as static, as incapable of indigenously generated innovation, a legacy, in Zimbabwe, of what Garlake (1982) has called the “settler paradigm.” I would suggest that this legacy informs particularly the depiction of women implied by archaeological models of the rise of the Zimbabwe state. Women are relegated to the background in these models, implicitly tied to an unchanging primal culture. I will approach this by examining what archaeologists have suggested about the two “prime movers” that are offered as the mechanisms for the rise of the Zimbabwe state: cattle and trade in luxury goods with the east coast of Africa. I will begin by contextualizing the example with

52

Tracy Luedke

background on the history of investigation of archaeological sites on the Zimbabwe plateau.

Archaeology on the Zimbabwe Plateau The region under discussion is the Zimbabwe plateau, the 4 000–5 000 foot high plateau which is the watershed between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. Ecologically the plateau is characterized by temperate rolling plains covered in savanna woodlands. The plateau offered many resources to its early inhabitants: agricultural land, timber, wild animal resources, and a supply of building materials in the form of granite domes which exfoliate sheets of rock that are easily broken into building materials (Garlake 1973: 15). As many as 150 stone-walled hilltop ruins have been identified on the plateau. These sites are referred to as Zimbabwes, the Shona word which has been variably translated as meaning houses of stone, venerated houses, and court, residence, or grave of a chief (Connah 1987: 192). Most of the Zimbabwes are situated throughout the Zimbabwe plateau, with a particular concentration on the edges of the plateau, but several outlying Zimbabwetype sites have also been located as far away as coastal Mozambique. Great Zimbabwe is the most impressive of all of the stone-walled ruins of the region. The site is located near Masvingo in south-central Zimbabwe and consists of a series of stone ruins covering an area of 720 hectares. The site includes a multi-chambered stone ruin perched on a hilltop and a series of stone ruins on the floor of the valley below, dominated by the extraordinary “Great Enclosure,” an elliptical enclosure formed by a stone wall 244 meters in length and in places 5 meters thick and 10 meters high. It is no wonder that these dramatic structures have attracted a great deal of attention, popular, scientific, and political, over the years. The ruins at Great Zimbabwe were encountered in 1871 by Carl Mauch, a German geologist who was searching for the gold of King Solomon’s mines. Other early investigators shared Mauch’s delusions and spent their time looking for evidence to support the thesis that Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenician colonists and represented the biblical Ophir of Solomon. In 1890 the area was occupied by Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa company. Rhodes encouraged the view that the site represented the work of “ancient colonists” as it buttressed his claims to sovereignty and legitimacy in Africa. Recognizing “the considerable propaganda value that evidence of ancient foreign settlement , preferably white and successful and with Biblical origins, would have” (Garlake 1982: 1), Rhodes consciously evoked parallels between the Phoenician colonizers and the British. In 1891, 1892, and 1902, several investigators worked on the site in search of evidence to support this hypothesis. These were not trained archaeologists, and they were clearly pursuing a very specific agenda. In fact, these investigators succeeded in

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

53

doing considerable damage to the site. Of note in this regard is a journalist named R. N. Hall, who was hired by the British South Africa Company. Over two years he excavated almost the entire site, removing trees, undergrowth, the excavation heaps of the two previous investigations, fallen stones around the outside of the walls, and at least 3–5 feet, and in some places 12 feet of stratified archaeological material (Garlake 1973: 72). Thus imperialism left marks both tangible and intangible on Great Zimbabwe. In 1905, the first trained archaeological excavations were undertaken by David Randall-MacIver, who confirmed that the site was indeed indigenous. This work was followed by Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s excavations in 1929. Summers, Robinson, and Whitty’s excavations of 1958 established a chronology for the site, and provided the basis upon which all further archaeological work rests. Later important researchers include Thomas Huffman and P.S. Garlake. These researchers established an archaeologically derived chronology of Great Zimbabwe which dated the beginning of stone wall building and evidence of social stratification to 1275. Great Zimbabwe continued as a major regional power from this time until it was abandoned around 1450. Despite substantial archaeological evidence for Great Zimbabwe’s indigenous origins, claims to the contrary were made by Rhodesian nationalists as late as the 1970s. In particular, the Rhodesian Front regime of 1962–1979, intent on declaiming anything that might buttress African claims to equality and sovereignty, denounced archaeologists whose work supported Great Zimbabwe’s African origins and censored museum displays, guide books, and articles that suggested the African origins of the site (Garlake 1982: 1). Despite archaeologists’ uniform acceptance of indigenous origins, Garlake, one of the primary researchers of Great Zimbabwe, still detected in 1982 the legacy of this “settler paradigm”: Although no archaeologists attempted to investigate the traditional culture or history of the Shona people, each brought to his research a whole range of assumptions about Shona society. These were derived entirely from the accepted settler views on the Shona people which were as much a part of the settler ethos as were their views on Great Zimbabwe. The settler paradigm has thus governed all protohistoric research in Zimbabwe even though archaeologists all recognized the absurdity of the settler view on the origins of Great Zimbabwe. (Garlake 1982: 3) This legacy explains in part the privileging of certain topics over others, for example, the attention to elite as opposed to commoner sites, and the attention to establishing the identity of the inhabitants and the nature of early migrations throughout the southern region. Less attention has been given to some crucial aspects of social life. Great Zimbabwe is something of an

54

Tracy Luedke

extreme example in this regard, but it serves as a reminder of the importance of interrogating the politics that lie behind and inform social scientific research. This need for interrogation applies both to the ends to which research results are put as well as the very nature of the topics pursued and, perhaps most tellingly, those not pursued. Archaeological analysis has provided an image of Great Zimbabwe’s political economic position and context in its heyday, although there has been little analysis of the internal social workings of Great Zimbabwe society, owing partly to the lack of excavation of non-elite sites. The image that emerges is of the stone ruins referred to as Great Zimbabwe representing the center of political authority of a large state. The stone buildings would have been the site of residence of the ruling elites, as well as centers of political and religious activity. Outside of these stone walls were the densely packed mud houses of the commoners who made up the population of this capital city, a population which has been estimated to have been as much as 18,000 (Huffman 1984). This capital city was the apex of a much larger state, made up of a network of lesser Zimbabwes and regional populations, all of which probably showed allegiance to and paid tribute to the central governing body at Great Zimbabwe (Connah 1987: 199). Consensus as to this general picture of Great Zimbabwe’s significance in the landscape gives way to multiple interpretations regarding the more important questions of why and how Great Zimbabwe came to occupy this position as the head of a large, centralized, stratified political entity. Several prime movers have been suggested as the economic mechanism that gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe. Of these the two that have received the most attention are cattle and long distance trade. It is to these economic models for the rise of Great Zimbabwe that I now turn.

Cattle Analyses of Great Zimbabwe often give primary importance in economy and society to the role of cattle. Archaeological approaches to faunal remains found on the plateau have focused on quantity and age composition with an eye towards understanding the role of cattle in the economy of the Zimbabwe state. This role is suggested by the volume of faunal remains and by ethnographic analogy to have been significant: “It is well known that cattle are the most important source of wealth in many of the traditional Bantu speaking societies of southern Africa. Their presence in considerable quantities in Late Iron Age faunal samples throughout the region is an indication that this role may have its origin in the distant past” (Thorp 1995: 2). One of the earliest and oft-cited studies of faunal remains is Brain’s analysis of faunal remains from the midden below the hilltop ruins that are a part of the Great Zimbabwe site (Brain 1974). Brain found both that there were a

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

55

great deal of cattle remains among the refuse from the stone-walled ruins and that a very high percentage of the cattle (75 percent) were immature. However, remains at other sites (at elite Mapungubwe sites, Voigt 1983; at commoner Great Zimbabwe sites, Sinclair 1984; at elite Khami sites, Thorp 1995) show a pattern of slaughter of adult animals more in keeping with “traditional” herd management strategies geared towards maintaining herd size as a source of wealth as opposed to using cattle for food. Thorp’s restudy of Brain’s data and comparison of it to other studies of faunal remains from the plateau indicate that the slaughter pattern in evidence at Great Zimbabwe is an anomaly which indicates the degree of social differentiation between elites and commoners (Thorp 1995: 73). Sinclair suggests that the difference may indicate that the elites who lived within the stone-walled enclosures appropriated the animals from the commoners living outside the walls and that their preference for young animals may have been a form of conspicuous consumption (Sinclair 1984: 51). Remains from Manekweni (Barker 1978), the only Zimbabwe tradition site in Mozambique, also show evidence for social differentiation in use of animal resources; faunal remains at that site show that the elites ate beef, whereas commoners ate mutton. Thus the faunal evidence is used in the service of several claims: that cattle, as opposed to other animals, dominated the herds; that the herds were large and an important source of wealth; that the evidence for differential uses of animal resources implies social stratification; and that this stratification, which exists throughout the plateau, is particularly notable at Great Zimbabwe, which is the capital and apex of the state system. The archaeological evidence for the centrality of cattle at Great Zimbabwe and other Zimbabwes coupled with the ecological context of the region led Garlake to suggest that a particular variety of cattle pastoralism gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe (Garlake 1978). Garlake suggests that the positioning of Great Zimbabwe and other Zimbabwes near the edges of the Zimbabwe plateau may indicate that one of the inhabitants’ primary concerns was transhumant pastoralism, in which cattle would have been taken to lower lying areas off the plateau in the dry season in order to take advantage of lowveld vegetation and to the plateau in the wet season to take advantage of highveld vegetation (Garlake 1978). However, despite the evidence that cattle played some role at Great Zimbabwe, Connah (1987) cautions that this evidence may not indicate that cattle played a significant overall role in the larger economy. The consumption of large amounts of young beef by the elites who occupied the stone ruins may not indicate much if anything about the diet or subsistence economy of the majority of the population. Connah points out the distinction shown at Manekweni between an elite diet of beef versus a commoner diet of sheep, goat, and wild game (Barker 1978). Again, the class bias of data from great Zimbabwe may have encouraged a misinterpretation of the economy with both class and gender implications.

56

Tracy Luedke

Another approach to interpreting the role of cattle in the economy and society of the Zimbabwe state can be seen in Huffman’s interpretations of settlement patterns. Huffman employs a structuralist spatial analysis based on Adam Kuper’s concept of the southern African “Bantu cattle culture” to argue for the material and symbolic centrality of cattle, demonstrated through a symbolic encoding of constructed spaces (Huffman 1981, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1996). This approach rests on the idea that the spatial arrangement of settlements reflects cosmology and a “cognitive system” (Huffman 1986: 302). Huffman detects two settlement patterns in southern Africa: the Bantu or Central Cattle Pattern and the Zimbabwe Cattle Pattern. Huffman builds on Adam Kuper’s model of the Bantu Cattle Pattern (Kuper 1980), a settlement pattern in which a ring of houses are arranged around a central area that includes cattle byres, grain storage bins, elite burials, and the men’s court: “the cattle were in the center because they were the principal form of wealth. Indeed, among the southern Bantu, cattle were the main avenue to wives and children and therefore to power, success, and status. As is well known, men acquired rights over women by exchanging cattle, and cattle belonged almost exclusively to the domain of men” (Huffman 1986: 296–8). This central area was the site of boys’ initiation ceremonies and a center of male activity, whereas backyards contained the grave sites of women and low status men (p. 300). Thus Huffman’s analysis reveals a worldview enacted through spatial expressions of dichotomies of high status/low status: right/left: inside/outside: male/female. Huffman answers criticisms of applying recent ethnographic examples across time and place to all southern African communities going back a thousand years by saying: the Bantu Cattle Pattern is a cognitive system, rather than an ethnic identity . . . This pattern . . . appears to be limited to Bantu speakers who are predominantly patrilineal and who exchange cattle for wives. Therefore the presence of this pattern in the archaeological record is persuasive evidence for a distinctive culture system wherever it appears. There seems no reason not to accept the presence of central cattle byres with burials and storage facilities as sufficient evidence for the entire spatial pattern and corresponding culture system. If this cluster of traits is diagnostic, then it is possible to extend it to . . . many iron age settlements. (1986: 302) Huffman describes a second settlement pattern, the “Zimbabwe Culture Pattern,” which is an elite settlement pattern such as that at Great Zimbabwe (1986: 304). Although he describes this pattern as different, in that cattle byres were no longer in the center of the settlement, elites were buried on hills as opposed to in byres, and stone-walled hilltop edifices distinguished the residences of political elites, he takes pains to show that the Zimbabwe

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

57

Culture Pattern evolved directly out of the Bantu Cattle Pattern, as a result of trade and the associated social stratification, and reflected the same cognitive organizing principles (Huffman 1986: 304). Huffman suggests that this transformation took place as a result of the influx of wealth from trade in luxury goods, a shift which took place at Mapungubwe, the predecessor to Great Zimbabwe, and continued at Great Zimbabwe: “The transformations . . . show that the Zimbabwe culture evolved from the Bantu Cattle culture through the economic stimulus of the East Coast Trade. The wealth from this trade . . . was used for bridewealth and other traditional transactions, and so the early trade goods augmented the traditional wealth in cattle” (Huffman 1986: 319). Applying his principles of “cognitive system,” Huffman discerns male and female entrances to the hill complex. He also continues to apply the idea of essential cognitive organizing principles to his spatial analysis; for example Render’s Ruins, in which a cache of goods was found, must have been the king’s first wife’s house because “according to Shona custom, the only person with the right and duty to take care of a leader’s possessions is his first wife” (p. 311). This spatial/symbolic analysis at times runs to the Freudian. Upright pillars of stone are taken to indicate the male part of a building, whereas vertical slots in the architecture indicate female areas, and places where pillars are inserted in slots are sites of ritual activity associated with fertility (Huffman 1984, 1986). Huffman is then clearly arguing for trade as the prime mover in the rise of states on the Zimbabwe plateau, a model which will be discussed more fully later. However, Huffman’s model is also relevant to a discussion of the role of cattle in the rise of the state, because it illustrates claims about the symbolic role of cattle in the society in contrast to the faunal remains analyses which focus on the materialist aspects of cattle in the economy. This distinction is discussed by Hall (1986), who uses Giddens’ structuration theory to distinguish between the “allocative” and “authoritative” aspects of resources as they are employed in power relationships: in the case of cattle, allocative components would include hides, meat, and milk, whereas authoritative components would include cattle being used in marriage transactions (Hall 1986: 84). Hall’s approach is meant as a critique of both structuralist and materialist approaches and argument for cattle playing both symbolic and economic roles simultaneously. Huffman’s model, then, is a suggestion for the centrality of cattle as an authoritative resource. There have been several critiques of Huffman’s approach (Hall 1984; Collett, Vines, and Hughes 1992; Beach 1998; Lane 1995, 1998). Lane takes Huffman to task on his use of the Bantu Cattle Pattern model, and his critique of the “abuse of ethnography” in the study of southern African Iron Age societies is useful more generally for making sense of Huffman’s and others’ claims of cultural continuity and the implications for social analysis:

58

Tracy Luedke

the logical extension of Huffman’s arguments is that the first Bantuspeaking, agricultural communities to settle in southern Africa possessed a settlement system and ideology that were sufficiently robust to survive approximately five-hundred years of population growth, settlement change, territorial expansion and migration and a further fifteen-hundred years of settlement consolidation and economic transformations up to the modern era. Similar long-term continuities in social and cultural practices are relatively scarce in other parts of the world. (Lane 1995: 56) Lane also recognizes the fundamental implications of such a claim: that African societies are inherently static and incapable of change, resting on primordial customs and beliefs. The beliefs and practices that are assumed to be maintained across space and time are often gendered, such as the assumption that bridewealth is universally existent and important in cattle keeping southern African societies (pp. 56–61). This again speaks to the way that the essentializing of “culture” and gender are intertwined. Women are often considered more firmly tied to culture and more resistant to change than men. One of the earlier researchers of Zimbabwean prehistory based his analysis of pottery on the idea that African societies were inherently not innovative, and that this resistance to change was particularly due to women, who “shared the inherent conservatism of the sex” (Schofield 1948 in Garlake 1982: 3). Thus assumptions about the timeless, static nature of African culture subsume perhaps even more firmly entrenched assumptions about the primordial nature of women’s roles. Another recent critique of Huffman’s work is that of David Beach, the primary ethnohistorian of the Shona (Beach 1998). Beach’s main critique is that Huffman treats Great Zimbabwe as “a single community, almost as a village writ large, and as a static one in which the entire pattern of settlement remained more or less the same over at least two centuries” (Beach 1998: 55). However, Beach does not criticize the basic assumptions of Shona cultural continuity. As Stahl points out in her CA response to Beach’s article, “[w]hile Beach is clearly concerned with history and the balance of change and continuity, he too treats ‘the Shona’ as an enduring entity associated with a relatively stable set of practices but is less clear than Huffman about the theoretical stance that informs his study” (Stahl 1998: 67). Stahl’s point is crucial and echoes critiques of Huffman’s work by Lane (1995) and Hall (1987). What is lacking from these critiques is any recognition that the specific currency of Huffman’s characterization of a timeless Shona cognitive system is gender; specifically it is a model which posits a Shona cognitive system in which the fundamental organizing principle is the opposition between male and female; further, this cognitive system is suggested to have been literally enacted in people’s actual everyday behavior. What is needed here is a feminist critique. Conkey and Gero (1997) have recently assessed the

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

59

course of research in the archaeology of gender/feminist archaeology. They point out that two of the strengths of the larger body of feminist scholarship are participation in “interlinked critiques of essentialism and scientific authority” (p. 425) and a related recognition “that politics and the substantive products of knowledge are essentially inseparable” (p. 427). A more recent discussion by Lane of gendered theorizing of organization of space in past southern African societies makes the most explicit attempt to date to tie feminist critiques and understandings of gender to theories like Huffman’s. Lane stresses the “multivocality of material culture” (Lane 1998: 179). The fact of this multivocality undermines any model that would posit one, unchanging set of beliefs about gender, followed by all members of a society at all times. As Lane points out, such models do not account for the fact that the members of social groups, such as men and women, will perceive and act on the world differently because of their differing perspectives, that there is also much difference in perspective and experience within social categories, and that gender identities are not fixed, but change throughout an individual’s lifetime (Lane 1998: 179–181). I would add to this list a basic aspect of human social life well known to cultural anthropologists and others who work with contemporary populations: that people often say one thing and do another, that cultural ideals about behavior and belief are often quite different from people’s actual behavior and beliefs. To apply this to Huffman’s analysis of symbolic spatial arrangements within the Great Zimbabwe ruins, even if space is arranged with a male–female dichotomy in mind, that does not necessarily tell us anything about the actual roles or activities of men and women. There is a difference between an ideology about the opposition between maleness and femaleness and the actual practices of individual people. And especially in designing the architectural space meant to act as a marker of class status and political power, a more conscious, overdetermined use of certain ideological principles may have been deployed. What is important for the purposes of this paper, is that in both approaches to the role of cattle in the economic and symbolic dynamics of Zimbabwe, certain underlying assumptions remain constant. In both models it is assumed that the qualitatively different role of cattle as opposed to other aspects of the subsistence economy gave cattle a special role in individual accumulation and the rise of the state. Researchers recognize that cattle were only one aspect of the subsistence base, and in fact may not even have been the most important aspect: “Direct archaeological evidence is limited but ethnohistorical evidence suggests that it was grain cultivation, particularly of sorghum and millet, that provided the basic staple foods . . . The role of livestock in this mixed economy was largely to cushion the effect of crop failure in bad years and, particularly in the case of cattle, to provide a means of amassing wealth in a negotiable form” (Connah 1987: 203–204). However, this recognition of the importance of agriculture is only given lip service, as illustrated by the lack of research done on agriculture.

60

Tracy Luedke

The lack of attention to agriculture as part of the subsistence economy and the privileging of cattle’s role in the rise of the state have gender implications. As Boserup’s work (1970) has shown, African women are often the primary agriculturalists. There is certainly both ethnohistorical (Beach 1980) and historical (Schmidt 1992) evidence to support the idea that women were the primary agriculturalists, although both men and women worked the fields at certain times of the year. Beach, the primary ethnohistorian of Zimbabwe, states, regarding the Great Zimbabwe state, “Very roughly, labour was divided, with women working in the fields and men handling most of the other branches of production, but this was not entirely rigid and depended a good deal upon the time and place in question” (Beach 1980: 91). The emphasis on cattle is tied to assumptions about cattle’s role in men’s procurement of wives through bridewealth in a patrilineal system. Cattle constitute wealth in Shona society, it is argued, because cattle act as a means for a man to increase his constituency and power by acquiring a wife or wives and control over the children of these marriages. The ends to which the emphasis on patrilineal bridewealth transactions are put are exemplified by Beach’s statement: “It is known that the Shona – for which, read Later Iron Age – people used to offer a bride-price of cattle to their fathers-in-law in return for their wives as far back as the sixteenth century” (Beach 1980: 15). Thus, “the Shona People” were apparently all male. The emphasis on cattle herding and the role of cattle in patrilineal bridewealth payments over the role of agriculture and women’s roles as farmers acts to place credit for the rise of the state firmly in a male domain. Male economic accumulation is posited as the foundation of the state (cf. Segobye 1998: 227–233). This is particularly striking, when one considers that elsewhere the rise of intensive agriculture and surplus food production are the focus of models of state development. Such models are common among scholars focusing on Central Mexico (Sanders et al. 1979), and Egypt (Wenke 1999) among other places, where, not surprisingly, intensive agriculture is constructed as under the control of men, though women do still sometimes provide labor.

Trade Another model offered for the rise of the Zimbabwe state stresses the importance of trade (Huffman 1972). There is evidence for trade contact between the plateau and the coast from the first millennium onwards, with glass beads from outside of southern Africa first appearing in the archaeological record throughout the plateau in the seventh and eightth centuries. The beads are of Indian and Persian origin, indicating that Arab traders carried these items at least as far as the coast. By the tenth century, the southern African coast and the plateau had been integrated into the trading network that spanned the Indian Ocean (Pwiti 1991). Although these early beads are evidence for what was being imported from the coast, there is little

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

61

early evidence for what was being exported. More substantial evidence for the nature of exchanges between the plateau and the coast first appears in the archaeological record in the eleventh century at the sites associated with Mapungubwe, the plateau state that was the precursor to Great Zimbabwe. The people of Mapungubwe appear to have been trading primarily ivory and to a lesser extent gold to the coast: pieces of ivory have been found in the archaeological record; there are scattered accounts by explorers and coastal traders which mention ivory coming from the hinterland; gold grave goods have also been found at Mapungubwe, which indicates that they were involved in mining. There is also evidence that Mapungubwe was involved in an intra-plateau trade in ivory bracelets, which were mass produced (Voigt 1983; Hall 1987: 81–82). The shift of political power from Mapungubwe to Great Zimbabwe was accompanied by a shift from ivory to gold as the main item of export for coastal trade. The shift is explained as a response to the increasing demand for gold from the coast and the fact that there were greater gold deposits on the plateau than in the Limpopo valley at Mapungubwe (Pwiti 1991). Early Arabic and Portuguese sources indicate trade between Sofala, on the Mozambican coast, and the interior. Gold was the most important commodity in the trade, although ivory and copper were also traded, and cloth, beads, and glazed ceramics were imported from the coast. Thus the general history that emerges from the archaeological evidence is that southern African societies first came into trading contact with the outside world around the seventh century. In order to obtain the goods available from the coast, such as cloth and beads, these societies began to exploit tradable commodities, at first ivory and then gold. The intensity of the exploitation and trade of these items increased until about the thirteenth century at which point the control of this trade played a central role in state formation. By this time the entire region had become an important part of a trading network that stretched as far as India and China (Pwiti 1991). The most important evidence for external trade at Great Zimbabwe comes from a cache of goods found in 1903 by Hall at Renders Ruin, one of the smaller ruins in the complex of ruins that constitute the remains of the city of Great Zimbabwe. This cache included evidence of external trade in the form of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century items including a glazed Persian bowl, Chinese celadon dishes, fragments of engraved and painted Near Eastern glass; there were also a piece of coral, an iron spoon, an iron lamp with copper chain, a copper box, copper rings, two bronze bells, several tens of thousands of glass beads, brass wire, and cowrie shells (Garlake 1973: 131–133). This trove has usually been interpreted as a treasury for the city or as the cache of a visiting trader. Further evidence of external trade exists in the form of an early fourteenth century coin from Kilwa which was found in another part of the site.

62

Tracy Luedke

There were items at Renders which also evidence internal trade networks: 30 kg of iron wire, 100 kg of iron hoes, axes, chisels, cakes of copper, ivory, two bronze spearheads, three iron gongs and rods, a soapstone dish, gold sheathing, gold beads, and gold wire. The gongs show sheet metal work and welding, neither of which were practiced at Great Zimbabwe, but which were practiced at Ingombe Ilede, in the northwestern part of the plateau; further evidence for trade with Ingombe Ilede includes a copper X-shaped ingot found at Chumnungwa, a Zimbabwe to the southeast of Great Zimbabwe. The inhabitants of Ingombe Ilede were mining copper and trading it for gold and iron goods; the lack of glass beads at Ingombe Ilede is taken to indicate that the people of Ingombe Ilede were primarily involved in the intra-plateau trade (Connah 1987: 212). The relative importance of the internal and external trades has been debated. Some researchers claim that external trade itself was of primary importance in the rise of the state (Huffman 1972); others have suggested that this internal trade predates the external trade, that the external trade was important but that it facilitated state formation rather than originating it, by capitalizing on the existing trade system (Connah 1987: 212). The primary proponent of the model in which trade with the East African coast provided the mechanism for the rise of the Great Zimbabwe state is Huffman (Huffman 1972). He suggests that trade stimulated the rise of the state through leaders’ monopoly of the wealth stemming from trade. Given a tribal society with some social stratification, the chief is the most wealthy person. Because he entertains visiting dignitaries, donates to weddings and funeral feasts of his people and supports other function, his wealth is constantly recycled within his tribe. Once trade contacts with an existing state organization are established, the chief invariably monopoloizes the tribal end of it. Since the new wealth is far in excess of that which is normally generated within the system, it cannot be redistributed, and wealth and political authority become increasingly concentrated. People can then be hired to perform a duty instead of cooperating through a system based on kinship ties. An army, or police force, can be established to collect taxes to support the government, and the functions of a state emerge. (Huffman 1972: 364–365) Huffman further suggests that the insertion of trade wealth into the local economy was consonant with existing social strategies for the accumulation of wealth and power. New wealth resulting from trade is presented as intensifying existing patrilineal economic arrangements, but not as fundamentally reordering them: trade items simply replaced cattle as a means of acquiring and controlling women and thus building political power (Huffman 1986: 319). The model, then, relies on elite men’s exclusive

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

63

control of trade through elite men’s exclusive control of the product which was the basis for Great Zimbabwe’s involvement in regional and international trade: gold. Gold mining has a long history on the Zimbabwe plateau, dating back to at least AD 1000. (Phimister 1976, Huffman 1972), with some claims for as early as AD 600. (Summers 1969). The earliest direct radiocarbon dates were taken from charcoal left in the mines by firesetting, a technique in which heat from fire is applied in the mine shaft to crack rock. The earliest of the radiocarbon dates come from Geelong and Aboyne mines, with dates of 1170+95 (Geelong) and 1230+80 (Aboyne), confirming that gold mining was taking place at least by this time (Summers 1969). Although gold is considered to have been the basis of Great Zimbabwe’s involvement in regional and international trade, it is suggested that gold mining remained a marginal activity (Phimister 1976). Mining was extremely labor intensive and was carried out in the winter months between harvesting and planting, when the labor could be spared. Gold was either panned from alluvial deposits or mined from quartz reefs, in which case miners dug down into the reef, sometimes as deeply as 25 meters. Miners then had to heat, crush, and wash the ore, a process which entailed a great deal of labor and yielded a small amount of gold. It appears that most of the gold that was mined ultimately went to trade, as there are very few gold items in the archaeological record at Great Zimbabwe. However, the lack of gold artifacts could also be the result of subsequent looting by amateur “archaeologists” and other adventurers. It has been suggested that mining was done by commoners but that gold smelting and luxury ornament manufacture were done inside the elite settlements (Swan 1994). There is evidence within the elite structures of Zimbabwe for gold smelting and smithing, including gold crucibles, tongs, molds, burnishers, and residue of gold-bearing quartz (Garlake 1973: 116). One difficulty in interpreting the nature of early mining is that much of the evidence for this early mining was destroyed by subsequent mining operations in the early part of this century (Connah 1987: 202). However, gold mining is one of the few aspects of economic activity for which there is some archaeological and historical evidence as to the division of labor. Phimister and Summers have suggested that gold mining may have evolved out of agriculture. Surface indications of Basement Complex rocks, the ancient rock in which gold deposits on the plateau are found, include the presence of fertile red clay soil, as distinguished from the sandy soils found over other kinds of geological formations. Summers suggests that the problem of prospecting for gold “could have been partly solved by agricultural experience” (Summers 1969: 15). Phimister finds further evidence for connections between mining and agriculture in the use of tools and techniques adapted from agricultural processes: the main tool used in mining was the agricultural hoe and the milling of excavated ore was

64

Tracy Luedke

accomplished through a grinding process very similar to that used for grinding grain (Phimister 1976: 11–15). As mentioned above in the section on cattle herding, women were and are the primary agriculturalists on the Zimbabwe plateau. It thus seems feasible that the individuals who put their agricultural expertise, tools, and techniques toward gold mining were women, that gold mining relied on the technologies of women. More direct evidence indicates women’s involvement in mining. Summers (1969) reviewed all the archaeological work on prehistoric mines on the Zimbabwe plateau and found that 16 human skeletons had been uncovered during excavations of precolonial mines. These skeletons are interpreted as those of miners who were caught when mine shafts caved in, which is supported by the placement of the skeletons as well as the particular damage done to them in the collapse (pp. 19–33, 136). Of these 16 skeletons, at least nine have been identified as female (p. 136). There is no question, then, that some, and perhaps a significant number, of the miners were women. The archaeological evidence that Summers reviews comes from all over the plateau and spans the time frame from the earliest mining dates known through the nineteenth century. A notable set of data in terms of tying women’s mining to Great Zimbabwe comes from the evidence at Aboyne Mine, which Summers excavated himself. As mentioned above, Summers radiocarbon dates the mine to 1230+80 (p. 28). This mine is located fairly close to great Zimbabwe, approximately 120 miles away (p. 161). Aboyne mine excavations yielded four skeletons. Of these, Summers identifies two as female, one as male, and the fourth remains undeterminable (Summers 1969: 22–28). Thus, in Aboyne Mine, we have evidence of a gold mining operation, within the dates of the reign of great Zimbabwe, within the region of great Zimbabwe, at which women were miners, and perhaps even the primary miners. There are then several pieces provided to the puzzle of how gold mining fits into the economy, which can, although they have not been, be examined for what they might imply about women’s autonomy, control of resources, and participation in economic activity. It is clear from the skeletal evidence that at least some of the miners were women. This also makes sense in terms of the probability that women were also the primary agriculturalists. As Phimister and Swan suggest, gold mining was a labor-intensive, marginal activity which could only have been carried out in complement to other seasonally oriented work, like farming. As well, as Phimister and Summers suggest, gold mining techniques and technologies probably evolved out of those for agriculture. Since the economic and political strength of the state is suggested as resting at least in part on the state’s (elite men’s) control of the trade of this extracted gold to the coast in return for other kinds of luxury items, then it must follow that the state exercised some amount of control over these mining activities. It is suggested that the mining itself was locally run, but the results of the mining were extracted from the populace in the

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

65

form of tribute to the rulers (Hall 1987: 97). There is no suggestion by researchers that this was directly forced labor; it is suggested that it was indirectly forced by the need to pay tribute. This would suggest that women gold miners were either extracting gold, and then using it directly to pay tribute for themselves and/or their families, or they were working in the mines for wages, which they were paid by an intermediary who took control of the gold. Either option would suggest that economic resources passed directly through the hands of some women. Although families have often been assumed to be communally sharing economic units, there is much evidence that this is not always the case. There is particularly a great deal of evidence from Africa that married couples do not pool economic resources, that women maintain control over their own economic resources. What this would imply is that women involved in gold mining on the Zimbabwe plateau had access to the wealth which was the basis for the power which was the basis for the state. This possibility undermines assumptions that the economic resource of gold was controlled solely by men. There is also evidence that the production and trading of gold may not have been monopolized by the elite that constituted the state to the extent indicated in Huffman’s model. In fact, it appears that much of common people’s daily lives were carried out independently of the ruling elite in their stone-walled enclosure: “To the common villager tending her gardens or minding his herds. The state organization may never have been a factor. Regardless of any benefits that may have accrued from membership in a powerful hegemony, village disputes, inheritances, weddings, and funerals were still decided at the local level” (Pikirayi 2001: 150). Elite control of gold may also have been symbolic more than actual. Herbert has pointed out the connections in many past and present African societies, including Great Zimbabwe, between metal objects and political power. She suggests that the archaeological evidence of the smelting and/or smithing of metals within the confines of the walls of Great Zimbabwe as well as the hoarding of various metal objects in Renders Ruin may indicate that the rulers of Great Zimbabwe wanted and needed to assert their control over these objects and their production (Herbert 1996). Perhaps then it was worked metal or the process of working metal over which the elites had control and not gold per se. In this case, it is possible to imagine that common people dealing in gold dust with visiting traders would not contradict the elite’s exclusive claims to gold objects such as jewelry, tools, or ritual objects. This harkens to Hall’s distinction between the instrumental and symbolic significance of particular resources. The symbolic meanings of gold and control over gold as a political symbol may not have coincided entirely with economic meanings and economic control of gold. Conversely, Pikirayi has suggested that the elite rulers may not have been directly involved in mining or trading but in regulating trade (Pikirayi 2001: 148). It is hard to imagine that total control of an activity taking place across such a wide area would have been possible.

66

Tracy Luedke

Either possibility suggests that commoners had access to and control of at least a portion of the gold they extracted and may even have traded it independently. Sinclair suggests that peasant miners may have traded gold for themselves (Sinclair 1984: 52). This opens the possibility that commoner women who mined gold may also have claimed ownership of and traded the products of their labor. In this model, women emerge as economic actors whose expertise regarding and access to the region’s most valuable commodity may have meant a great deal in terms of their economic, political, and social positions within Great Zimbabwe society and their role in the rise of the state. However, according to many archaeological models, what was fundamentally reordered by the economic transformations associated with the rise of the state was not the relationships between women and men, but the relationships amongst various groups of men. The aspect of the trade which is stressed is its role in men’s accumulation of power through their control of women, which at a certain volume, allows these men further control over other men. Thus, the development of class is shown to grow out of gendered relationships, but those gender relationships are not shown to have in turn been transformed by shifting economic realities. It is imaginable that these trading activities had other kinds of social effects as well, particularly in women’s roles and gender relations, however this possibility is nowhere discussed. But the evidence presented here of women’s involvement in gold mining and trading implies that there must have been at least some changes in gender roles wrought by the economic and political transformations associated with the rise of the state. There is clear evidence that the switch from a subsistence economy to an exchange economy on the plateau was accompanied by changes in social relationships in the form of class stratification. That these profound economic and social changes would have taken place without any changes in gender roles and relations seems unlikely. In the models posited by archaeologists, massive economic and social change and innovation is clearly shown to take place but gender is assumed to have remained a constant. Women are thus excluded both from any role in the growing of the state and from experiencing any effects as a result of its growth.

Conclusion The emphasis on cultural continuity, particularly in terms of women’s roles seems to be grounded in the desire of researchers to identify the ideological glue that maintains the cohesion of the state; there is an assumption that communities are prone to breaking apart, that fission is the normal state of affairs. Culture, particularly in the form of gender roles, is used to maintain the narrative quality of descriptions of the past. In this narrative about the state, it is men who are fissioning, men who are the innovators whose desire

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

67

for accumulating goods and power lead to the rise of the state. However, these men’s activities are still informed by the ideologies of a timeless “tradition.” Women are the signifiers of this tradition, the glue that cements men’s relationships, particularly in their form as an exchange commodity between male lineages. That the two prime movers suggested as the mechanisms for the rise of the Zimbabwe state both concerned male accumulation, which intensified the ability of men to control women, might be read as bearing out Engels’ hypothesis: the rise of the state resulted from and fed the empowering of men socially and economically. I do not question Engels suggestion that changes in gender relations were part and parcel of the economic changes of state formation. I do question his vision of the nature of gender roles and relations before, during, and after these transformations. In the literature on Great Zimbabwe, gender relations are rarely considered either before or after the transition to statehood. In these models, women do not contribute to or participate in this transformation and the resulting economic and social changes elicit no change in gender roles or relations. Engels at least recognizes that gender roles and relations were transformed in the process of these political economic changes. However, ultimately Engels’ model rests on women being inherently, “naturally” communal, as reactors to the “real” activity of men and without any agency of their own. In some ways then there are similar assumptions in Engels’ model and in the models proposed by the Great Zimbabwe researchers I have described here. In both cases, whether gender ideologies are suggested to have changed over time or not, women are seen as adjuncts to a social world based on the activities of men, an assumption which is belied by the archaeological and historical evidence. That these disparate models have this fundamental similarity illustrates the degree to which gender is essentialized. Feminist scholars have realized that feminism is not just about attending to gendered identities, but is a commitment to interrogating all kinds of essentialisms and all patterns of inequity (di Leonardo 1991: 27–31). For Great Zimbabwe and other cases like it, this is a crucial perspective, for it reveals the dialectical relationship between essentialisms about gender and culture and their implications for the analysis of state formation in past societies.

References cited Barker, P.T. (1978) Economic Models for the Manekweni Zimbabwe, Mozambique. Azania 13: 71–100. Beach, D.N. (1980) The Shona and Zimbabwe 900–1850. New York: Africana Publishing Co. —— (1998) Cognitive Archaeology and the Imaginary History at Great Zimbabwe. Current Anthropology 39(1): 47–72.

68

Tracy Luedke

Boserup, Ester (1970) Woman’s Role in Economic Development. New York: St Martin’s Press. Brain, C.K. (1974) Human Food Remains from the Iron Age at Zimbabwe. South African Journal of Science 70: 303–309. Collett, D.P., A.E. Vines, and E.G. Hughes (1992) The Chronology of the Valley Enclosures: Implications for the Interpretation of Great Zimbabwe. The African Archaeological Review 10: 139–161. Conkey, Margaret W. with Sarah H. Williams (1991) Original Narratives: The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Micaela di Leonardo, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conkey, Margaret W. and Joan M. Gero (1997) Programme to Practice: Gender and Feminism in Archaeology. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 411–37. Connah, Graham (1987) A Question of Economic Basis: Great Zimbabwe and Related Sites. Chapter 8 in idem, African Civilizations: Precolonial Cities and State in Tropical Africa: An Archaeological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. di Leonardo, Micaela (1991) Gender, Culture, and Political Economy: Feminist Anthropology in Historical Perspective. In Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Micaela di Leonardo, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Engels, Friedrich (1884) The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. New York: International Publishers. Garlake, P.S. (1973) Great Zimbabwe. Aylesbury: Thames and Hudson. —— (1978) Pastoralism and Great Zimbabwe. Journal of African History 19(4): 479–493. —— (1982) Prehistory and Ideology in Zimbabwe. Africa 52(3): 1–19. Hall, Martin (1984) The Myth of the Zulu Homestead: Archaeology and Ethnography. Africa 54(1): 65–79. —— (1986) The Role of Cattle in Southern African Agropastoral Societies: More than Bones Alone Can Tell. South African Archaeological Society, Goodwin Series, 5: 83–87. —— (1987) The Changing Past: Farmers, Kings and Traders in Southern Africa, 200–1860. Cape Town: David Philip. —— (1995) Great Zimbabwe and the Lost City: The Cultural Colonization of the South African Past. In Theory in Archaeology: A World Perspective. P.J. Ucko, ed. London: Routledge. Herbert, Eugenia W. (1996) Metals and power at Great Zimbabwe. In Aspects of African Archaeology. Gilbert Pwiti and Robert Soper, eds. Harare: University of Zimbabwe Publications. Huffman, Thomas N. (1972) The Rise and Fall of Zimbabwe. Journal of African History 12(3): 353–366. —— (1981) Snakes and Birds: Expressive Space at Great Zimbabwe. African Studies 40: 131–50. —— (198) Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the African Iron Age. Annual Review of Anthropology 11: 133–150.

Gender and agency in Great Zimbabwe

69

—— (1984) “Where you are the girls gather to play”: The Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe. In Frontiers: Southern African Archaeology Today. Hall, M., ed. British Archaeological Reports International Series 207. Oxford: BAR. —— (1986) Iron Age Settlement Patterns and the Origins of Class Distinctions in Southern Africa. Advances in World Archaeology 5: 291–338. —— (1987) Settlement Hierarchies in the Northern Transvaal: Zimbabwe Ruins and Venda History. African Studies 46(1): 73–116 —— (1996) Snakes and Crocodiles. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press. Kuper, Adam (1980) Symbolic Dimensions of the Southern Bantu Homestead. Africa 5(1): 8–23. Lane, Paul (1995) The Use and Abuse of Ethnography in the Study of the Southern African Iron Age. Azania 29–30: 51–64. —— (1998) Engendered Spaces and Bodily Practices in the Iron Age of Southern Africa. In Gender in African Prehistory. Susan Kent, ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Leacock, Eleanor (1981) History, Development, and the Division of Labor by Sex: Implications for Organization. Signs 7(2): 474–91. Ortner, Sherry (1974) Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture? In Women, Culture, and Society. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Phimister, I.R. (1976) Pre-colonial Gold Mining in Southern Zambezia: A Reassessment. African Social Research 21: 1–30. Pikirayi (2001) Cattle, Gold, and Copper – Traders, Chiefs, and Kings. In The Zimbabwe Culture. Lanham, MD: Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Pwiti, Gilbert (1991) Trade and Economies in Southern Africa c. AD 700–1200. Zimbabwea 3(1). Rosaldo, Michelle Z. (1980) The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5 (3): 389–417 Sacks, Karen (1982) Sisters and Wives. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley (1979) The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilisation. New York: New York Academic Press. Schmidt, Elizabeth (1992) Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Segobye, Alinah (1998) Daughters of the Cattle: The Significance of Herding in the Growth of Complex Societies in Southern Africa Between the Tenth and Fifteenth Centuries AD. In Gender in African Prehistory. Susan Kent, ed. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Silverblatt, Irene (1988) Women in States. Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 27–460. Sinclair, Paul (1984) Some Aspects of the Economic Level of the Zimbabwe State. Zimbabwea 1(1): 48–53. Stahl, Ann B. (1998) Comment on Beach. Current Anthropology 39(1): 66–68. Summers, Roger (1969) Ancient Mining in Rhodesia and Adjacent Areas. Salisbury: Trustees of the National Museums of Rhodesia. Swan, Lorraine (1994) Early Gold Mining on the Zimbawean Plateau. No. 9 in the series Studies in African Archaeology. Uppsala: Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis.

70

Tracy Luedke

Thorp, Carolyn R. (1995) Kings, Commoners, and Cattle at Zimbabwe Tradition Sites. Harare: National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. Voigt, E.A. (1983) Mapungubwe: An Archaeozoological Interpretation of an Iron Age Community. Pretoria: Transvaal Museum. Wenke, Robert J. (1999) Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three Million Years. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Eric (1982) Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 2

The use and abuse of ethnographic analogies in interpretations of gender systems at Cahokia Laura Pate

Introduction In the last two decades, archaeologists have begun both to investigate gender systems in prehistoric societies and to examine the effects of contemporary conceptions of gender on prehistoric models. American Bottom researchers, however, have virtually ignored these issues in their analyses of Cahokian culture. Their references to gender are few and far between and tend to be fairly insignificant. Moreover, despite some evidence to the contrary, past Native American gender systems and modern American ones are assumed to be very similar. The trivialization of gender, its simplification and misinterpretation, and its exclusion from analyses have far-reaching implications for conclusions about Cahokian culture as a whole. The case of the southeastern “chiefdoms,” as they are called, is particularly important for this study. To some extent, it was the investigation of these archaeological cultures – of Moundville in particular – that first translated the idea of ranked societies into an archaeologically useful concept (e.g. Peebles and Kus 1977). Much of the subsequent theorizing about the rise of civilization has incorporated ideas from interpretations of these sites (Drennan and Uribe 1987), and this theorizing has had a profound impact on the interpretation of the American Bottom. Thus, for most archaeologists, Cahokians and their neighbors were the people who didn’t quite make it; they developed a certain degree of complexity, but not quite a state. Centralization of population, long-distance trade, specialist manufacturing, and status-related differences in diet, housing, burial location, and wealth all developed at Cahokia, but population is not considered sufficiently dense, trade not sufficiently essential, specialists not sufficiently full-time, and status distinctions not sufficiently complex to count as state-level development. One thing that the authors of the chapters in this book found consistently was the profoundly circular reasoning that permeates much of the literature on social ranking in archaeological cultures. As Plog and Upham (1983: 200) point out, “when, for example, the size of the largest settlement is used to identify state organization, it is impossible to explore the relationship between state organization and population aggregation since the latter was

72

Laura Pate

used to define the former.” Although efforts have been made to combat particular aspects of this logical problem, there remains a set of implicit assumptions about the division of labor which, unexamined, continues to plague the discipline. So, for example, in his analysis of burials from the Dallas phase (a southeastern chiefdom), Hatch (1987) first divides his sample according to biological sex and then analyzes the grave goods for indications of gender distinctions. His assumptions become blatant in the interpretation of ambiguous objects: Shell spoons – found with female burials – are “domestic utensils,” while lumps of mineral pigment – found with male burials – were “possibly used in connection with body painting preparatory to community ceremony which only this subset of males was permitted to attend” (p. 11). No doubt, had the mineral pigments been found with females, they would have been designated as “personal adornment,” and shell spoons found with men would have been interpreted as evidence of a male secret society. The problem with this sort of reasoning is not simply that it misrepresents the role of women in the rise of ranking and social class in early societies but that it conflates gender and rank, thereby potentially discounting ranks of some considerable importance and creating others where none existed. So, in the above example, Hatch implies that the difference between male and female burial assemblages indicates the subordination of women within general society (the spoon wielders were buried in the villages and in the platform mounds, the body painters only in the mounds). Embedded in this line of reasoning is the idea that the rank distinction between women (inhabiting “private space”) and men (making political decisions at the village level) is a distinction based only on the ascribed status of sex. Curiously, in his discussion of elite burial data from the same sample set, when he finds females and males associated with the same grave goods, Hatch argues that these also indicate ascribed status, because ceremonial objects belonging to women must not be the result of social functioning or achievement. So without ever really discussing gender differences, but by making implicit assumptions about them, Hatch has described a society with some complexity, but not too much; a chiefdom, but not a state. Heightened awareness of implicit assumptions about gender may well have a profound effect on how we understand ancient political systems. We need to recognize – and try to unravel – at least three sets of assumptions: those presently in vogue, those current when ethnohistories and ethnographies were written, and those that existed during the period being studied. In the following discussion, rather than attempt to re-describe a huge literature in terms of its insensitivity to these assumptions, I will focus on a single aspect of ancient social roles – the relation of sex to gender. If, indeed, ethnocentric assumptions about gender and rank confuse our picture of the past, the place to begin analysis is at the very foundations of our interpretations of the past. Thus, I will consider the possibility of multiple

Gender systems at Cahokia

73

genders as a key to the deconstruction of simplistic models of ancient political organization.

Physical environment The American Bottom is an alluvial plain below the confluence of the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Mississippi Rivers. Cahokia itself – the largest Middle Mississippian site in the region, indeed the largest prehistoric city in North America – is located in the northern part of the plain across the Mississippi River from modern-day St Louis. Other Middle Mississippian sites, including farmsteads, single-mound villages, and multiple-mound villages, are scattered throughout the American Bottom. This is an extremely fertile region, one well suited to agriculture. The floodplain is, in addition, characterized by a mixture of ecosystems, with ridges, terraces, and alluvial fans located near marshes and open-water habitats. All these ecosystems provided some subsistence for the Middle Mississippian people, and these floodplain resources could be supplemented by others such as hickory nuts which were available in the nearby uplands (Milner 1990).

Mississippian Period at Cahokia Middle Mississippian cultures are identified archaeologically by a constellation of traits. Stoltman (cited in Yerkes 1988) has listed 12 primary Middle Mississippian characteristics, including a complex social organization; a theocratic political organization; intensive maize agriculture; occupational specialization; permanent nucleated towns; public buildings; and rectangular wall-trench houses. The other diagnostic traits concern details of material culture. Earlier cultures which display some but not all of these defining characteristics are called Emergent Mississippian (Yerkes 1988). Cahokia at its zenith is the quintessential example of Middle Mississippian culture. According to Pauketat (1992), Cahokia emerged from a series of smallscale polities sometime between AD 750 and AD 1000. During this Emergent Mississippian Period, a complex chiefdom-level society supported by fulltime maize agriculturalists arose (Emerson and Brown 1992). Recent investigations have suggested that some of the mounds at Cahokia – including the massive Monks Mound (Collins and Chalfant 1993) – and on the Grand Plaza also may have begun then (Holley et al. 1993). The Middle Mississippian culture was fully expressed during the Lohmann and Stirling phases. However, urban decline began during the Moorehead phase with a marked decrease in public building, perhaps related to a decline in centralized social and political control. There was also a drastic reduction both in the population and in the number of sites in the American Bottom during this period, which may have been a result of environmental

74

Laura Pate

degradation (Emerson and Brown 1992). These trends continued during the Sand Prairie phase, and Cahokia collapsed at the end of that phase. Presented in Table 2.1 are the standard dates for the Middle Mississippian phases at Cahokia. Recently, it has been suggested that minor adjustments should be made to these dates. Milner (1998) argues that the Lohmann and the Stirling phases each lasted 100 years, that the Moorehead phase lasted 50 years, and that the Sand Prairie phase lasted 125 years. The terminal date for the Middle Mississippian period remains the same, however. Table 2.1 Middle Mississippian phases at Cahokia Phase

Dates, AD

Lohmann Stirling Moorehead Sand Prairie

1000–1050 1050–1150 150–1250 250–1400

Source: Bareis and Porter 1984

Ethnographic analogy Archaeologists of necessity use ethnographic analogies along with archaeological data to reconstruct past cultures. In the case of Cahokia, these analogies are drawn largely from ethnohistories written in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries by Euro-American explorers, conquerors, missionaries, and settlers in the Southeast. Also used, although to a lesser extent, are ethnohistories from the Northeast and the Midwest. These works have been employed extensively in the reconstruction of American Bottom culture, and their applicability is not considered controversial. In fact, recent literature implies negligence on the part of archaeologists who in past discussions have not relied on ethnography and ethnohistory enough (see Emerson 1997a). The use of these ethnohistories is, however, problematic for several reasons. First, even the earliest Euro-American accounts were written several hundred years after Cahokia collapsed – following centuries of decline – around AD 1400. The American Bottom was virtually uninhabited during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the post-dispersal history of the Cahokian population is completely unknown. There are, thus, no known connections between the prehistoric and the post-Contact occupants of the American Bottom or the surrounding regions (Emerson and Brown 1992), and there is no reason to assume a priori in what ways the cultures of the historic Midwestern populations resembled the cultures of the prehistoric groups. This same point, of course, applies also to analogies with the protohistoric and historic populations of the Southeast, separated from Cahokia not only by time but by geographical distance.

Gender systems at Cahokia

75

There are, moreover, good reasons for suggesting that Cahokian society probably was organized differently from any proto-historic or historic Native American society. Arguments about the nature of the Cahokian political structure abound. Was this a loosely organized state, with four (Fowler 1978) or perhaps five (O’Brien 1989) levels of hierarchically organized sites, or was it a chiefdom like any other prehistoric Mississippian chiefdom (Milner 1998)? Whatever the answer to this question, Cahokia was certainly more complex politically than were the societies that existed after the post-Contact collapse of many of the Southeastern chiefdoms. In addition, the population of Cahokia – of the city itself – was larger by far than that at any other Native American city north of Mexico. Population estimates at Cahokia’s peak vary from a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants to a maximum of 40,000 inhabitants (Milner 1990). By way of contrast, Swanton (1911: 43) estimates that when the French first encountered the Natchez in the late seventeenth century, the chiefdom consisted in its entirety of about 3,500 people. Aside from questions of the applicability of specific ethnohistorical analogies to Cahokia, the very nature of any ethnohistory is problematic. The accounts were written almost exclusively by Euro-American men; in consequence, references to Native American women are uncommon and far more fragmentary than are references to Native American men. Moreover, the Euro-Americans were observing what were, in many ways, societies unlike any they had ever seen before. Thus, the accuracy of their interpretations is questionable, particularly when they were faced with a cultural construct that was, in their view, not only unusual but unnatural, as was the case with Native American gender systems that were not dichotomous (Kehoe 1983). The major criticism, however, of the use of ethnohistorical evidence in archaeology stems not from problems with the evidence itself but from the way that archaeologists have used the evidence to construct universalized and generalized models of Native American culture. Societies in the Eastern Woodlands often are treated as if they possessed a cultural unity which transcended time and space; ergo, the effects of historical events on the construction of individual cultures are ignored. Archaeologists and anthropologists pick and choose among bits of data reported in ethnohistories, combining information from many tribes into a single model which is assumed to be an accurate representation of all proto-historic and historic Native American societies within a culture area, an area often defined by recent historical and political events or by environmental boundaries with unknown prehistoric significance. This model is then used as a framework for analyzing data recovered from archaeological sites throughout a large region. The problems arising from such a methodology are particularly striking in analyses of male and female roles in Native American societies. A case in point is the (limited) discussions of the sexual division of labor in Cahokian society. Most, if not all, of these discussions are predicated on a

76

Laura Pate

generic picture of gendered activities in the proto-historic and historic Southeast. Alan Harn (1994), for example, writes about the Larson village, located in the Central Illinois River Valley, an area occupied by immigrants from the Cahokia region as well as by local Late Woodland peoples. This thirteenth-century Mississippian village was destroyed by fire; thus, the original floors of the structures were preserved. Harn attempts to define activity areas within house structures based on the sorts of refuse found in each area, and he suggests that these activity areas correspond straightforwardly with male and female areas. Acknowledging, at least, the tenuous nature of his underlying premise, Harn (p. 43, emphasis added) writes that “if it can be assumed that a sexual division of labor existed among the Mississippian groups inhabiting the Central Illinois River Valley similar to that seen among tribes of the historic Southeast,” then women would have been responsible for food preparation, hide processing, weaving, and potting, and men would have hunted, fished, and made tools and ornaments. Thus, he describes the northern half of the house, with its food-preparation tools, as a female activity area and the south-southeast quadrant, with its tool caches, pipes, ochre, bone, and baked clay squeezes, as a male activity area. Pauketat and Woods (1986), finding a similar division between male and female areas at the Lawrence Primas site north of Cahokia, put forward a more sweeping suggestion, that the female-north, male-southeast division may represent a general Middle Mississippian pattern. Neither Harn’s (1994) nor Pauketat and Woods’ (1986) analyses are markedly more sophisticated than Price’s 1969 report on activity areas at a burned Middle Mississippian house (~ AD 1320) in southeast Missouri. This report includes one of the earliest, if not the earliest, discussions of the sexual division of labor in the Middle Mississippian Period and is still cited by American Bottom researchers (e.g. Pauketat and Woods 1986). Like the later researchers, Price bases his analysis on what he calls the historic Southeastern tribal division of labor; his list of gendered activities (almost identical to Harn’s) is, presumably, taken from Swanton’s writings. Price’s (1969: 24) appraisal of the division is made clear by his choice of words. Potting, cooking, food preparation, hide preparation, and weaving are described as “the chores of the females,” and hunting, fishing, trading, and tool making are declared to be “the role of the males.” There are two obvious problems with all three analyses. First, the suggestion that there was no variation in gender-specific activities over an area that stretches from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Gulf of Mexico to Central Illinois over a period of five or six hundred years is ludicrous. Second, implicit in the analyses is the assumption that most activities were performed by only one gender. Price (1969) did suggest that both men and women might have been involved with horticulture. Ethnographic evidence from a variety of tribes, however, indicates that a wide range of activities could be performed by either (any) gender (Blackwood

Gender systems at Cahokia

77

1984), and even among the Illinois, who did tend to separate activities according to gender, some activities – such as carrying meat back from a kill or playing lacrosse – were performed by both men and women (Hauser 1990). Rather than investigating the connection between gender and occupation, Harn (1994), Pauketat and Woods (1986), and Price assume that they know how the two are related and that they can simply insert archaeological data into a universal formula. The results are uninformative and have not generated much interest, in the form of further research, among other archaeologists. There is, however, the occasional reference in the archaeological literature to this putative Cahokian division of labor. Koehler (1997), for example, recently wrote a chapter on the role of women in Mississippian society. He includes a short paragraph describing the separate male and female activity areas that have been identified in the American Bottom and the Central Illinois River Valley. Because he cites no sources, he implies that the phenomenon that he is describing is uncontroversial, well documented, and widely accepted. To reiterate, American Bottom researchers rarely discuss models of Cahokian gender systems explicitly. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting to compare the ethnohistorical data that are included in these models with those that are disregarded. Researchers have tended to accept at face value the data that mirror appropriate gender behavior in Western society (e.g., women cook, and men make and use tools), and they have used these data to model behavioral norms which are said to describe a large group of geographically and temporally disparate Native American societies. On the other hand, data related to subjects which are taboo in Western society have been ignored, and the implications of data that suggest that gender systems in Native American societies might have been radically different from Western systems have been overlooked – more will be said about these issues in the following two sections. These criticisms are not trivial; the theoretical assumptions and the practical results of the assumptions affect not just reconstructions of gender systems but also reconstructions of Cahokian society as a whole. In his attempt to reconstruct Cahokian cosmology through the identification of changes in cult practices at Cahokia between AD 900 and AD 1200, Emerson (1997a) provides a particularly instructive example of how implicit assumptions about gender shape interpretations of material culture. He argues for the existence of a fertility cult, which was co-opted by elites during the rise of the era of greatest Mississippian social complexity. Identification of this cult is dependent on a limited number of stone carvings of women and an ethnographic analogy drawn from a rather broad array of Native American practices as identified by ethnohistorians and ethnographers. The sketchiness of the description of the fertility cult suggests that the existence of such cults is well known to the reader, as indeed it is, having the status of received wisdom in the social sciences. Although

78

Laura Pate

Emerson makes no explicit mention of male–female domination, he identifies the rise of the cult as related to – and supportive of – the rise of a dominant elite class. He also does not overtly connect the domination of women to the rise of a class-based society, but he does identify his perspective as Marxist. In the course of his discussion, female effigies are described as fertility symbols, as “earth mothers” or “corn mothers.” Male effigies (only one is discussed) are identified as shamans. In other words, female depictions are ceremonial and symbolic; male power is real and practical. Female effigies depict mythological characters; male effigies depict real men. Priests of the cult, whose role is identified with chiefly activities, are identified as male, without any justification at all. Ergo, women may symbolize power, but men wield it. Clearly, this is a case where alternative interpretations of the material record are both possible and important. If a priori assumptions about gender are discarded and the distribution of figurines is discussed in light of other aspects of the archaeological record, the picture becomes much richer and less clear. In the case of Cahokia, there is no empirical reason to accept the domination of women by men. In other words, the possibility that gender was not a determining factor in the exercise of political power cannot be ruled out on the basis of extant data. The rest of this discussion will center on alternative interpretations of ritual buildings and the possibility of multiple genders.

Sweatlodges and menstrual huts in the ethnohistorical and archaeological record Many unusual structures at archaeological sites are reported to be associated in some way with male rituals. For example, large buildings, such as Feature 31 at the Moorehead phase Julien site, typically are referred to as men’s houses. Milner (1984) suggests that this feature – a large structure with two internal partitions and many hearths – might have been a public building but probably was a men’s house because 72 points, including one large trinotched point covered with red pigment, were found in the structure. Equally intrigued by ethnohistorical reports of round sweatlodges – ritual buildings associated exclusively with men – in the proto-historic and historic periods in the Southeast, archaeologists have been eager to discover these buildings in archaeological contexts. Because most buildings at Mississippian sites are rectangular wall-trench buildings, the circular post buildings found at some sites are assumed to have a ritual function. In the American Bottom, they often are described as sweatlodges. Some contain hearths, and this is viewed as corroborating evidence that the structures were, indeed, sweatlodges; the absence of a hearth, however, typically is not interpreted as conflicting evidence because hearths often are shallow features and so might have been plowed out. Putative sweatlodges have been discovered in the American Bottom at the Julien site, at the Mitchell site, at the Range site, at

Gender systems at Cahokia

79

the Powell Tract site at Cahokia (Milner 1984), at the Lawrence Primas site (Pauketat and Woods 1986), and at Labras Lake (Yerkes 1987). Far from being incidental to settlement patterns, these sweatlodges have been incorporated into models of the Cahokian political system. It has been suggested that there were nodal communities in the American Bottom (Emerson 1997b; Milner 1990), and that the leaders of these fourth-line farming hamlets would have had some control over surrounding settlements (Yerkes 1987). These nodal communities are identified by the presence of a sweatlodge. Galloway (1997) contrasts this fascination with male ritual buildings – even those such as sweatlodges which are associated with ritual purification – with the almost complete absence of interest in female ritual buildings, which she maintains is rooted in Western menstrual taboos. There is ethnohistorical evidence for the existence of menstrual huts in the proto-historic and historic Southeast. Not surprisingly, the evidence is sketchy, consisting of scattered references to buildings reserved for menstrual seclusion and reports of specific ritual prohibitions in a few tribes. Still, given the number of menstrual huts that must have existed in the proto-historic and historic periods alone, Galloway finds it odd that she could find only three (problematic) references to menstrual huts in the archaeological literature of the region. Galloway does not argue that the existence of menstrual huts in the postContact Southeast implies that menstrual huts must have existed throughout the prehistoric Southeast, but she does maintain that the subject is worth pursuing. Noting that the available cross-cultural surveys are problematic – both the ethnographies and the coding systems are androcentrically biased – Galloway suggests that menstrual seclusion might be associated with matrilineality and matrilocality and that further research along these lines could be profitable. If the hypothesis is valid, Galloway suggests, the existence of menstrual buildings at archaeological sites could be used as a marker for kinship systems. Although her attempt to use data related specifically to women to make inferences about society as a whole is appealing, the relation she proposes between architecture and social organization probably is oversimplified. The problem then becomes the identification of menstrual buildings archaeologically. Galloway suggests that menstrual huts, like most other prehistoric ritual buildings in the Southeast, might be identified by their location and their contents rather than by their structure. Extrapolating – perhaps over extrapolating – from the exceedingly brief ethnohistorical references to menstrual seclusion and menstrual taboos, Galloway maintains that prehistoric menstrual buildings probably would have been located away from villages and perhaps would have been downstream from the other structures. Although ethnohistorical reports contain no information about the interior of menstrual huts, Galloway suggests that these buildings might

80

Laura Pate

have contained both ritual items and – because women were living there, if only briefly – utilitarian items. One of the items, Galloway suggests, which might have been associated with women’s rituals is Ramey Incised pottery, a type that has been a problem since it was identified. Assumed at first to be an elite ware both because it is well made and because it is relatively uncommon, Ramey Incised is, nevertheless, ubiquitous. It has been found at many types of sites – ceremonial sites, domestic sites, large sites, small sites – and in multiple contexts – in pits, in houses, in middens, and in graves (Emerson 1989). Given this ubiquity, it is difficult to accept Ramey Incised as an elite pottery. Galloway argues that it might, instead, have been a ware which was associated with ritual pollution experienced by many people at all levels of society – i.e. that it was associated with women, with menstruation, with parturition. Again, the important consideration for this chapter is not the validity of Galloway’s argument but her attempt to interpret archaeological evidence as if women had a hand in creating it. Finally, Galloway discusses the major ritual sites in the Cahokia regional system – the BBB Motor site and the Sponemann site. The ritual items recovered at these sites include artifacts associated with fertility, agriculture, and women. The sites typically are said to be male ritual sites, but Galloway argues that they might just as reasonably be interpreted as female ritual sites that combined menstrual-seclusion structures and fertility ceremonialism. Galloway’s model presents an intriguing alternative to the standard interpretations of male-centered settlement organized, in part, around sweatlodges used only by men. Nevertheless, her model is derived from interpretations of classic ethnography that are being questioned seriously here. Unfortunately, the only alternative models available from current literature also conform to male-centered construction of ancient society. The possibility that women might have had their own sweatlodges, that men and women might have shared ritual structures, or that menstrual huts might have been sites of sacred power and political action, rather than stigmatized locales of impurity and danger, has yet to be considered, much less evaluated empirically. Part of the reason most archaeologists have ignored the possibility of female ritual structures may lie in the assumptions about gender and the division of labor that are implicit in traditional models of complex societies. Following a long line of social theorists, archaeologists expect that in complex societies the division of labor will be intensified and women will be politically subordinate and economically dependent. Most archaeologists working on American Bottom data are interested in emphasizing the complexity of Cahokia’s political economy. Evidence of female political action or economic power would undermine claims for complexity, because the traditional models are considered indisputable. I think it is time to begin seriously to challenge the models.

Gender systems at Cahokia

81

Two-spirits in native North American cultures Modern Western constructions of gender are strongly dichotomized, gender assignments typically are conceived of as immutable, and, as Schnarch (1992) has pointed out, Western sex and gender assignments tend to coincide. Yet, this is not the case in all contemporary societies. To give only one example, seven gender categories have been reported among the Chukchi in Siberia, and gender assignments are not necessarily permanent in this group. Individuals may adopt different genders at different times in their lives, and some genders, such as those that a Chukchi may adopt during a trance state or during particular rituals, are intrinsically situational and temporary (Jacobs and Cromwell 1992, cited in Hollimon 1997). There is, thus, no reason to assume a priori that all past cultures dichotomized gender. In fact, there is a fair amount of ethnohistorical and ethnographic evidence that gender systems were not dichotomous in some proto-historic and historic Native American cultures. Instead, in some societies, three or four genders existed. These genders usually are referred to in historical documents as berdaches and in the anthropological literature as berdaches, cross-genders, or two-spirits. Parenthetically, the term berdache originally was applied exclusively to biological males who lived as women; this term may be used by anthropologists to refer also to biological females who live as men. Although it cannot be assumed from the ethnohistorical or ethnographic evidence that any particular prehistoric society had a non-dichotomous gender system, it also should not be assumed that gender systems were binary or that the third and fourth genders were unimportant. The difficulty of describing two-spirits is perhaps indicative of just how deeply embedded in modern Western society a dichotomous gender system is. However, the two-spirit can be defined as either a biological male or a biological female who adopts some or all aspects of the role more commonly associated with a gender which does not match the person’s biological category. He or she may dress like, talk like, or act like the “opposite” sex; in addition, the two-spirit typically does the same work as the “opposite” sex (and often is reported to be particularly proficient at this work), and he or she participates in the rituals associated with the “opposite” sex (Blackwood 1984; Schnarch 1992). In addition, two-spirits often are described as possessing spiritual power. They may fulfill a mediating role between men and women or between the physical and the spiritual world (Schnarch 1992). In some societies, selected rituals – such as the naming of children (Thayer 1980) or funerary activities (Hollimon 1997) – were performed only by two-spirits. There was, apparently, a great deal of cross-cultural variety in the way that two-spirit status was expressed. In many societies, both male and female twospirits cross-dressed (Callender and Kochems 1983a; Schnarch 1992); in others, one or both did not (Callender and Kochems 1983a). The choice of

82

Laura Pate

clothing might depend on the work in which a person was engaged (Callender and Kochems 1983a; Schnarch 1992) or on individual choice (Callender and Kochems 1983a). In some societies, two-spirits wore clothes unlike those of either men or women or wore combinations of men’s and women’s clothes. Elsie Clews Parsons (1916, cited in Hollimon 1997) reports that, among the Zuni, male two-spirits were buried in a combination of men’s and women’s clothing although in life they wore only women’s clothing. Among the Illinois, male two-spirits wore their hair as women did (Hauser 1990). As Callender and Kochems (1983a) point out, many of these data were collected during a period of cultural disruption and assimilation and may not reflect accurately the styles of the pre-Contact Period. However, the available evidence suggests that clothing and hairstyle cannot always be equated with gender status. The lack of a consistent relation between gender status and either clothing or hairstyle has serious implications for the interpretation of Mississippian iconography; traditionally, it has been assumed that the biological sex of the human represented can be inferred from the clothing, the hairstyle, or the activities of the figure. The Schild pipe, for instance, has been said to represent a female because the figure is skirted and is not wearing earspools, and an effigy from Spiro has been described as a woman because that individual is not wearing earspools and is grinding corn (Emerson 1989). Even recent attempts to re-analyze Mississippian iconography from a nonandrocentric perspective (e.g. Koehler 1997; Thomas 2000) have failed to come to grips with this problem. Both Koehler and Thomas rely extensively on clothing and hairstyles as markers of sex. According to Koehler, women can be identified by their hair (usually straight) and their skirts, while men are identified by their hairstyles (buns or ponytails) and their nudity (although penises are rarely depicted). Although Thomas relies primarily on depictions of breasts and female genitalia to identify representations of women, she also uses skirts and hairstyles as markers. This easy acceptance of dress and hairstyle as a means of determining sex is particularly surprising given that both Thomas and Koehler are familiar with the literature on twospirits. Thomas mentions two-spirits in her 1996 article about gender in North Carolina Mississippian cultures, and Koehler discusses two-spirits in this same 1997 article. In fact, he suggests that a Piney Creek, Illinois, image of a warrior holding two spears might represent a female two-spirit because the figure seems to have both a male hairstyle and female genitalia. Despite this, he does not question the validity of identifying figures with male hairstyles and without explicit representations of sexual characteristics as biological males. Clearly, however, if two-spirits were present in Mississippian cultures, neither biological sex nor gender can be equated straightforwardly with appearance. It is unclear just how common the two-spirit status was even in the PostContact Period, but, in their oft-cited 1983(a) article, Callender and

Gender systems at Cahokia

83

Kochems state that there are direct reports of two-spirits in 113 protohistoric and historic North American societies. Tribes with two-spirits were found in almost every region of North America: in the Southwest, in California, on the Northwest coast, in the Great Basin, in the Plains, in the Prairies, and in the Southeast. Callender and Kochems declare that evidence for the two-spirit tradition was surprisingly absent in much of the East, including parts of the Southeast (but cf. Thomas 1996: 41). As several researchers have pointed out (e.g., Callender and Kochems 1983a; Schnarch 1992), the absence of direct evidence does not necessarily mean that (male) two-spirits did not exist in other societies. From the sixteenth century on, Euro-American observers reacted with repugnance to the two-spirit status; when these observers did mention two-spirits, they wrote only very brief – and biased – statements about them. Much of the Euro-American hostility was focused on the sexual behavior of the twospirits, who frequently were assumed to be homosexuals, but the EuroAmericans were appalled also by the occupational behavior of the two-spirits. Seventeenth-century French observers wrote of the Illinois two-spirits that these were men who “glory in demeaning themselves to do everything that women do” (Marquette, cited in Hauser, 1990: 45). Given that the negative response to the two-spirits by Euro-Americans seems to have been ubiquitous, there is a very real possibility that some Euro-Americans simply refused to mention a system they found abhorrent. It is also possible that, faced with a gender system unlike their own, the Euro-Americans did not realize what they were observing. Furthermore, the impact of Euro-American judgment on Native Americans cannot be discounted. In many cultures in which it is known to have existed, the two-spirit status – or at least references to it – disappeared rapidly after Contact. For instance, two-spirits were reportedly common in the Illinois tribe of the seventeenth century, but there are no eighteenth century references to two-spirits in that tribe (Hauser 1990). According to Blackwood (1984), the female two-spirit role had virtually disappeared among all Native American groups – including the Western tribes – by the end of the nineteenth century. Schnarch (1992) has also pointed out that even explicit denials of the existence of two-spirits by tribe members cannot be accepted at face value because many informants might have been reluctant to admit that such a despised custom existed. Blackwood (1984) notes that much of the ethnographic evidence about two-spirits was gathered in the twentieth century by anthropologists who could not observe the system but could only question informants about the existence of and the function of two-spirits in the past. Many of these informants were demonstrably hostile to the two-spirit system. And, in 1940, in one of the very few early articles about two-spirits, Kroeber (cited in Blackwood 1984) had noted that gathering ethnographic data about the two-spirit system was almost impossible because of the Euro-American repugnance to it.

84

Laura Pate

A final confounding factor in determining the distribution of two-spirits is the sheer difficulty of discovering passing references to them in the ethnohistories and ethnographies. Several commentators on the Callender and Kochems article (e.g. Bloch 1983; Brown 1983) point out specific omissions in their list of tribes in which two-spirits have been reported. Signorini (1983) claims that there is even a plausible reference to two-spirits in the Iroquois tribe; Callender and Kochems (1983a) had argued repeatedly that given the abundance of information available about the Iroquois the absence of evidence of two-spirits in this tribe must be accepted as a reflection of reality. (In their reply, Callender and Kochems [1983b] stand by their original position, although they acknowledge that they have not read the specific statement to which Signorini referred.) To recapitulate, there are many reasons both for believing that two-spirits might have existed in tribes for which there are no reports of the custom and for believing that existing reports are likely to be fragmentary and biased. On the other hand, because Europeans often approached Native American customs with repugnance, false reports based on prejudice, malice, and even fear all exist in the literature. It should be noted that the caveats just discussed are not always taken as applicable to the study of female two-spirits. Specifically, Callender and Kochems (1983a) could find reports of female two-spirits in only 30 tribes, mostly Western tribes. They maintain that this distribution does reflect ethnographic reality and, from it, conclude that the occurrence of female twospirits was more restricted than the occurrence of male two-spirits. Callender and Kochems then suggest that Whitehead was perhaps right when she suggested in a 1981 chapter that it was more difficult for females than males to become two-spirits because “the biological component of gender” (Callender and Kochems 1983a: 455) was more significant for women – by which they mean that women menstruate and men are threatened by this. Incidentally, Whitehead (1981, cited in Blackwood, 1984) – echoing sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Euro-American declarations that male two-spirits were effeminate or incapable of succeeding at male activities – maintains that female two-spirits were physically deficient, that they exhibited amenorrhea and underdeveloped secondary sexual characteristics. Callender and Kochems (1983a: 456) conclude that female two-spirits were never true two-spirits but were instead women who behaved like men in some ways but who still retained their female gender status. Blackwood (1984) has pointed out that Whitehead and Callender and Kochems could not conceive of a complete change in social gender roles because they did not distinguish gender and biological sex. Two-spirits are known from ethnohistorical or ethnographic reports to have been present in the lower Mississippi Valley (Callender and Kochems 1983a), in other parts of the Southeast (Callender and Kochems 1983a; Thomas 1996), among the Prairie Indians (Callender and Kochems

Gender systems at Cahokia

85

1983a), and among the Illinois and the Miami in the Midwest (Callender and Kochems 1983a; Hauser 1990). These are all areas or tribes which traditionally have provided ethnographic analogies for archaeologists working at Cahokia, yet the evidence about two-spirits has been ignored by these archaeologists. The proto-historic and historic Illinois lived in Illinois, southern Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, eastern Missouri, and northeastern Arkansas. French explorers were the first Europeans to encounter the Illinois; the Jollet and Marquette expedition in 1673 was the first into Illinois territory. The Frenchmen reported that there were male two-spirits in the Illinois tribe; there were no reports of female two-spirits. The male two-spirits were said to dress as women, to do women’s work – they did agricultural work, ported goods from one home base to another, ported meat back from kill sites, and worked at women’s crafts – and they were said to have sexual relationships with either men or women. The Illinois two-spirits may have observed some of the same prohibitions as women did – some sources, for example, report that two-spirits did not participate in raids or hunts, but there are contradictory reports (Hauser 1990). Pierre Deliette, an early French observer, reported that the Illinois raised boys as females if they were seen to play with female tools – spades, spindles, axes – rather than male tools – bows and arrows. The boys were dressed as girls, wore their hair like girls, and were tattooed like girls (Hauser 1990). Blackwood (1984) reports the same sort of process for female two-spirits among the Western tribes. Girls who played with boys’ toys – with bows and arrows – were raised as boys and taught the skills a man should know. In some other tribes, a person’s two-spirit status was revealed in a vision-dream rather than through a preference or an aptitude for the work of the “opposite” sex (Callender and Kochems 1983a; Schnarch 1992). Among the references to two-spirits in the Natchez culture is one particularly intriguing phrase. Dumont de Montigny referred to a Natchez two-spirit as “this pretended chief of the women” (Callender and Kochems 1983b: 465). Although they stress the ambiguity of this phrase, Callender and Kochems acknowledge that this may mean that gender status and political office were directly related among the