“Engels was Right: Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal”
“In the immediate aftermath of World War I, anthropology in Britain and America became established for the first time as a professional discipline. This new discipline was set up with a political mandate: to overturn the materialist paradigm established in the pre-war period by Lewis Morgan, Frederick Engels and Karl Marx. In particular, the mission of the new anthropology was to debunk the theory — until then accepted by almost everyone — that the primordial human social institution had been not the individual family but the matrilineal clan…
According to Morgan, this arrangement — known technically as ‘matrilocal residence’ — originally prevailed in all human societies across the world. So what happened to change such time-honoured arrangements? According to Morgan, the key factor was the domestication of animals, notably cattle. A man possessing a herd could bargain with his future bride’s kinsfolk, allowing them to keep his cows in exchange for their daughter, whom he could now take away. Under the previous matrilocal system, his bride would have been free to remain with her natal family, benefitting from shared childcare, the children’s father being considered just a visitor. The introduction of cattle triggered a general shift from matrilocal to patrilocal residence…
Once Engels had incorporated Morgan’s findings into the socialist canon, however, no one could write neutrally on such topics any more…
Embarrassingly for proponents of the patrilocal band model, genetic data on sub-Saharan African hunter-gatherers indicates a long-term historical preference for matrilocal residence. Studies of mitochondrial versus Y-chromosomal dispersal patterns show that over thousands of years, hunter-gatherer women across this vast region have tended to reside close to their mothers following marriage, migration rates for women being lower than those for men.[47]
A census among the Hadza — bow-and-arrow hunters of Tanzania — showed 68 per cent of married women whose mothers were alive residing with them in the same camp.[48] ‘Across all societies’, concludes the major specialist on this topic, ‘the greater the dependence on gathering, hunting, and fishing, the less likely that residence is virilocal [patrilocal]’.[49] Hunting has the strongest effect and, contrary to proponents of the standard model, results in less patrilocality, not more.”
I’m kinda skeptical about any theory that rests on the assumption that we are all obsessed with passing down our genes. You can make that argument when anthropomorphizing bacteria, but humans make decisions based on culture as well as biology. And for the vast majority of human history, we weren’t aware of what biological features could be passed on to our children, or how (see: LaMarck)… I wonder if it wouldn’t be more important to a parent 5000 years ago that their child shared their cultural practices and carried on familial knowledge, rather than everyone having a widow’s peak or whatever.
And why was the “individual family” so important to those early 20th century authors? Like, there must have been some principled reason at least articulated at some point. Obviously, today, we see this as a gross patriarchal move to oppose rights for women. But, like, the way they talk about it isn’t just in terms of women’s rights, I have to imagine that there was something greater.
Last thought — there is something really special about reading about the “grandmother hypothesis”. I think it’s the only place I’ve seen the theoretical-primordial-woman centered. It’s always “man wants to pass down his genes, so he manipulates and controls people”, never “woman reasonably would have the same impulse, would develop power to be able to ensure the same thing, would therefore prefer daughters”. (obviously, as described above, I’m skeptical… but it’s still nice to read)
Related: “Knocking Down Straw Dolls: A Critique of Cynthia Eller’s The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future”; “Early men and women were equal, say scientists”; “I think I know where babies come from, therefore I am human”
