How does the role of the sexes within a tribal community differ to that of a state organized society?
Everytime I get into these conversations I will always hear stories of inequality and oppression but personally I don’t believe any of it as I perceive this to be a modern propaganda campaign to belittle tribal people.
i haven’t heard any such stories myself, but if i were to ponder the reason something like that might come true, i would assume that it stems from civilized baggage.
i think most aboriginal cultures developed with differing gender roles, but the roles differ from people to people.
I think the natural role of the men in primitive societies is to be warriors and hunters. Two roles that involve killing, one related to protecting the clan the other related to providing meat. The women are gatherers nurturers. Its how things were for the last 90,000 of the last 100,00 years.
Its the way we are wired.
I’ve never been a big fan of feminist critiques of civilization. I am also not a fan of moral critiques of civilization that begin from the premise that the main thing wrong with civilization is that its too violent.
Its human nature for men to fight for territory and to perpetuate their clan. When this natural behavior is combined with agriculture and symbolic culture and intensifies over time it creates civilization.
civilizations become stratified, with power concentrated at the top and large clases of relatively powerless people that come to deeply resent the upper classes who more or less alone are able to display alpha male behavior.
This gives birth to what Nietzsche calls “The servant morality”
I think the servant morality is inherent in many anarcho-primitivist critiques of civilization coming as it does from the left. It still has that heritage. Its not purely post left.
But I’ve come to look civilization not so much as “takers” and “leavers” but more like “winners” and “losers”
In wars you have winners and losers. Complex societies that intensify through agriculture and symbolic culture have been able to win the wars and perpetuate, through this process, the memes of civilization.
But civilization’s memes connnect into our genes and basic wiring. The wiring it connects with are the basic genes of hunter gatherers. And for men those genes tend to tell us to be warriors and hunters.
In the the servant morality you have what gave rise to marxism, people in the laboring classes banding together as having a common lot and forming collectives to combat aristocrats.
But I have come to the conclusion that primitive men don’t think that way. they have no class consciousness, because they have no social classes. Out of all civilized people they would resemble aristicrats most in their thinking as they are independant and able to exert power.
Feminism springs out of a marxist view of the world. It places all women in a down trodden social class and all men in the role of oppressor.
In many ways though civilized society gives more power to women and oppresses men more. Because in civlized society there is only room for so many independant proud men. Most men are slaves to people with power over them and are unable to act independantly.
There is a lot more room for the expression of nurturing behavior. Many natural male tendencies are legislated against and or twisted and controlled in other ways.
I think urban gangs are one place where natural male behavior achieves expression. In a lot of ways this is perhaps disturbing. But you have to wonder why “gangsta rap” so resonates with young males all over the world.
I want to be a person. I happen to, and more specifically I be a person with two distinct sex chromosomes and the corresponding asymmetrical proportions of hormonal chemical messengers. If that means I regularly manifest a certain set of urges and favored activities which fit into a grouping of similar behavior patterns commonly found in my fellow males, then so be it.
I’ll keep letting the heart play lighthouse. Tribal lighthouse? Wild heart? Sure, why not.
Women have different roles depending on which tribe they are in. we can’t assume that all tribes treat their women the same way in their tribal society. its harder to tell in this society what is truely a mans duty and what a womens duty is. in tribal societies, though it will differ, one thing remains the same: men and women both KNOW where their place is and what their duties ared --not so in our culture.
Why is it that within the “primitivist” community so many people want to go back to the way things were and don’t show much intrest in moving forward, out of civilization, and into exactly what may work best for them. The TrollSplinter clan is dedicated to reaching a state that is free of civilization and gender roles. The idea of the existance of gender in general is not fact for us. If you want to hunt and kill, do it. If you want to make baskets and gather nettle, do it. If you want to do both, even better. I don’t see the need to do what we’ve been told is instinct. Why not just do what feels right?
Exactly, I think it’s best to dispense with the sociobiological rhetoric of "natural men’s roles "and “natural women’s roles,” “basic wiring”, “memes” and "genes telling us to be warriors, “winners and losers”, and other discredited notions, and get on with the task of creating free and egalitarian communities.
If we look at history and archeological evidence,we find that every tribal group varies from place to place.
Varying climates,and habitats affected mens and womens roles in life.
What is considered a mans role in one tribe,may not matter in another,
or vice versa.
Many roles were shared.
One other thing I can point out is that by nature on average there are certain things that the two genders excel at more than the other.
It is not always a matter of oppression or social protocol,
It is doing what comes naturally.
Yes humans have been known to create unnessessary rules for their groups.
A custom that seems crazy to me,may be what keeps a new guinea tribe together.
There is no one right way for everyone to live,some say.
For me it is finding what works best for the group that I am in.
ofthewood
Actually memes and genes are not a very useful way of explaining human behaviour. “Memes” (originally coined by ultra-Darwinian Richard Dawkins) is a concept thought to represent the cultural equivalent of genes, a kind of descrete unit of culture that replicates itself and mutate inside people’s heads. Memetic transmission is then thought to be similar to genetic transmission. But note that this way of explaining behaviour merely makes the meaning of ‘meme’ the same as ‘idea’, and we know that ideas are neither granular units nor do they replicate themselves. It’s nothing but a self-serving mechanistic view of social behaviour that reifies thought. Ideas are not things.
As for genes, we have long known that genes do not cause behaviour because they do not code for behaviour, genes code for protein. I’d recommend almost any book by Richard Lewontin, to help understand the finer points of this critique, especially Biology as Ideology, for starters.
I just meant self serving in the sense that many biologists tend to have a mechanistic and reductionist view of behaviour, reducing complicated patterns of choice, motivation, ideas, etc to little bits of stuff that causes us to act. This serves their political views of what they think human nature is or should be, but seems incorrect in so many ways.
Genes code for the types of protein that are required for most metabolic processes. Niether the genes nor the processes have anything to do with behaviour per se, that is, they have nothing to do with why you like playing football, who you choose for a girlfriend, or why you hate spinach. Behaviour is an emergent property of enormous complexity that can’t be reduced to anything on the molecular level. Genes can explain hair and eye color, body shape and immune system disorders, but not ideas. To do so is to confuse observation with explanation: hierarchy and domination can then be said to be “natural” and “genetic” i.e “She was born to be our Queen, and we her slaves”.
The role of Women in any wholistic healthy society, where women are allowed to socially interact with a child held to her bare-breast, will be a vastly more meaningful role; the role of a life less repressed by patriarchal shame.
Unfortunately,
Anal-man and our anal-civilization is patriarchal, because the unconscious anal preoccupations of anal-man’s anal-retentiveness are latently homosexual, and must possess and dominate women in order to compensate for an insecure male sexual identity.
Women’s breasts must be hidden away in shame from patriarchal society, because they are, and must remain, the patriarchal private property of insecure anal-man.
Women, shamed under patriarchy, are never publically allowed to know nor enjoy the deep wholistic existential connection with their own naked skins without shame.
Prevented from experiencing the intimate nurturing fullness of being a woman, their children, will never know the unconditional nuturing of their mother’s naked breasts, but will absorb instead their mother’s patriarchal breast-shame and repression.
Such children are doomed to universally fail in their attempt to negotiate the all important oral-stage of personality development, and will begin to exibit the classical symptoms of oral-fixation; life-long envy, it’s resentments, and a life-long impulse towards chronic consumption.
Sound familiar?
Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning, as one failure guarantees the next; all for want of our mother’s breasts.
[quote=“Free_Range_Organic_Human, post:3, topic:246”]civilizations become stratified, with power concentrated at the top and large clases of relatively powerless people that come to deeply resent the upper classes who more or less alone are able to display alpha male behavior.
This gives birth to what Nietzsche calls “The servant morality”[/quote]
Nietzsche was an existentialist who despised your pathetically desperate alpha-male, and knew him for what he was; simply the most fear-driven in his ultra-slavish confomity to the herd-mind.
The non-conforming artist, fearless in his piercing contempt for the posturing alpha-males of the herd-mind, is Nietzsche’s Superman!
The non-conformist, dancing under an orgasmic moon in a dionesian burst of spontaneous freedom.
That’s Nietzsche’s transcendant and self-realized Will to Power!
That’s Superman!
[quote=“TheJoker, post:1, topic:246”]How does the role of the sexes within a tribal community differ to that of a state organized society?
Everytime I get into these conversations I will always hear stories of inequality and oppression but personally I don’t believe any of it as I perceive this to be a modern propaganda campaign to belittle tribal people.[/quote]
My background and idea on this can be found from this post about men and wolves/dogs (wolves and dogs are not the same …) posting this link because I can’t directly link you to any of the books I’ve read or just the matter in my head…
http://anthropik.com/2006/11/wolves-dogs/
The way I see a tribal unit work, tho I am no expert and really have no practical knowledge delving into this either… but I would see it as working like a wolf pack would in a way. An alpha male/female (but please, don’t get worked up over this ‘alpha’ word… in the sense I see it as is not the sense most people do, though it can often be this way…) this alpha pair would be the breeding male/female (or parents) in the tribe. It would be safe to assume most decisions would be made by these two together, and if children are about I would think the woman may have even more ‘power’. How these two work however I am not sure… as seen in modern society… the man could be the hunter and the woman to do other tasks or even vise versa.
I agree with this quote posted earlier. However the tasks given (or taught) might be done to the gender that is ‘better’ at it, but if one wants to do something else, or learn something else, why not?
If you want to hunt and kill, do it. If you want to make baskets and gather nettle, do it. If you want to do both, even better. I don't see the need to do what we've been told is instinct. Why not just do what feels right?
I think it might be seen ‘normally’ (and I mean most frequently) man as provider, Woman as nurturer or what not. (This would be to me only strongly supported if the woman is with or has young children). For the most part though this works because it’s just kind of how we are ‘wired’ to be. I don’t see there being any inequality at doing what you are designed to do, or skilled at, or what ever. Certainly tho I think there will be ‘oppression’. This is probably not the oppression that you would think of. More like… hmm not even sure of how to say this… having a hard time of thinking of an example… perhaps just the whole over the individual mentality and outcome… But really, if one was out of being a child… and could provide for themselves (for a short time at least) I see no reason why if they felt oppressed, or had different ideals, they could not leave (perhaps for a time, or maybe forever) and start there own tribe or attempt to join another one. I think I’m moving away from the essence of the question posted here but… I think with a tribal society and having most of our modern social taboos removed, or maybe reworked… and having a much closer knit society it would remove much other social problems and unrest seen today…
yeah just my thoughts…
I think tribal structure may represent the point where the man/wolf comparison breaks down. Tribes generally consist of more than one family and tend to have less hierarchy in decision making than the much smaller group of wolves. Humans might have “leaders” in the sense of personalities that have more charisma or more weight to their suggestions or more status within the tribe, but we don’t have the alpha/beta/omega relationships to the same degree that wolves do.
Not to mention the whole only-alphas-get-to-breed thing. 
If you have a community with 10 women and 1 man, there will be another generation. But if you have 1 woman and 10 men, maybe not. Biologically, men are much more expendable than women. Because of that, men have generally been put to the more dangerous and lethal tasks. Men tend to do more of the hunting, and if there’s a battle to be fought, it generally falls to the men. This shows in evolution; men tend to be bigger and stronger. The parts of the brain relating to empathy, communication, and the skills needed to keep the group together tend to be stronger in women. They tend to be put to the safer, more essential tasks like gathering.
That said, tribal societies are egalitarian. They don’t tolerate -archies; patriarchies, matriarchies, or any other kind. Primitive societies did have differences in gender roles, but the oppressive gender typing of civilization is a product of agriculture, which moved men and women from co-equal roles, to men inhabiting all the important positions, and women locked away at home.
Its human nature for men to fight for territory and to perpetuate their clan.
Hunter-gatherers don’t fight for territory, though. Only farmers have a need to expand or to protect land that they’ve invested labor into.
In many ways though civilized society gives more power to women and oppresses men more. Because in civlized society there is only room for so many independant proud men. Most men are slaves to people with power over them and are unable to act independantly.
Yes, and the women are slaves even to them. But there are some men higher up who do have some power. There are only very rarely women in such positions. Civilization has hurt us all, but you’ve got to be blind to think that it’s hurt both genders equally, and insane to think that it’s hurt men more.
I think urban gangs are one place where natural male behavior achieves expression. In a lot of ways this is perhaps disturbing. But you have to wonder why "gangsta rap" so resonates with young males all over the world.
Once upon a time, because it was a voice of resistance. This isn’t any kind of natural expression, any more than the violence in a prison yard is a natural expression. This is what happens when you put humans in a pathological situation.
Why is it that within the "primitivist" community so many people want to go back to the way things were and don't show much intrest in moving forward, out of civilization, and into exactly what may work best for them.
Because that’s what worked. Are you familiar with “Sankofa”? It’s an Akan (West African) term meaning, “It is not forbidden to go back and get what you lost.” The only way to move forward is to take a step back.
Exactly, I think it's best to dispense with the sociobiological rhetoric of "natural men's roles "and "natural women's roles," "basic wiring", "memes" and "genes telling us to be warriors, "winners and losers", and other discredited notions, and get on with the task of creating free and egalitarian communities.
Granted, most of Ted’s argument is a bunch of washed-up, pseudo-scientific hogwash that was discredited a hundred years ago, but at the same time, a working community will have to come to terms with the fact that men and women are not the same. From how far gone we are now, it may look like gender-bending anarchy, but working societies do have notions of what it means to be a Man, and what it means to be a Woman. And they’ll very often have third, fourth, even fifth genders, and what it means to be one of them.
If we look at history and archeological evidence,we find that every tribal group varies from place to place. Varying climates,and habitats affected mens and womens roles in life. What is considered a mans role in one tribe,may not matter in another, or vice versa. Many roles were shared.
Absolutely true. My first statement was a generalization, but there’s plenty of variation.
The roles thing is taking it too far. Gender is taking things too far for that matter. It isn't the unchangeable necessity people assume it to be. If someone wants to have it in their society then they might go and do that. I'd personally avoid them though. The memetic and genetic concepts however do help to explain human behavior.
I disagree. Every working society has concepts of gender. They don’t need to be iron-clad, and you don’t need to punish those who cross those lines, but guidelines of what it means to be Man, Woman, or any other gender is important. It’s one of a culture’s most important functions: adapting biological realities to a particular ecology. To ignore gender is to ignore far too essential an element of human existence.
That said, having a concept of gender doesn’t mean you have to have just two genders, or that people who cross genders must be “bad.” They can be loosely defined or strictly enforced; you can find examples of anything from 2 to 5 genders. The important point is that you really do need to have some notion of gender for a society to really work. There’s a biological reality there that’s simply too big to ignore.
An alpha male/female (but please, don't get worked up over this 'alpha' word.. in the sense I see it as is not the sense most people do, though it can often be this way..) this alpha pair would be the breeding male/female (or parents) in the tribe.
See also http://anthropik.com/2006/11/alpha-dogs-wolf-packs-the-wandering-free-families/
The social hierarchies of alphas, betas and omegas were observed in captivity: “It is a bit like observing only the inmates of prisons when you are trying to understand human society, then extrapolating your findings to free-living people.” When Mech observed wild wolf packs, he never saw any of the dominance displays so common among captive wolf packs. The wild wolf pack, like the wild human tribe, is a family. Human tribes are multi-generational, so they have some better mechanics for inter-generational egalitarianism, so there isn’t even that kind of watered-down, not-really “alpha,” but as Mech says, “calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so ‘alpha’ adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent, the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal’s dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information.” We’re not talking about dominance hierarchies; we’re talking about families.
It would be safe to assume most decisions would be made by these two together, and if children are about I would think the woman may have even more 'power'.
It’s hard to get inside a wolf’s head, but certainly among human tribes this is not the case. Even small children have as much say as the most respected elder. Take a look at Sorenson’s “Preconquest Consciousness”
Tribes generally consist of more than one family and tend to have less hierarchy in decision making than the much smaller group of wolves. Humans might have "leaders" in the sense of personalities that have more charisma or more weight to their suggestions or more status within the tribe, but we don't have the alpha/beta/omega relationships to the same degree that wolves do.
Wolves don’t have the alpha/beta/omega relationships. But a wolf pack is remade from one generation to the next, whereas bands are more ad hoc, and tribes are multi-generational. Then again, nuclear families (which operate very much like wolf packs) form up bands, which fuse and fission often and easily, so you could say that band-level society is made up of various alliances of human families that are each quite analogous to wolf packs.
Not to mention the whole only-alphas-get-to-breed thing.
In a regular wolf pack, the “alphas” are the parents. So yes, they’re the only ones who get to breed, which is the same as human societies. We also discourage you from fucking your mom. When wolf cubs grow up, they become the “alphas” of their own packs, i.e., they move out and start their own families, rather than trying to bang mom.
Jason thanks for pointing out the differences in a captive vs wild wolf. Sometimes it’s hard to get to these when we’ve lived forever in captivity.
You’re absolutely correct about wolves not displaying the same amount of ‘alpha’ and ‘omega’ behaviour in the wild. The main reason is (especially during the mating season) a wolf in captive is unable to escape, or leave the pack (at least for some time, e.g. until mating season is over). This wolf will, while showing extremely subordinate behaviour still be pressed and persecuted because it is still there. Wolf packs are extremely complex, and as observed by native peoples a wolf hierachy is much more dynamic than what we see today in captive packs. It is true the ‘alpha’, ‘beta’ and ‘omega’ meanings really… I don’t even know how to say it, to use them is to make things to simplistic, and defining something that is dynamic. You may be able to call one wolf an alpha in one situation and another in another situation (wild). Not to use it, unless we restructure the language we speak of wolves (and ourselves) in (which isn’t a bad idea) will leave out important aspects.
It's hard to get inside a wolf's head, but certainly among human tribes this is not the case. Even small children have as much say as the most respected elder. Take a look at Sorenson's "Preconquest Consciousness"Never read the book but I'll make note to check it out. Yeah thanks again for pointing this out, it's hard to say everything you want sometimes.. when I said
It would be safe to assume most decisions would be made by these two together, and if children are about I would think the woman may have even more 'power'.I didn't mean to say the parents make decisions by themselves, but ultimately they would be the ones to make decisions, but if there decisions are made by what is best for the whole rather than the individual then the small children, who are usually a most loved member of any group of people/animals, should defiantly have a good sway, maybe not so much by what they say, but by there being.
Not to mention the whole only-alphas-get-to-breed thing.
In a regular wolf pack, the "alphas" are the parents. So yes, they're the only ones who get to breed, which is the same as human societies. We also discourage you from fucking your mom. When wolf cubs grow up, they become the "alphas" of their own packs, i.e., they move out and start their own families, rather than trying to bang mom.
haha well said.
I need to look into how a nomadic (or semi-nomadic) hunter-gatherer tribe is in regards to the family and interaction with multiple families, or a tribe.
wow, that post was like Bioregional Animism, Jason: it put things in their place.
nice explanations. thinking of a wolf pack in terms of a human family gives an excellent perspective and really does deflate the value of the alpha/beta/omega terms.
This is a good little study on women hunters among Central African foragers. http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/hewlett/femalehunters.html
Jason,
Here is the Difference between being civilized and being primitive. You say I am spouting “pseudo-scientific nonsense that has been discredited a hundred years ago” because you are hundreds of miles away hiding behind a computer monitor and so you can talk tough.
Were we in a face to face encounter, living in a world of stone age technology, you would have to show respect, especially if you weren’t prepared to back up you tough words.
But basically you are a liberal democrat programmer that fantasizes about primitives, so you discount any anthropological data that is not politically correct.
But you are wrong. Primitive tribes are violent, at leat the real life ones. You can fantasize about whatever “pre-apocylptic” nonsense you want.
All animals compete for resources and will use violence.
Its like you want to be all liberal and everything and you can’t even observe yourself. You are aggressive and like to tenaciously go after people on the internet and beat them in debates, when you win you get a surge of increased testosterone.
There it is right there, but you are blind to it. Males like to fight and compete with each other for resources and territory.
Ideas are mental space and you constantly do battle and seek to expand your territory.