Gas Hidrógeno comercial

Until the 1970s, the universal political subordination of women was one of the accepted fundamentals of cultural anthropology. E. E. Evans- Pritchard (1965: 54) observed that “in almost every conceivable variety of social institutions, in all of them, regardless of social structure, men are in the ascendancy. . . . ” Robin Fox (1967: 31) includes male domi- nation as one of only four “basic principles” of kinship (along with female gestation, male impregnation, and incest avoidance). In an over- view of “cultural universals,” Donald Brown (1991: 91n) categorically asserts the “universal dominance of men in the public-political arena.”

There remains a popular myth of primeval matriarchy. This view is a survival of a nineteenth-century belief, most exhaustively articulated by

J. J. Bachofen in 1861 in Das Mutterrecht, that women’s invention of agriculture gave rise to a cult of the Mother Goddess and a long period of female domination. Drawing on classical studies, rather than cross- cultural investigation, Bachofen set women’s rule as the very cornerstone of civilization, the first emergence from savage anarchy. Unfortunately, no evidence for a period of matriarchy—or even for a matriarchy—has emerged from the ethnographic or archeological records (Webster 1975). From the perspective of evolutionary biology, female subordination may be postulated as an inevitable result of two million years of evo- lution of Man the Hunter. Women were too busy birthin’ babies and keeping the home fires burning in the old cave to have much to do with anything as momentous as the survival of the fittest. The end result of all that evolving was a demure and passive female forever barred from politics by her physical inferiority and lack of testosterone. At best, women could gain authority in the domestic sphere, although the public sphere remained off limits.

Although the universality of male domination remains controversial, even among feminists, it is certainly true that a form of academic male domination prevailed in anthropology at least through the 1950s. Para- doxically, some of the most influential researchers of the first generation of professional anthropologists in the United States were women: Mar- garet Mead and Ruth Benedict, among others, were successful in turning the question of gender from biology to socialization and in establishing cultural relativism as a major tenet of anthropology. However, for de- cades women virtually disappeared from both ethnographies and from theory, where they were usually treated, if they were treated at all, as appurtenances to males. A major problem that revisionist researchers have encountered in searching the ethnographic record is the relative paucity of detailed information on women. The same omission is found in textbooks. As Sandra Morgen (1989: 10) observes, “Dominant an- thropological understandings of gender are revealed not only by where anthropology textbooks and theory do discuss women and/or gender, but also by where those discussions are significantly absent. Two of the most striking examples of this absence are in our teaching of human evolution and of stratification, power and political economy.”

The emergence of feminist scholarship over the last 40 years has chal- lenged many of anthropology’s fundamental assumptions while helping to fill out the record with new ethnographic data. Only a portion of this material is overtly “political”; that is, having to do specifically with group decision making and leadership. However, in a wider sense, most of it is political, because a dominant thrust of feminist scholarship has

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been power, especially the relative power of the sexes. Is male domi- nation really universal? If so, what are its causes? If not, how did it evolve culturally? What are the specific contexts that encourage or dis- courage gender differences in status and power? Is male domination re- ally a meaningful concept?

As in any revolution in thinking, the questioning of anthropological assumptions about gender has intermixed both scholarship and ideology. Whether one believes that gender inequality is a universal or what one believes are the causes of male domination will have profound impli- cations for how one perceives the world and how one recommends changing society. Although there is hardly any point on which all femi- nist anthropologists agree, one important implication is clear: gender can no longer be ignored; it must be considered as “an analytical category— which, like race, ethnicity, class or caste, tends to be crucial in the construction of both group identity and structures of power in society. . . . ” (Morgen 1989: 8).

Man the Hunter versus Woman the Gatherer

Until the 1980s, the standard theory for the evolution of homo sapiens placed the emphasis on cooperative hunting of big game. The advantages of freeing the hands for the use of tools in killing and butchering resulted in bipedalism, which led to greater efficiency in hunting and an increased dependence on animal protein. In a complex feedback process, selection for new skills generated larger brains, which in turn brought about more cooperatively and complexly organized hunts. Larger brains meant longer periods of immaturity for children; women were saddled with protracted child care, which effectively prevented them from hunting or traveling extensive distances. Thus dependent, women were required to remain at “home base,” foraging a bit and taking care of children, while men elaborated their tool kits and evolved incipient civilization out of hunting strategy.

Frances Dahlberg (1981: 1) refers to this traditional Man-the-Hunter schema as a “just-so story,” not that different from other myths that explain the origins of language, tool use, and civilization. Women are represented as passive. The selective pressure of evolution is almost en- tirely on the male.

Offering an alternative perspective, Sally Slocum (1975) points out that hominid evolution is based on a relatively small amount of data, leaving gaping holes in the evidence to be filled in with hidden, and often unconscious, assumptions that cannot help but be influenced by

the male-dominated culture from which such ideas emerge. For example, the earliest tools, no more than barely worked rocks, have been assumed to be “hand axes” when they could just as well have been used as aids in women’s gathering and in preparation of plant foods. Cooperative hunting of large game, which is claimed to be the initial kick in human evolution, could only have occurred after brain size had begun to in- crease. On the other hand, the postulated pair bonding of one man taking care of one woman could only have taken place after the hunting ad- aptation was already well established. Initially, an increase in child de- pendency would have led to a pair bond between mother and offspring, not man and woman.

An alternative schema would give Woman the Gatherer at least equal weight in evolution with Man the Hunter. Natural selection obviously operated on both sexes. The lengthening of infant dependency would have placed a premium on a mother’s skills in finding food for herself and her young. Far from being dependent on their male consorts, women may have supplied the bulk of the food for their families, as they have done in many hunting-gathering societies of recent times. Gathering is hardly a simple process; it involves finding and identifying edible plants, a knowledge of seasonal variation, a good sense of geography and weather, the development of containers for carrying food (and babies at the same time), and the invention of tools and techniques for food prep- aration. Longer gestation and more difficult births would also require greater social skills and communication among women that would select for larger brains. Women, far from being the passive recipients of evo- lution, were certainly as active as men.

Another version of the Man-the-Hunter concept comes from socio- biology, where it is acknowledged that both women and men were in- strumental in evolution, but that natural selection led to different evolutionary strategies for each sex, resulting in male dominance. The “selfish gene” school theorizes that from an evolutionary point of view, all organisms, including humans, are basically containers for genes, and that there is an innate drive to spread one’s own genetic program as widely as possible. The best male strategy is to have as many partners as possible, leading to aggression and competition. Women, on the other hand, have a larger genetic investment in their own offspring, so there would be a greater tendency toward long-term relationships and coop- eration (Draper 1985). This argument is buttressed by studies of higher primates. Some species of baboons show marked sex role differentiation and strong dominance hierarchies, and many others, such as gorillas and orangutans, also reveal significant sexual dimorphism.

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Feminists, however, point out that, once again, male biases are evident. In chimpanzees—humans’ closest evolutionary relatives—there is little sexual dimorphism, and males compete for females not by aggression and dominance but through sociability, mutual grooming, and sharing food. Even among baboons, the most notoriously hierarchical of primate species, environment may have more to do with behavior than with in- stinct. Among some forest-living baboons, the “political” decisions on troop movements are made by older females, and, although males posture and threaten when confronted by a predator, they are also the first to find safety in the trees if the threat persists, leaving females encumbered with infants to fend for themselves (Dahlberg 1981; Leibowitz 1975). In short, the sociobiological argument often rests on which species one chooses to compare to humans.

Theorists have not yet settled on any particular evolutionary model, but it is already evident that the role of women must be considered equally to that of men, and that this consideration devastates traditional notions of Man the Hunter as the primary force in human evolution. Similarly, the consideration of the female role in evolution makes the- ories of male dominance based on Darwinian notions questionable at best.

Biological Differences in Gender

Differences in gender are indisputable, although the existence of innate

behavioraldifferences remains hotly controversial. There have been two basic perspectives: (1) the culturalogical school, which views the entire explanation in the socialization of children into role behavior proper to their cultures; and (2) the “prepared learning” school, which assumes a biologically based propensity to learn and to perpetuate role behaviors peculiar to each sex (Draper 1985).

Psychobiological evidence comes from four sources: studies of cross- cultural uniformities, observations of infant behavior, comparisons with higher primates, and descriptions of physiological characteristics. A cross-cultural study revealed that young boys are consistently more ag- gressive than are young girls, although in only 20 percent of the sample were boys actually socialized for aggressiveness. Also, observations of children raised together in Israeli Kibbutzim, where, supposedly, social- ization was the same for both sexes, revealed that boys were more ag- gressive and competitive and girls were more “integrative” (affectionate, willing to share, cooperative, and so forth). Research on infant behavior, ostensibly prior to socialization (including in orphanages, where little

socialization took place), revealed a similar pattern. Throughout mam- malia, including the primates, males are normally more aggressive, al- though there are exceptions, as noted above. The muscular strength of women is 55 to 65 percent that of men. Males seem to have higher energy potentials and females, lower metabolic rates. Early brain differ- entiation suggests diverse behavioral potentials by sex. Androgyny in girls (prenatal exposure to male hormones) leads to “tomboy” behavior. Finally, the association of the male hormone testosterone with aggres- siveness is well known (Parker and Parker 1979). More recent neuro- psychological studies of hormonal effects on brain development reveal different male and female patterns: the “lifelong effects of early exposure to sex hormones are characterized as ‘organizational’ because they ap- pear to alter brain function permanently during a critical period in pre- natal or early postnatal development” (Kimura 2002: 33).

Some subtle biological differences are now well established, although laboratory studies tend to focus on such measurable things as differential spatial and linguistic abilities that appear to have little to do with political behavior or issues of dominance and subordination. Many claims for biological differences continue to be disputed. It has been pointed out, for example, that sexual socialization of infants really begins at birth, often in very subtle ways. “Intersex” children—who lack an enzyme for converting testosterone and therefore growing up with “ambiguous” gen- italia—after puberty easily assumed the male identities for which they were socialized. The study that found that prenatal androgyny led to tomboy behavior in girls has been challenged, and there are biologists who strongly contest evidence of prenatal brain differentiation between the sexes. Even muscular strength and endurance is strongly affected by environment; differences in performance levels in sports are narrowing rapidly as women receive training and encouragement similar to that of male athletes (Lott 1987).

Even if there are prepatterned behavioral differences between the sexes—males being more “agonistic” (aggressive, exploratory, hierar- chical, and competitive) and females more socially “integrative” and “nurturent” (Parker and Parker 1979)—all behavior in humans is filtered through culture. If such propensities do exist, the degree to which they will be manifested, assuming they are manifested at all, will be deter- mined by culture and individual psychology. The wide variety of sex role behaviors among societies and within any particular society testifies to the extent of human malleability, no matter what innate predispositions there may be.

The problem comes not from admitting possible behavioral differences derived from biologically based propensities, but rather from the logical

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(or illogical) jump to male domination. There is little in these hypothe- sized innate differences to suggest gender stratification or the superiority of one sex over another (in fact, males respond worse to stress than do females, are more vulnerable to physical and psychological illness throughout their lives, and have a lower life expectancy). The assumption that physical strength alone or higher testosterone leads to dominance fails to account for the fact that almost nowhere does strength or raw aggression imply leadership; leaders in many societies are selected for sociability, sharing, and their intuitive understanding of others, all traits that are supposedly feminine. Also, if stratification or male dominance were biologically based, one would expect it to be universal, but, as will be seen, there appear to be egalitarian societies at both the foraging and horticultural levels.

The debate over the biological bases of sexual stratification was ar- dently fought throughout the 1970s; presently it is pretty much a dead issue outside of sociobiology. Feminist anthropologists have gone on to more complex, and more fruitful, questions.

WOMEN AND POWER: THE CROSS-CULTURAL