Matriarchal and Patriarchal Consciousness and Culture

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creekmary
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Post by creekmary »

...is, therefore, the nature of the hero journey gender neutral?
BTW... There are examples of living matriarchal societies. The Haudenosaunee for one.
Creeks are too. Probably diluted by now, but still.

It's hard to see things from the outside, so reading things like the Abstract below sometimes helps me.

I think "hero-ing" might be universal as a part of just being alive, inherent in everyone. It seems that male/female, patri/matriarchial views are certainly different though. That difference in thinking and outlook probably wouldn't change the impulse, but might make a difference in the goals and processes.

Also, thinking about matrilineality, if that's a word, women don't ever have to worry about who's the mother. Men might have to keep a rein on their women though when they have to worry about who's the father.

TITLE: Creek Women and the "Civilizing" of Creek Society, 1790-1820.
AUTHOR: Dysart, Jane E.
PUBLICATION_DATE: 1989
ABSTRACT: Women in traditional Creek society, while making few decisions in the public domain, held almost absolute power in the domestic realm. When a Creek couple married, the husband moved into his wife's house and lived among her clan, her matrilineal kin. The house, household goods, fields, and children belonged to her. Boys were educated by their maternal uncles, while girls learned domestic skills from their mothers and female kin. The Creeks' strong conservatism in the 18th and 19th centuries was undoubtedly reinforced by the matrilineal clan and constant interaction among women of different generations. The Indian agent and Jeffersonian reformer, Benjamin Hawkins, considered that women played a crucial role in Creek society and thus had to be targeted as instruments of change. From 1796 until his death in 1816, Hawkins lived among the Creeks and zealously promoted the "civilization program" devised by federal officials to transform the Indians into yeoman farmers and confiscate their hunting grounds. The success of this policy required that the system of matrilineal kinship and communal property give way to one of patrilineal inheritance and private ownership of property. To accomplish these goals, Hawkins and his assistants established a "model" farm, taught Creek women to spin and weave, attempted (unsuccessfully) to create "model" families through marriage with Creek women, and sought to instill the work ethic and attachment to individual property. Although some Creeks and their leaders adopted the white lifestyle, most rejected it and in 1813 went to war to destroy the leaders and instruments of "progress."


Susan

Clemsy
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Post by Clemsy »

Hi Susan! I'm not surprised the Creek were (still are?) a matriarchal society also. I dimly recall this as being common in Native cultures... but wasn't sure. Found this interesting LINK from Washington State University. Offered some new vocab for me:
Most Native American social organization is based on kinship; there are, of course, varying degrees to which individual societies are or were organized along these lines, but a basic understanding of kinship-based societies is the first requirement for approaching almost any Native American culture.

Kinship-based societies organize human communities based on real, biological relationships among the members of that community. These biological relationships are both vertical and lateral.

Vertical kinship relationships are based on lines of descent; vertical lines of descent are relationships between ancestors and descendants. You are related to your mother and father in a vertical kinship relationship—they your ancestor and you are their descendant. These vertical kinship relationships are the most important and are the basis on which all kinship societies organize themselves.

Vertical kinship relationships are reckoned either through one's mother or one's father or both. While almost all human cultures recognize an individual's relationship to both one's mother and father and their relations, almost all societies determine that one line of descent is vastly more important than the other. In European countries, for instance, one reckons descent through the father—individuals take the name of their father rather than their mother.

When kinship is reckoned through the paternal line it is called a patrilineal or agnatic line of descent; individuals relate themselves to their father, their father's father, and all the kinship relationships of that father. In European-derived cultures, kinship descent is always patrilineal. When kinship is reckoned through the maternal line it is called a matrilineal or uterine line of descent. When both one's patrilineal and matrilineal lines of descent are equally important, kinship descent is bilateral descent. An individual in a bilateral descent group calculates their descent through both their father and mother. When your descent is reckoned either through the mother's line or the father's line, depending on your own gender, but not through both, then the kinship descent is duolineal or bilineal.

Horizontal kinship relationships, that is, your relationship to other members of the community who are not your ancestors or descendants, get their values from the vertical kinship relations. For instance, the relationship between a brother and a sister is a horizontal kinship relationship—this relationship gets its values ("brother" and "sister") because the two individuals share the same immediate parents. In a kinship-based society, individual members are very knowledgable of the their ancestry and how each other member of the society relates to them through ancestry.

Marriage, of course, adds an additional problem to this set-up. When a community does not allow marriage with members outside of the community, this is called endogamous marriage patterns. Endogamous marriage means that individuals are marrying their relatives in some way and so the lines of descent remain fairly pristine. When a community marries only members outside the community, this is called exogamous marraige patterns. Such communities incorporate the one spouse into the other spouse's community, depending on which family the married couple settles down with.

Individual married couples and nuclear families almost never settle by themselves, but they move in with or next to one of the spouse's family. In exogamous marriage cultures, then one spouse must move out of their kinship-based community and move to the other spouse's community. If a society demands that the wife move in with the husband's family or move to the husband's community, that is a patrilocal, or "father-located" kinship society. If the husband must move in with the wife's family or community, that is a matrilocal, or "mother-located" kinship community.

Native American family life fits one of two profiles. Either families include only the husband and wife and the first generation of their descendants—this is called a nuclear family. The other alternative are families in which married couples from two or more generations live together as a family—this is an extended family and was the most common family structure among Native Americans.

All societies involve some level of authority. Kinship societies closely ally that authority with kinship relations. If authority in a family group lies with the women of the family, that society is called a matriarchal, or "mother ruler" society; if authority in a family group lies with the men of the family, that is a patriarchal ("father ruler") society.

These three aspects of kinship—matrilineal versus patrilineal, matrilocal versus patrilocal, and matriarchal versus patriarchal—do not fit uniformly together. Some Native American cultures were matrilineal, patriarchal, and matrilocal. Some were patrilineal, matriarchal, and patrilocal. Some were bilateral, matriarchal, and combined matrilocality with patrilocality.
Didn't think this was too far off topic to post. Interesting stuff.
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

AJ wrote:That's a very good suggestion. Do you have any examples?
I had to think about this one, AJ, and how to put my thoughts into words since I was speaking from personal experience. (Which I presumed to generalize to all, huh. :P ) I’m not so sure that I’m going to pull off this one well…

And just in case, I want to mention first that most definitely I find value in a woman’s learning all that she can about myths and symbology and various ways of pursuing individuation, the hero’s/heroine's journey, etc. We’re collective beings first and foremost, and it’s important to understand where we’re coming from and why so we can better understand and shape the individual paths that we're compelled to pursue, including how others before us might have done the same. There’s much about the collective in all its guises that does speak to and work for us—the collective might entail a dragon or two, but as a whole it’s not the enemy, and this despite my recent complaining about patriarchy :wink: --so exploring our shared collective consciousness/unconsciousness and history does bear fruit at the personal level, of course. Yet no doubt you know what I mean when I suggest that along the way, we intuitively discern what fits and what doesn’t, what to keep and what to toss; and sometimes we might even find that what must be tossed is someone else’s vision of what it means to pursue an individual path and what that path should look like. This happened to be the case for me, that after years of readings and sincerely focusing on individuation (I tend toward the Jungian for the most part in this regard.), I came to realize that in important respects my way no longer mirrored those of others from whom I was learning and seeking guidance; nor should it, really, if indeed Jungian processes were at work, no? So being the intuitive sort who naturally plays around with symbolic images in dreams and art, I initially began to focus most on those images that for me don’t readily reflect the usual collective meanings with which I'm familiar and tend to put to use, then occasionally turned to other images as well. Typical Jungian image and symbol interpretation (and Campbell’s, too) invariably points back to conventional meanings no matter how far afield one might begin; yet a true symbol entails all possible meanings which means that if one sticks with it long enough, something new that resonates is likely to emerge never intuited before, or a new way of understanding the old might pop up if one does start with a known symbol, and in the best of scenarios, some pair of symbolic opposites emerges and is transcended. Then one has to figure out what to do about it. :wink: All this, of course, is reflective of the inward journey.

***

The general message in all this, I guess, is that if the guidance sought and tended to be followed doesn’t continue to resonate with personal experience, that’s okay. Perhaps it shouldn’t when we reach a certain point along the way. So experiment, I say, and find out what does speak and work and follow it. Besides, it seems to me that only two universal human experiences can truly be said to exist—the moment of birth and the moment of death; what happens in between, what it means, and what value to assign is up to each of us to determine.

Cindy
Last edited by Cindy B. on Thu Dec 17, 2009 12:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

noman
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Post by noman »

Clemsy,

Ephesus is probably the best preserved of ancient Roman cities, and a favorite destination for goddess-tourists. Here is a Roman copy of the Greek statue of the multi-breasted goddess Artemis from Ephesus (now in a museum in Istanbul).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... phesus.jpg
...I would think the probability of matriarchal cultures would be about as likely as that of patriarchal.

- Clemsy
I love ya like a brother Clemsy – but you’re just so filled up with what I call ‘hippie-myths’ – or what I maybe should call ‘new age myths’ that began around 1970. The fundamental problem here, I think, is that the ‘cry for myth’ is so great, that Truth has to take a back seat for the sake of some sort of power play. Whatever our destiny as a culture, I don’t believe that Truth has to be sacrificed on the altar of Equality or any other deity we wish to honor. The reason I’m stating this is that I don’t believe you and I have different values. If it were just a matter of different values there wouldn’t be much to discuss. But there is this convoluted vision of reality. And if you’re just playing games with me and asserting something you don’t actually believe, like a religious fundie, for the sake of what is good and just and necessary than we do have fundamentally different values and there is nothing I can do about it. But I don’t like that option.

The best description of the myth of matriarchal pre-history is stated by the one and only Gloria Steinem:
Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocratic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered, and it was thought …that women bore fruit like trees – when they were ripe. Childbirth was mysterious. It was vital. And it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it…. Men were on the periphery – an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female center, the principle of life.

The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effect, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold….

Gynocracy also suffered from the period invasions of nomadic tribes…. The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male-dominated and female-dominated cultures.

… women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocratic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences.

- Gloria Steinem 1972
Even though this isn’t scholarship, you have to appreciate her impact. It’s mythology. And many women and men believe it - literally. Cynthia Eller sorts it out in her book The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 2000.
P29 The myth of matriarchal prehistory is proudly proclaimed by some feminists, tacitly acknowledged by others, and studiously ignored by probably the majority, who may not find it plausible or appealing but don’t wish to break feminist ranks.

P27 Matriarchal myth is even making its way into school curricula. While it is true that one can go through twelve years of primary and secondary education, or even a college or graduate school career without being taught that prehistory was matriarchal (particularly if one majors in, say, engineering), the academic world is far from immune to the enticements of matriarchal mythology. Young women have told me that the myth of matriarchal prehistory has been presented to them as historic truth in high school classes in world history, religion, and women’s studies. Women’s Roots, by June Stephenson, now in its fourth edition, is a rendition of matriarchal prehistory designed to be read by high school students. At the college level, courses are offered about or with the premise of matriarchal prehistory, with titles like “Reclaiming the Goddess,” “Herstory of the goddess,” and “The Goddess and the Matriarchy Controversy.” A 1995 text, Women and Religion by Marianne Ferguson, purporting to cover the broad terrain of interactions between women and religion, is actually a straightforward telling of the myth of matriarchal prehistory, form the mother goddesses of prehistory to the father gods of patriarchy.

P34 Matriarchal myth emerged with new vigor in the early 1970s, as second-wave feminists began to take it over in earnest, engineering a decisive shift in its meaning in the process. Prior to this, most matriarchalists regarded the patriarchal revolution as either a signal improvement over matriarchy, or at least a necessary, if regrettable, step toward the progressive civilization of humankind. But by the mid 1980s, the myth of matriarchy had definitively become a myth of regress, of paradise lost. These days it is virtually impossible to speak of ancient matriarchies and their overthrow by invading patriarchs without drawing feminist, or at least quasi-feminist lessons form the story.

As early feminists looked hopefully to other, “primitive” cultures for signs of matriarchy, they asked for corroboration from their anthropologist sisters. In the main, they didn’t get it. Around the same time that Elizabeth Gould Davis was enticing readers with her descriptions of the great women-ruled empires of prehistory, Sherry Ortner, in her highly influential article “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” was calling women’s secondary status “one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact,” and asserting that “the search for a genuinely egalitarian, let alone matriarchal, culture, has proven fruitless.” Anthropological denials of matriarchy extended as well to prehistory. “males are dominate among primates,” a group of feminist anthropologists noted in 1971, “and at the ‘lowest’ level of human social evolution now extant, males are still dominant. There is no reason to assume that in the intervening stages of human evolution the same situation did not prevail.”

P62 …the entire premise of feminist matriarchal myth is dualistic: there was a time in the past, associated with women, when people lived and thought one way; now there is a time, associated with men, when people live and think in another way. Furthermore, matriarchy and patriarchy are not simply two ways of being in the world, existing in a complementary balance (the sort of relationship feminist matriarchists sometimes envision for women and men, “feminine” and “masculine” ); they are polar opposites, one good and the other evil. In feminist matriarchal thought, the goddess, who abjures dualisms, is constantly pitted in direct opposition to the patriarchal god of Western cultures, whose primary failing is his penchant for separating “us” from “them,” “good” form “bad,” “mind” form “body,” and, of course, “women” from “men.” In a remarkable piece of double-think, Elizabeth Judd tells us that “the recognition of rigid gender distinctions is characteristics of males but not females”; and yet here she is, female, marking out rigid gender distinctions upon which her entire theory of human life and history rests.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, 2000
On the truth of the archeological evidence Eller writes:
P155 It is unfortunate that prehistoric art cannot tell us more about how women were regarded in prehistoric societies, or how they lived their lives, but the evidence of prehistoric art is simply inconclusive. It tells us that women existed, and that people in prehistoric societies chose to represent them, usually in stylized or abstract forms. It tells us that then, as now, women seemed to be depicted more often than men. But beyond that, we are given precious little information about the status of either divine or human women in prehistory; it shows us nothing that would contradict the alternative hypothesis that male dominance flourished throughout the prehistoric times form which these works survive.

P180 Interpretation of “gendered” status especially is so overburdened by observers’ wishes and assumptions that it is very difficult to bracket of present concerns and discover past reality. But what we do know (or can judge to be probable) about gender in prehistory is not particularly encouraging regarding the status of women. Ethnographic analogies to contemporary groups with life ways similar to those of prehistoric times (hunting and gathering or horticulture, practiced in small groups) show little sex egalitarianism and no matriarchy. Indeed, these societies always discriminate in some way between women and men, usually to women’s detriment. Women may have powerful roles, but their power does not undermine or seriously challenge an overall system of male dominance in either these groups or ours, and there is no reason to believe that it would have in prehistoric societies either. If there are in fact societies where women’s position is high and secure, these exceptions cannot lead us to believe that it was this pattern (rather than the more prevalent pattern of discrimination against women) which held in prehistory.

There is also nothing in the archaeological record that is at odds with an image of prehistoric life as nasty, brutish, short, and male-dominated.

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, 2000
On the practical effect of the myth of a matriarchal pre-history Eller writes:
P185 Feminist matriarchalists, like other myth-makers, begin with a vision of the world as they would like it to be, project it into the past, and then find a way (narratively speaking) to make present conditions emerge from ideal ones.

…archaeologist Sarah Taylor remarks, “I for one do not find it very comforting to think that once, in a very distant and ‘primitive’ society, women held power, especially if we have been moving away from that condition ever since.”

Many do find this comforting. Matriarchal myth addresses one of the feminist movement’s most difficult questions: How can women attain real power when it seems we have never had it before? How can we hope that sex egalitarianism is possible, that male dominance can be ended, when it has been a mark of who we are as a species from time immemorial? Feminist matriarchal myth answers that question in what I think has to be admitted is an emotionally compelling, inspiring way.

P186 I once asked a class of students which problem they would rather live with, all claims to historical truth aside: that of explaining women’s (pre) historical loss of power in such a way that it does not rule out women’s power in the future, or that of explaining how male dominance – universal up until now – can be ended at some point in the future. Roughly half chose the first, the other half the second. As one woman who chose the first option remarked, “I need to have an Eden, a belief that things once were right.”

The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, Cynthia Eller, 2000
That last quote was a real eye-opener for me. For many people, there are more important things in the world than Truth, such as appeasing the feminine psyche.

Now I can hear ya’all thinking ‘Oh fine NoMan. You find one book, one single authority, and then you claim it as Goddess’s Truth.’ But I’ve found that among ‘real’ scholars, the matriarchal prehistory myth isn’t even considered. Cynthia Eller simply brings the scholarship and mythology together in a revealing way. For every one dismissal of the matriarchal prehistory myth such as Ellers, there must be several hundreds that in some way support the matriarchal prehistory myth. Why? BECAUSE IT SELLS! And it really, really sells, along with other ‘hippie-myths’ such as the cult of the peaceful, noble, and eco-friendly savage of primary cultures.

You’ve got me ahead of my game Cindy with this thread, because I was going to start a thread that puts all these ‘hippie-myths’ together. But the cult of matriarchy does deserve its own thread.

I would say that the quest for a matriarchal society is sought in four places, pre-historical cultures, primate species, modern primary cultures, and non-Western cultures.

1.) Pre-historical societies

Cynthia Eller, in her book, reminds us of a slogan on a woman’s shirt from the early 70s that reads, “I survived 5000 years of Patriarchal Hierarchy”. It’s rather convenient that matriarchy ended just at the time we have written language to tell us what people were actually thinking and provide us with a clearer picture of society. But before that – paradise.

2.) Primate species

We are one of about thirty primate species. A primatologist once said in a lecture that when she begins her lecture on certain matriarchal species, she sees a lot of her female students perk up and get excited. Most primate species are patriarchal. The idea that the bonobo, so close to us genetically, is a peace loving matriarchal species is another one of those hippie-myths that is in the process of being debunked. We don’t have a great deal of info. And that is what myths thrive on. But the discovery of any matriarchal primate can be seen as a sign of hope for our species. For reasons that are buried deep within the human psyche, about two-thirds of primatologists are females.

3.) Modern primary cultures

I once heard about a tribe somewhere near the Himalayans that practiced polyandry (multiple husbands). It had to do with the fact that men were away from home for long periods of time. But again, the evidence of such practice anywhere in the world is scant and questionable. If it exists, these aren’t what you might consider stable societies. Women will sometimes serve as council in primary cultures. But by and large, women only have power by virtue of their association with powerful men. Women’s rights (if you want to call them that) are implemented by men, either by their husbands or their immediate family members. There are no female lawyers in these cultures.

The most notorious of modern myth-maker in this area is Margret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928
Mead’s Samoans were innocent souls, amongst whom such crimes as murder and rape were unknown. They were also sexually promiscuous without experiencing any sense of guilt. According to Mead, sexual relationships represented the principal pastime of the young and marriage was delayed to allow as many years of this pleasant activity as possible.


She ignored all evidence, historical and contemporary, which contradicted her thesis. For example, the records show that murder and rape were common in Samoa; indeed, Samoa appears to have had one of the highest rates of rape in the world, and the whole account of Samoan sexuality was ludicrously wide of the mark. Far from being promiscuous Arcadians, the Samoan females lived in a culture which enforced a rigid code of virginity amongst unmarried adolescent girls. Nor was this attributable to Christian missionaries: in pre-Christian times violation of the code had been punishable by death.



- Wild in the Woods: The Myth of the Noble Eco-Savage, Robert Whelan, 1999


* * * * * * *

P66 …the Germans had pacified the Samoan Islands almost one hundred years before Margaret Mead arrived as a young woman in the mid-1920s to do her famous study. Although there had once been considerable warfare, all was peaceful by the time mead arrived which is reflected in her rather idyllic portrayal of life on the isles. Earlier accounts present a very different picture. The Samoans had long fought among themselves and neighboring island groups. Missionary John Williams, in 1830-1832, recorded that one village had dept a record of 197 battles. One day he inquired about mountains in the distance being enveloped in flames and smoke and was informed “that a battle had been fought that very morning and that the flames which we saw were consuming the houses, the plantations and the bodies of women and children and inform people” who had fallen into the hands of the conquerors. Samoa was at peace in the 1920s but at war in the 1820s.

- Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful Noble Savage, Steven A. LeBlanc, 2003

Steven A. LeBlanc is an archaeologist and Director of Collections at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
Again, it is a search for an Eden. The Iroquois are often cited by the half-educated as an example of a primary matriarchal culture. We can learn a great deal about ourselves from studying primary cultures of the recent past. Much of Campbell’s work is centered on this belief. But projecting our wish-fulfillment dreams on them is quite the insult, both to those modern primary cultures, and to modern scholarship.

4.) Non-Western high Cultures
…masculine flavor imbued in our Western collective consciousness is here to stay, no doubt, for a very long time.

…women in Western societies are encouraged and taught how to behave as the assigned "other," while at the same time we are also expected to become similar to boys and men in our personal psychologies and consciousness

…the vast majority of Western stories handed down arose from varieties of a male/masculine-based consciousness.

- Cindy
We had a gentleman from India here in these forums (not my friend Nandu but another Indian gentleman) that tried to tell me that India historically has treated women better than in the West. I was shocked. This, coming from an Indian? Surely he should know about the modern practice of ‘dowry extortion’ whereby women are murdered in ‘kitchen accidents’, often fires, unless more dowry money can be procured by her friends and family.

http://www.cpiml.org/liberation/year_20 ... zameen.htm

Surely he would know sati (a widow throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre) was practiced until the British put an end to it in the early 19th century. Surely an Indian would know that traditionally, women had no choice as to who to marry, when, were to live, or what occupation to have. No rights as we know them – at all. This is what Campbell observed in the 1950s when he visited India.

In one of Campbell’s lectures, a woman asked him this very question, concerning the relationship of the presence of the goddess and the actual treatment of women.
Woman: In any of these cultures, mythologies, what was the corresponding attitude toward the real live women, compared to the attitude toward the gods; any connection?

Joseph Campbell: Every woman in India to this day is the goddess. But, should god get out of the way of god. [Joseph Campbell is referring to a story in which it is taught that God is in all things, so no one should expect to be treated special on account of realizing they are God as taught in the Buddhist tradition - NoMan] There are two realms, two aspects. There is the divine, symbolic majesty, and the living in the world involves the woman being the mistress of the household in charge of all the tasks of the household and the man going out and bringing in the bacon. It’s an old, old story. And in earlier days women didn’t think that was a degradation to be queen of the house. And I’ve been in Indian households where the woman does not share the meal, the dinner, with the guests and men who are there. She stands as the queen of the whole feast. She is the one who is putting on the celebration and participating in it that way….

It’s very hard to judge Indian life from our standpoint.

- Mysteries of the Goddess, Tape 4, side b,

China has a one thousand year history of foot binding, and other practices that we would find abhorrent. We have so many different cultures to look at, each with their own ways of oppressing women. But a silly modern mythology has been built up around the idea that the Biblically based, anti-nature mythology, translates into practical treatment that was far worse than what any of these other high cultures did, or are doing. There’s a lot of myth-making going on here. What is curiously hippie-critical, is that while the West has provided the most progress toward greater freedom and rights for all, it is condemned as having been much worse than these other cultures that have made little headway, save in the adoption of Western ways. Seriously hippie-critical.


You omitted the part, noman, where Campbell also mentioned that women have no need for a hero's/heroine's journey. Initially when I started this thread, I planned to keep my own comments at the objective level for the most part, but what the heck--it's true that on occasion I disagree with Campbell (and Jung) when it comes to his views about women.

- Cindy

Cindy – people who know me here know that I have no problem going against Joseph Campbell’s opinion when I think he’s wrong about something. He was a Western teacher, not a guru. Western teachers were meant to be challenged and scrutinized. But when it comes to his attitude toward second wave feminism I think he was in top form. His knowledge and wisdom come through. He took one look at ‘second wave’ in the 70s and thought, ‘this just isn’t going to work folks’. Men can’t become women. Women can take on the male role – but at a price Campbell says.
Maureen Murdock: My desire to understand how the woman’s journey relates to the journey of the hero first led me to talk with Joseph Campbell in 1981. I knew that the stages of the heroine’s journey incorporated aspects of the journey of the hero, but I felt that the focus of female spiritual development was to heal the internal split between woman and her feminine nature I wanted to hear Campbell’s views. I was surprised when he responded that women don’t need to make the journey. “In the whole mythological tradition the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to. When a woman realizes what her wonderful character is, she’s not going to get messed up with the notion of being pseudo-male.”

- The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock, 1990
To this I would say that by 1981 Campbell was pretty much fed up with what feminists were proposing for society. It doesn’t mean that a woman can’t take a journey. What Joe is saying is that a woman needn’t take the journey. There’s a huge difference there. Recall that his wife was an accomplished professional artist in her own right. And is it fair to tell all women that they must make a hero’s journey? It is important to consider the options for women. We’re all for options aren’t we?

P96 Feminism’s war against the housewife has pitted the best educated, most sophisticated, most aggressive, and most masculinized portion of the female population against women who generally possess less education and less worldly experience, who are more likely to be docile than aggressive, feminine than masculine. Phyllis Schlafly is rare in combining appreciation for the importance and pleasures of a homemaking role with the intellectual resources, sense of mission, and requisite combativeness to face the unremitting hostility directed against a defender of traditional women. An average homemaker not only has had no forum in which to speak, but never imagined she would be called upon to defend her raison d’etre. Until recently, society had led her to expect that repelling vicious attacks upon her worth was more the responsibility of men than women.

Except for a few brave souls, however, men have declined to defend the housewife – for many reasons. Some men have felt a quasi-chivalrous reluctance to counter an offensive waged by women. Wherever feminist dogma is firmly entrenched – in academia, the media, and government bureaucracies – one often pays a very high price for opposing it. The early confluence of feminism and the sexual revolution led many men to favor quite readily a cause they correctly perceived as assuring them sexual access to an increasing number of women. The feminist message has also been congenial to those men who have welcomed the relief from the role of sole breadwinner that their wives’ market production has provided.

P121 Whatever subsequent apologists might argue to mitigate feminism’s excesses, status degradation of the housewife has been the purpose of its attack. Far from being the enemy, it was men that feminists admired – at least in the public sphere. The enemy is the housewife who contentedly lives a different life from the male role models feminists seek to emulate. Tracking Friedan’s path, the women’s movement set out to undermine the self-esteem and contentment of a woman at home and to diminish her worth in men’s eyes.

- Domestic Tranquility: A brief Against Feminism, F. Carolyn Graglia, 1998
This is what makes the whole game were playing insane and comical. Career women compete more viciously than ever with other women for men – because there are fewer men worth having as women take more and more of the premium jobs. You have to remember that generally speaking women marry up. Men marry down. So there are fewer higher ranking men for professional women. At the same time, professional women, indoctrinated by our educational system to believe in an evil patriarchy, and that their mission in life is to compete with and wrest power from males in the market place, are furious at the women who chose not to compete as they do, because those women are supporting and literally sleeping with the enemy. So these women are being taught that if they are ‘just a housewife’ and a mom they are complete losers.

I rather agree with Campbell that it isn’t necessary for a woman to go on an adventure of social achievement. There’s nothing wrong with it. But it isn’t necessary.

The most asinine question I ever heard in a Campbell forum (not this one) was whether Joseph Campbell was a misogynist. This is a man, born in 1904, who when young was handsome and athletic and part of the educated elite, but never trashed women; a man who had a single monogamous relationship for over fifty years, who supported his wife with her career, who didn’t take advantage of his social success as most men would, who taught women exclusively for 38 years and was by all indications very concerned about their welfare and fulfillment in life. And for all of this, Campbell is thought of as anti-woman - probably because he wouldn’t go along with some of the feminist’s fantasies of the 70s.

I don’t believe the man was clueless or old fashioned. I think he was realistic and progressive. Here are a few quotes I’ve collected from the 70s and 80s of Campbell speaking on this issue.
Toms: Largely America has been, ‘policemen’ to the world, father of the world, coming in and taking care of those less fortunate, less privileged, etc., and now we have a strong women’s movement in the society. Do you see any changes taking place, do you see us moving out of a patriarchal model, out of being a father to the world and perhaps being something else.

Campbell: With respect to this woman’s movement – I taught at Sarah Lawrence for 38 years, was very close to young women, and very seriously concerned with their character, potentialities and so forth and so on. We’re in a marvelous moment with respect to the problem of women. It’s a moment that is just as crucial for men as for women, because the archtypology of just the wife and mother and housewife, is gone. And many a man when he marries, when he thinks of marriage thinks of that archetype – and he is unwilling to face – or unable to face – the fact of a female personality. Men have had a bigger range of life courses that have enabled them to develop their potentials – I spoke before of a potential and developing one’s own life. But women have been condemned you might say to one style, one system of interests and concerns. And that’s not true anymore. The world is opened up to them.

Now there are not models for them. And the immediate model is, of course, the men’s world, and many move into that in competition as it were. But the great thing is the possibility of a female personality as the guiding image of the woman’s own life. And then her husband has to match that. Do you see what I mean? He’s in dialog now with an unpredictable presence – because the sexes are deeply mysterious to each another, really and wonderfully so.

At college reunions, ten years after, twenty years after, thirty years after, after I would have taught this young woman, and recognized the possibilities. It’s easy to tell, when the woman comes back, whether the husband has been a counterplayer to a personality which of course helps develop his personality, rather than his archetypology of just the husband – or the woman who has not been allowed really to flower in her own potential but has been turned into an archetype, I mean, it’s right there in front of you when you see these young women. And this is the challenge of a marriage. What a beautiful thing. A life together as growing personalities each helping the other to flower rather than just moving into a standard archetype. It’s a wonderful moment. People can make the decision whether they want to be a cookie-mold product or something quite astonishing and unexpected. (1978)

- The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell

* * * * * * *

Toms: What’s happening in these times when we see the emergence of the feminist movement, the assertion of woman power, the return of the goddess as it were, the patriarchal society that we live in to some extent. All of that wrapped up in relationship. What’s happened to relationships around all the things that have been occurring over the last decades.

Campbell: What I’m going to say is may hurt me. But I think women full of resentment and I get too much of that feeling from this whole thing. They’re not going back to the mother goddess at all, who is not resentment. She is a mother. And she know how to relate. The great power of the mother and of the woman is relationships. She understands these things. It’s not in terms of who’s the winner here. But in terms of human, human values. And it’s the male who represents achievement and whose top boy in this club. And these women who now begin to want achievement have gone over into the patriarchal thing, they haven’t gone back to the mother. Do you understand what I’m saying they’ve accepted so to say the male ethos and have aligned themselves with it to the damage of their own female character.

Toms: What would be the example of this? Would this be an example of a woman becoming a telephone worker on the…


Campbell: No. It has nothing to do with the work their doing. It has to do with the inner attitude toward it. Now I was in a wonderful seminar and one woman spoke up and said that the way her mother had submitted to her father, and had given herself to him taught her that this was not what she was going to do. You know. And the whole thing of marriage is of relationship, and yielding and knowing what the function each is playing a role in an organism here. One of the things that I have realized and that I think that people when they are long married do realize is that marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with personal satisfaction and all of this and immediate satisfaction. But as I said time and time again, marriage is an ordeal. It’s yielding – and that’s why it’s a sacrament. Because you are giving up your personal, what can we call it, simplicity, to participate in a relationship. And when your giving to someone you’re not giving to that person you’re giving to the relationship. And if you realize that you are in the relationship as well as the other person this thing becomes what it truly can be namely a life building, a life fostering and enriching experience - not an impoverishment because you’re giving to somebody else. So I think this is a main problem. I see so many people marry out of a love affair experience without realizing their moving into a new dimension of life. And I think that it is safe to say that that dimension has nothing to do with what may happen if you have then following that the crisis of a passing love affair. Those do not conflict when their properly understood. So – these are complicated things.

- The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell

* * * * * * *

P93
Student: Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the hero. But what about the woman?

Campbell: The woman is the mother of the hero; she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving; she’s the protectress of the hero; she is this, she is that. What more do you want?

Student: I want to be the hero!

Campbell: So I was glad I was retiring that year [1972] and not going to teach any more [laughter]

-The Hero’s Journey

* * * * * * *

Campbell: Now the women’s movement represents women in new roles. The old roles were those of the relationship to the male – who was related to the structuring of society. Do you understand what I’m saying? Woman was cooperating and she was what the society was being put together for. So that she should bring forth the next generation in a decent way. Well look what’s happened to the family. I’ve understand that something like one out of ten marriages survives in this country and as a result the children are dislocated it’s a terrible situation. An ideal for life just completely knocked to pieces.

Toms: Some people would say this is the death of the patriarchal institution and the emergence of the matriarchal. What do you think?

Campbell: Well I don’t think there ever was a matriarchal. We can’t locate it in time and space. You mustn’t mistake the time when the mother goddess was a dominant power in the Neolithic and bronze age – because people were related primarily to agriculture and she is the producing earth and then the power of women and the power of the earth is the same power. Then you have invasions from north and south. The Indo-Europeans and the Semitic peoples coming in. Warrior people. Herding people, not linked in the same way to production and this war period takes over. The third and second millenniums BCE are just incredible the battle fury of those days. You get echoes of this in the book of Joshua and the book of Judges – annihilating cities. And that’s the way it went on. And with that women had to be protected from these invading warrior people so the male pattern takes over. And then the religions that came out of that - particularly the Biblical religion – which is a very strongly male oriented religion. Christianity picked it up – Islam picked it up. Then were moving into other problems.

Toms: Do you think war’s endemic to humanity…

Campbell: Yes! The rage of one primitive village against another, that’s one thing. But the business of conquest and appropriating other people’s property and towns with a sense of righteousness in doing so – that begins as far as I know in the Near East in the third millennium BCE. About the time of Sargon I, 2750 BCE.

Toms: Are there any cultures that have a mythology of peace rather than a mythology of war?

Campbell: Well the mythology of peace comes along in such doctrines as those of Christ or Lao Tzu, or Confucius or the Buddha and so forth. But those are not what dominate the culture. Spengler has a statement in The Decline of the West that stays in my mind, “If you haven’t the courage to be the hammer you’ll come off in the role of the anvil.” And that’s just the ABC’s of political life.


- The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell

* * * * * * *

Campbell: These are two contrasting mythologies you’ll find throughout the Asian and European worlds. From the Rhine to the Tai Pan Sea, the sun is female, and the moon is male. The moon dies into the sun every month and is born from the sun. So the sun is the mother of the moon. And the sun therefore is the female power. And the female represents that which is. And every young woman should learn this early. As a result of masculine education, she is taught that she has to do something. She doesn’t. She has to be something. This is a very important distinction. The male can’t be anything. He’s gotta do something. And so he is that which is involved in the processes of time. He’s associated with the moon. In those traditions the moon is male. It dies and is resurrected. The father begets himself through his wife, in the form then of his son, who is a continuation of himself. So he has died into her and is born from her as his son. This is why Osiris is dead when he begets his son Horus. This is one of the problems a man understands when he is about to get married. This is my death! It’s true. The independent voyage of the sun opened - ends when one is married and becomes a father. Then you are of past and the sun/son [?] is future. Marriage and death are for the male the same thing. What happens to her is that she is open – and she begins to function. She is no longer simply herself. She is the vehicle of something.

The crisis ritual in the young woman’s life is the first menstruation. At that moment she’s no longer in command of her body. Nature has taken over. And she’s now to become the vehicle of a process. When the young man is initiated, nature hasn’t overtaken him at all. The society overtakes him. Look kid, you’re no longer what you thought you were. You are the vehicle of something. And the function of the male initiation rights, which are always ruff, compared with the woman’s – the girl is told to sit alone and realize what is happening to you. The male is told – take this, that, he’s smashed up, his body is changed and everything else and he becomes then a vehicle of the social order. The male rights are said to be the male menstruation. I’ve heard it from American Indians, ‘We have to suffer in our rituals because our women suffer.’ That’s a way of saying we too have to become the vehicles of something bigger than ourselves. And what the male represents is society. What the woman represents is nature. This society is against that society. The male represents division. The female represents, ‘I don’t care which of my little boys wins. They’re all my dears. My darlings.’ That affirmation of the whole thing. And the female consciousness and the male is in there for achievement. And whose top male and so forth. You don’t have whose top female in the same way at all. There’s only the one who knows more than the other. But that doesn’t have anything to do with what the male’s up to. So this is a radical thing.

Now when I was a small boy, there was a question as to whether women should be educated. And, it was argued. But they didn’t realize even then what the implications were. When the woman is educated in the male curriculum, which is what these universities give us, she forgets what it is to be a woman. [pause] This isn’t published. But this is a real problem today. And there are qualities I find for instance in the arts of women, and in the scholarship of women, that are very valuable positive qualities. But the sacrifice that the woman commits in achieving this career is much greater than the sacrifice that a man makes in achieving his career. And so it’s bigger ordeal for a woman to participate in what might be called the culture complex, than it is for the male.

- Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time
The interpretation of Campbell on this issue has been skewed by the modern delusion of a 5000 year old evil patriarchy whose sole purpose it is to oppress and exploit women, along with the delusion that a pre-sixties housewife was oppressed without knowing it. Campbell never said that women shouldn’t have careers, or that they should be stuck in the mold of housewife. He simply understood that the male’s journey, the power quest, was not always, and probably not usually, the best role-model for her quest.

- NoMan

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Post by Cindy B. »

Noman,

It was tempting, I admit, but I'm going to stay away from commenting on your remarks about feminism. That gender war I originally mentioned wanting to avoid in my first post--I might just ignite it if we two get started on that one. :wink: Besides, already I've offered more personalized commentary than I intended in this thread, so the time's come for me, I think, to take a step back. I know what I'm capable of in certain situations, and it's not pretty. :twisted:

Guess I did just comment, huh. :P

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

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Post by Evinnra »

The interpretation of Campbell on this issue has been skewed by the modern delusion of a 5000 year old evil patriarchy whose sole purpose it is to oppress and exploit women, along with the delusion that a pre-sixties housewife was oppressed without knowing it. Campbell never said that women shouldn’t have careers, or that they should be stuck in the mold of housewife. He simply understood that the male’s journey, the power quest, was not always, and probably not usually, the best role-model for her quest.
Our recorded history shows the when patriarchy descends into legitimising polygamy, the society stagnates. When a society have no means to enforce strict monogamy - like many societies today - the males become effeminate. These scenarioes are dangerous at best and lethal at worst for any society. It is feminine receptivity that makes people - all people - recognise when a society is getting out of balance. It is masculine assertiveness in people - all people - that enforces re-instating the requisite mode of conduct. I agree with everything you wrote NoMan and I fervently hope that other female associates will get your meaning too. To stop corruption and the the physical/sexual/emotional exploitation of women and children we need strong and morally upstanding men to act.
'A fish popped out of the water only to be recaptured again. It is as I, a slave to all yet free of everything.'
http://evinnra-evinnra.blogspot.com

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Post by Clemsy »

I love ya like a brother Clemsy –
:lol: Doubt it... but it does attempt to take the edge off the following 'but'...
but you’re just so filled up with what I call ‘hippie-myths’ – or what I maybe should call ‘new age myths’ that began around 1970.
Personally? I'm convinced you write things like this because you like poking people who don't agree with you. It's a rather trollish behavior, noman, and very easily defined as a fine example of the application of the ad hominem fallacy, employing what Lakoff calls 'linguistic frames.' It's easy: define the label, apply, dismiss.

I don't treat my brothers this way. You either for that matter.

Cheers,
Clemsy
Give me stories before I go mad! ~Andreas

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Post by A J »

Cindy,

First of all, I would like to thank you for your response to my question. You did a good job, I think, of generalizing. :D As I read, I got that, in a general sense anyway, you journey has been similar to mine in many ways.

There are so many posts here since my last visit, I need time to study and digest them all before I respond.

AJ
"Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy."

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

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Post by Cindy B. »

Right, I did avoid the personal, AJ, because no two individual psychologies are identical, of course. I assumed that you'd get where I was coming from all the same. And it doesn't surprise me, really, that our journeys have been similar in certain ways. I'm younger than you, but we've both been at this for a long time. There's something to be said for age and experience, huh. :wink:

Cindy
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

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Post by A J »

Noman,

I would like to thank you again for the review of A Myth in Action. Not only did it begin one of the longest and most convoluted threads on this forum, it, and the mention of the thread and the book in a JCF newsletter contributed to the sales of the book, and opened it up to a whole new audience of readers in addition to the fans of Audie Murphy whom I had expected to be the primary audience. And as I read your review, I felt that the message I had hoped to get across had been grasped by at least one of those readers. I am very grateful. As that thread went on and diverged, we didn't always agree. Perhaps that is partly because we come with different perspectives, being of different genders.

Everyone,

One of the books I read during the 80's that has had a strong influence on me is called Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, written by Mary Field Belenky, with Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. The book references the studies by William Perry concerning the evolution of learning styles in higher education, as he reported them i his book, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1970) The work of the writers of Women's Ways... challenges some of his conclusions, which were based primarily on male data, by approaching the same topic from a female perspective. There conclusions were that men and women come from different places in their learning, and consequently, their ways of knowing are equally valid, but different. The writers begin with the stages described by Perry, whose work
Depicts a passage through a sequence of epistemological perspectives that he calls positions. It is through these coherent interpretative frameworks that students give meaning to their educational experience. Perry traces a progression from an initial position he calls basic dualism, where the student views the world in polarities of right/wrong, black/white, we/they, and good/bad. Here passive learners are dependent on authorities to hand down the truthm teaching them "right from wrong." Gradually the student becomes increasingly aware of the diversity of opinion and multiple perspectives that others hold, and the dualistic faith in absolute authority and truth is shaken. dualism gives way to multiplicity as the student comes to understand that authorities may not have the right answers, at least in some areaqs, such as the humanities, which seem to be more a matter of opinion and taste than fact. The student begins to grow beyond a dependency and trust in external authorities and carves out his own territory of personal freedom." "Everyone has a right to his own opinion and mind is as good as any other." As the student's opinion is challenged by a teacher's insistence on evidence and support for opinion,, multiploicity yields to relativism subordinate, where an analytical evaluative approach to knowledge is consciously and actively cultivated at least in the academic disciplines one is being tutored in, if not in the rest of one's life. It is only with the shift to full relativism that the student completely comprehends that truth is relative, that the meaning of an event depends on the context in which that event occurs and on the framework that the knower uses to understand that event, and that relativism pervades all aspects of life, not just the academic world. Only then is the student able to comprehend that knowledge is constructed, not given;contextual, not absolute; mutable, not fixed. It is within relativism that Perry believes the affirmation of personal identity and commitment evolves.
The writers found that while a woman's learning experience follows similar steps and patterns, there are some differences for many women. For instance, momen often begin at an earlier stage than dualism, or what Belenkey et al call received knowing, with an initial stage they call silence. There are many women who must first learn that they have a voice, and a right to be heard, a "right to speak out," before they could recognize a duality. Still, in the stage of received knowing, there is an assumption that the authorities have the answers, and that learning is about taking in those answers. For silent women, the authorities do not use words that can be heard and taken in. Their experience of authority is a violent one - not necessarily physical violence, but of dominance with the expectation of submission. It is a powerless position. One has to learn one has a voice - something of value to say - before one can even receive the words of those in authority. One has to have a "self."

As a woman develops a sense of self, of an ability to take in knowledge, she enters that stage of received knowing, but is still completely dependent on the authorities, and does not question what she hears:
Feeling capable of hearing, understanding, and remembering, [they] have faith that if they listen carefully enough they will be able to "do the right thing" and will get along with others. Because they look outward for moral knowledge, their moral judgments conform to the conventions of their society--or the dictates of the non-conventional they choose to emulate.
and this gives them a sense of power and the ability to have some control, to accept responsibility, which leads to the next stage: subjective knowledge, or listening to the "inner voice." Like the males in Perry's study, who have reached the stage he calls "multiplicity," these women have learned to trust their own instincts. That "gut feeling," though, will eventually, if the process continues, develop to a point where one recognizes the importance of having some sort of "procedure" for evaluating the validity of their intuitive ideas, and subjective knowing gives way to procedural knowing. The writers here find, that for women at least, there is more than one procedure for testing what they are learning. Separate knowing is their term for the use of logic and scientific reasoning. They also found evidence of what they call connected knowing, "...which builds on the subjectivist's conviction that the most trustworthy knowledge comes from personal experience rather than the pronouncements of authorities," and so "...develop procedures for gaining access to other people's knowledge. At the heart of these procedures is the capacity for empathy." Tthey quote one of their subjects as saying, "You shouldn't read a book just as something printed and distant...but as a real experience of someone...I try and read the mind of the author behind it and ask, 'Why did he write that? What was happening to him when he wrote that? [she is saying "he" and "him" because the book refered to was Dante's Divine Comedy] "Connected knowers," they conclude, "begin with an interest in the facts of other people's lives, but they gradually shift the focus to other people's ways of thinking. As in all procedural knowing, it is the form rather than the content..that is central...both get out from behind their own eyes and use a different lens, in one case the lens of a discipline, in the other the lens of another person." Group collaboration is one function that has grown from this "connected" way of knowing and learning.

Whether the women in this study focused on procedural or connected ways of knowing, many of them proceeded on to constructed knowledge, described as a way of "integrating the voices." "It is in the process of sorting out the pieces of the self and of searching for a unique and authentic voice that women come to the basic insights of constructivist thought: All knowledge is constructed, and the knower is an intimate part of the known At first women arrive at this insight in searching for a core self that remains responsive to situation and context. Ultimately constructivists understand that answers to all questions vary depending on the context in which they are asked and on the frame of reference in which they are asking."

It is interesting to me, as I reread and write about a work I first read over 20 years ago, how my perceptions of what I read are evolving as well. I realize, for instance, how completely I have since come into the constructivist point of view.

I tend, these days, too, to speak from a more empirical perspective than I once did. Thhis text, though, still seems to do a good job of describing the process, and pointing out that men and women tend to think differently, and approach the process from different places.

I feel this work helps to delineate a woman's perspective from within a patriarchal structure.

AJ
"Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy."

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

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Post by Cindy B. »

On cultural hyperextension (sociobiology) from The Jung Page:
http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/article ... man-nature


***


The Hare and The Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature
David P. Barash, Ph.D. (1986)


Book Review by Donald Williams (1988/2003)


. . . Dr. Barash is a professor of zoology and psychology at the University of Washington, and the theme of his work is the problematic relationship between culture and biology when they are out of phase: "While our biological nature remains shackled by genetics, lumbering along at a tortoise's pace—never faster than one generation at a step, and typically much slower even than that—our culture has been sprinting." (p. 4) We have culturally created a world for which we are biologically unprepared. In the process of exploring this conflict between nature and culture he reviews evolutionary theory, makes observations on the process of cultural evolution and discusses the biological components of such important human issues as sexuality, male/female differences, feminism, kinship ties, altruism, aggression, war, nuclear weapons policies, population, the ecological ethic, and technological evolution. Rather than attempt to cover the highlights of this book, I would like to direct my attention to two specific areas where psychobiological evolutionary theory impacts Jungian [and Freudian] thought: gender differences and aggression. . . (C: What follows will only address gender differences.)

. . . Let's look first at gender differences. There we see that evolutionary theory does seem at first to confirm Jung's assertions on the archetypal/instinctual dimensions of sexual differences, only to then challenge the relevance of these differences for contemporary culture. Since our evolutionary inheritance goes way back, we can imagine natural selection working on a group of gatherers and hunters hundreds of thousands of years ago on the savannahs of Africa. If we imagine our women and men in small nomadic groups, with ample leisure time and no dreams yet of alphabets, assembly lines or shopping malls, we can state the argument more bluntly. There on the savannah everyone's biological goal was to be represented, as amply as possible, in the next generation. Then, as now, there were two biological commandments on the savannah: survive and reproduce. ("Pass it on," according to evolutionary biology, is the name of the compulsion that encompasses all others, the one that makes women and men keep an eye on each other.) "Fitness" in the game on the savannah was measured by one's success in passing on genes to the next generation. Women and men, however, had different reproductive strategies for passing on their strands of DNA. Women are limited in the number of children they can bear and nurture and failures are costly. Women, therefore, have the best chance of passing on their genes if they make wise choices about when and with whom to copulate. Since they are the ones to bear the consequences, it is adaptive for women to wait, to resist courtship, and to evoke stronger competitive displays among the men. Biologically, it is women, not men, who make the choices. The competitive displays that the men make help the women distinguish the fit from the unfit; and usually the fittest males are chosen.

Men, on the other hand, are the ones to court, woo, proposition, seduce and give gifts; and it is generally men who rape. (See Donald Symons. The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1979, p. 253 ff.) Men, though not limited in the number of women they can impregnate or in the number of children they can produce, can also never know if they have successfully passed on their genes, no matter how often they copulate. Frequent sexual activity, and its attendant free-floating lust, are adaptive for men, just as they would be maladaptive for women in their roles as careful choice makers. Women, in this sociobiological analysis, have the best chance of passing on their genes if they mate selectively and wisely, whereas men have a better chance of passing on their genes if they impregnate as many women as they can.

The postulated differences in reproductive strategies lead of course to psychological conclusions, and beyond the hoary "Higamous Hogamous, woman monogamous, Hogamous Higamous, man is polygamous" women will have a keen awareness of the consequences of their actions, the most portentous being copulation. Women not only choose (men), they take responsibility for the consequences (children) of their actions. Women, Barash argues, personify the human psychological impulses toward discrimination, choice, the acceptance of limits, nurturance and cooperation. Men, in contrast, seem more naturally programmed to represent the human tendencies of risk taking, aggressive competition and restless longing (all tied up with their roles vis a vis women). Barash states the differences this way: "the biology of male-female differences predisposes males of most species to sexual aggressiveness, advertisement, and availability, while females are selected for discrimination and sales resistance." (Sociobiology, pp. 292-293)

Barash notes that the sociobiological understanding of male/female differences supports and clarifies Carol Gilligan's view of male and female moral preferences: The biological evolutionary task of both males and females is to succeed in projecting copies of their genes into the future, to maximize their fitness…Male success is typically achieved by effective competition, female success, by relationship, especially with their own offspring and other relatives. Thus, for boys and men, morality is at its most ideal and alluring when it is a morality of justice, of theoretical principles that place restraints upon aggressive, competitive, self-serving tendencies; for girls and women, on the other hand, morality is suffused with images of relationship, of caring, and of taking care of others. Male morality, as Gilligan describes it, is an ethic of inhibiting one's nasty self; female morality, in contrast, emphasizes releasing of the caring self. (Gilligan, quoted in Hare, p. 110).

Barash's presentation of our biological inheritance helps us to appreciate the validity of various psychological attempts to differentiate feminine and masculine instinctual dispositions such as Gilligan's (responsibilities/rights), Jung's (eros/logos), and Guntrip's (being/doing).

The problem, however, is that these differences are neither necessary nor necessarily good in contemporary culture. Furthermore, it is doubtful that instincts or archetypes have caused the differences we see and more likely that male/female differences today are cultural exaggerations of instinctual inclinations. Barash calls this phenomenon "cultural hyperextension"—"the hare's tendency to run for miles in a direction that the tortoise has just taken a single step." (Hare, p. 59) Of course there are biological universals, and yes, women and men are different, but the goddesses and gods we study as archetypes are cultural, mythological mountains made "out of what may, in essence, be biological molehills." (Hare, p. 106) Barash's conclusion is: "Men and women are indeed different, but in most cases they are less different than human social traditions have demanded them to be." (Hare, p. 106)

The differences between the sexes on the savannah do not necessarily pertain today, although we anachronistically retain them not only in the way we think about our supposed gender roles but also in our very slow-to-change neurobiology. Our instinctive behavior, our sexuality and related emotions are adapted to a way of life that virtually no longer exists. We are genetically adapted to a life characterized by small groups, low population densities, nomadism and division of labor by sex, even though this gatherer-hunter way of life began to change significantly about 10,000 years ago. With agriculture, the domestication of animals, and the growth of cities, a lot has happened in that 10,000 years. Physical evolutionary change, however, is slow by contrast to cultural change, and 10,000 years has not been enough time to generate substantial physical changes. Since biology (unlike Aesop's tortoise) cannot catch up, we are at once limited and free to define our gender identities. To a surprising extent, sexual differences today are largely what we make them. The conservatism of the tortoise ensures that there will always be differences between women and men, but biology is not destiny, archetypal or otherwise. What we do with our differences and our possibilities is really up to us. Viewed in this sociobiological context, there is a nostalgic, if not regressive, cast to the contemporary Jungian evocation of neolithic goddesses and gods as role models for the lives of [modern] women and men. . .

http://www.cgjungpage.org/learn/article ... man-nature
Last edited by Cindy B. on Wed May 21, 2014 2:55 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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Andreas
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Post by Andreas »

Yeap amazing posts. Need time to absorb though. Also Cindy very cool avatar :D.
“To live is enough.” ― Shunryu Suzuki

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Thanks, Andreas. :)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

creekmary
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Post by creekmary »

Ok. We're probably through with this topic for the most part, but I thought I would throw another something out about the male/female journey differences.

I had someone recommend the book "Women Who Run With The Wolves" to me (my response - "honey, I think I'm already there..."), and will bring it to loan to me next time. I kind of remember something about it when it came out but have been reading online reviews, etc. about it and it seems to be addressing "Hero-ing" for women - getting in touch with their basic selves and the journey it takes to get there.

I haven't read it yet but I probably will and I thought I'd see what people think who have read it and if it might pertain to the male/female differences.

Susan

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Post by A J »

Susan, I first read it several years ago. I would recommend it, and anything else written by Dr. Estes. She seems, to me, to have a very good grasp of the feminine instinct and archetype. You might find yourself there, since, from what you have posted here over time, I would think that you are well acquainted with the Wild Woman. You will probably still find much that is valuable and new to you. She is a gifted storyteller, as well as a highly accredited Jungian analyst.

I like her work.

Ann
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