On Tue, 30 Nov 1999, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
> Kelley,
> a. Net hunting: you give no sense of how widespread it was vis a vis the
> sexual division of labor that does seem to have held in the vast majority
> of foraging societies studied by archaeologists. In this case of net
> hunting, were women only allowed to use nets on rare occassions when men
> used lances and hunted overwhelmingly more frequently?
[First off, forgive me for backing in: I just got back from a week vacation]
Rakesh, there's a wonderful description of how net hunting worked among the pygmies of the Congo (back when they were called pygmies and it was called just the Congo, i.e., 1960) in Colin Turnbull's _The Forest People_. He makes it clear that the nets and the spear holders are two sides of the same game -- the men can't hunt by themselves in this system anymore than a pitcher can pitch without a catcher. Of course, it depends on having a well-stocked rain forest. Once you're banished to crappy land by western imperialism, everything changes. But for that very reason, I daresay his picture is especially cogent -- in earliest times, clearly the larder of the forest was even better stocked than it is now, and eking out a living from rotten land, now the rule, was the exception.
Overall, Turnbill presents a very plausible (and wonderfully well-written) picture of how the sexual division of labor could be experienced as not oppressive among such hunter gatherers because the specialized tasks had equal economic importance and equal status. The book also presents an interesting contrast between the relative social and political equality of women among the hunter gatherers of the rain forest and the extremely stringent and oppressive sexual division of labor obtaining among their nearest neighbors, the farmers on the edge of the forest -- people who, in the absence of primeval forests and their denizens, are often considered by common sense generalization as "nearest" to our origins.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com