rakesh writeth:
>Yet in *human foraging societies* there *seems* to have been an apparent
>iron law which universally prohibited women from hunting on a regular
>basis, from having gender-specific weapons and equipment for hunting, and a
>further total prohibition against the pursuit of large and dangerous game
>(lit review in Tim Megarry Society in Prehistory: The Origins of Human
>Culture, p. 307). Engels seems to have understood foraging societies in
>such terms of a sexual division of labor. Is this accurate? Was Engels
>wrong to see this sexual division of labor as neutral; or did it really
>serve as as the basis for sexual asymmetry?
>
>Just thought I would ask.
if you go to website and read further, ehrenreich suggests that the above isn't necessarily so. they've discovered quite a bit of evidence for 'net hunting' which is a communal affair: trapping animals into a 'corner' so to speak or shoving them off a cliff or ravine. such hunting required everyone to stalk and circle and scare up the game with hoots and hollers --which toddlers are just as good at as adults. it's been difficult to find this evidence because nets disintegrate so rapidly. but, they've found them in well preserved sites, such as those under water. they've also discovered some evidence that women may have been making tools for foraging well before men started making them for hunting. so, while none of this evidence is easy to discern and make absolute claims, this seems to suggest quite a bit more variety and hence possibilities as to what might have happened in this interaction between cultural and biology.
i don't know, though. in general, i've always found it hard to understand how anyone could say that women couldn't have hunted because of children. firstly, childbirth and children don't make you weak. second, we don't have to assume that babies were breastfed constantly and weren't actually being given solid foods earlier than we suspect, this would leave a woman more free than we suspect. and , particularly since we observe much more communal child rearing practices, it's certainly possible to imagine that some women hunted. [that there are so many hunter goddesses is interesting in and of itself as a sign of that possibility] and geez, i know that danny, my son, wasn't hanging off me 24-7 at 10 months! though it sure felt that way when he was 6 wks old! then there's the possibility of wet nursing, etc. who knows? but, seriously, i am inclined to believe that breastfeeding was enough to keep a woman fairly confined to the campfires with nursing children and for our ancestors to have assumed that this was for the best or in the natural order of things. but still, that hunting was a decisive factor in our development, ehrenreich's report on angier's work suggests that worrying about that isn't especially fruitful either.
at any rate, to katha. i guess i was hoping that you would tell me more about how you see my posts as denying biology or differences or even that i asserted that men felt the same as women did. i'm having a pretty hard time grasping why what i've said has suggested some sort of radical constructionism. i think even if you only look at what i typed in response to you you can see that i pretty much said that
1. culture and biology do interact, but biology isn't as determinative of culture as many seem to make it pi fail to see how it's damaging to reveal the social/cultural aspects of how we conceive of biology, particularly as so much of this is *not* especially unique to feminist thought, but has been a development in the philosophy of the sciences at least since the 50s.]
2. i explicitly stated that yes, of course, there'd be differences but those differences wouldn't be the basis of gendered inequalities in a more just society. that was among my very first posts and i know repeated to you when you first painted me as denying differences.
3. i also repeatedly denied that any of this means that there is no such thing as biology. [i'm not a biologist, but a sociologist. naturally, i focus on the social and cultural aspects of our lives together. this does not mean i give no credence to biology.]
4. i also said that dimorphism --which simply means two bodies--doesn't translate into "opposites" which is how rakesh portrayed them [and obviously it shouldn't translate as one is lesser]. though i don't see rakesh as doing this purposefully, i do see it as 'natural' because we've so often not forced ourselves to examine how our language use *does* shape how we see biology and how it ends up being studied and what questions are seen as important. [see, for ex, emily martin's work on the anthropology of science]
5. and i'm a social scientist, i certainly think science is possible! that liberty i can never take in these discussions.
in that sense we quite agree in most ways. that i've insisted on pointing out the ways in which the language has shaped the emphases we place on those biological facts and, most importantly for me, that those emphases can blind us to some important other 'realities' and 'facts', i don't think this is a reason to portray what i've said as extreme social constructionism.
i think part of the problem is that i'm finding it so unusual to be painted as a social constructionist in the extreme when i'm often enough on the attack re butler and i'm often told i'm too willing to rely on social scientific studies! to be painted as anti-science and anti-materiality is just not the typical criticism i get!
kelley
p.s. rakesh. i think that carrol really was unfairly attacked in the first place. perhaps there is an older antipathy be./ the two i'm unaware of. but it sounded extraordinarily hostile to me. and it continues on. roger continues to believe that carrol was arguing that we must see it as one sex when, in fact, he was merely arguing that this historical evidence is interesting enough to make us pause. and once paused for consideration, the arguments of gould and others might make you think harder about *how* we think about our biologies and whether its a good idea to conceive of them as oppositional categories or what have you. to ask why we focus on the things that separate us rather than what we share in common ios such an interesting question, in my mind. none of it, though, erases material realities and constraints. it *does* though help us to work on changing the social constraints that we've needlessly imposed.
kelley +~+~+~+~+
Pulp Culture +~+~+~+~+ pulping theory-research-praxis http://www.flash.net/~oudies/pulp_culture.htm pulp-admin at infothecary.org