Cannibals and Kings (10 page)

What has prevented others from seeing the causal connection between warfare and all of these male-biased institutions? The stumbling block has always been that some of the most warlike village societies seem to have either very weak male supremacist complexes or none at all. The Iroquois, for example, are well-known for their incessant warfare and their training of males to be immune to pain. They are also well-known for their merciless treatment of prisoners of war. Captives were forced to run a gauntlet, their fingernails were pulled out and their limbs were hacked off, and they were finally decapitated or roasted alive at the stake—after which their remains were consumed in cannibalistic feasts. Yet the Iroquois were matrilineal, matrilocal, paid no bride-price, were more or less monogamous, and had no elaborate religious complex for intimidating or isolating women. Many societies display a similar pattern of intense militarism combined with matrilineal rather than patrilineal descent and weak rather than strong male supremacist institutions. (Bear
in mind, however, that matrilineal societies constitute less than 15 percent of all cases.)

In fact, the association between matrilineal institutions and a ferocious form of militarism is much too regular to result by chance. If one weren’t already convinced that warfare was responsible for patrilineal-patrilocal complexes, a logical conclusion would be that it was also somehow responsible for matrilineal-matrilocal complexes. The solution to this quandary, of course, is that there are different types of warfare. Matrilineal village societies tend to practice a brand of warfare different from that practiced by patrilineal village societies such as the Yanomamo. William Divale was the first to show that matrilineal societies typically engage in “external warfare,” that is, penetration by large raiding parties deep into the territories of distant enemies who are linguistically and ethnologically distinct from the attackers. Warfare among patrilineal band and village groups like the Yanomamo, on the other hand, is called “internal warfare” because it involves attacks by small groups of raiders on nearby villages in which enemies speak the same language and probably share a fairly recent common ancestry—thus the term “internal warfare.”

The logic behind the connection between matrilineality and external warfare is as follows: The married men who move into a matrilocal Iroquois communal house come from different families and villages. Their change of residence prevents them from viewing their interests exclusively in terms of what is good for their fathers, brothers, and sons and at the same time brings them into daily contact with men of nearby villages. This promotes peace between neighboring villages and lays the basis for men to cooperate in forming large war
parties capable of attacking enemies hundreds of miles away. (Iroquois armies consisting of over 500 warriors mounted attacks from New York against targets in places as distant as Illinois.) Divale has expanded the number of cases to which this logic applies by suggesting that the patrilineal people who were attacked by matrilineally organized groups would also have to adopt a similar organization in a short time or be destroyed.

But let me enter a caveat here against the conclusion that
all
cases of matrilineal organization are related to the practice of external warfare. The protracted absence of males for any reason may lead to a focus on women as the carriers of titles and the guardians of male interests. Hunting and fishing expeditions and long-distance trading are two male-centered activities which are also associated with matrilineality. The logic is similar to that involved in warfare: Men must join together for hazardous undertakings which will require them to be away from their houses, lands, and other property for weeks or months. Such prolonged absences mean that women must bear the responsibility for the decisions about daily work patterns and the care and training of children, and that they must also shoulder the burden of agricultural production in gardens and fields. Shifts from patrilineal to matrilineal organizations originate as an attempt on the part of absentee males to turn over the care of jointly owned houses, lands, and property to their sisters. Absentee males rely on their sisters rather than their wives because wives are drawn from someone else’s paternal interest group and have divided loyalties. Sisters who stay at home, however, have the same property interests as brothers. Absentee brothers therefore discourage marriages which would remove their sisters from the household in which they grew up together.
Sisters are only too happy to comply since patrilocal marriage exposes them to abuses at the hands of male supremacist husbands and unsympathetic fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law.

The actual transition from patrilocality to matrilocality need not involve any sudden traumatic institutional changes. It can take place by the simple expedient of changing bride-price to bride-service. In other words, instead of transferring valuables as a prelude to removing his bride from her family, the husband settles in temporarily with the family, hunts for them, and helps them clear their fields. From this situation it is but a small step to the kinds of marriages that are characteristic of matrilineal, matrilocal systems. Such marriages are easily broken liaisons in which husbands are in fact regarded as temporary sojourners with sexual privileges who can be asked to leave whenever their presence causes the slightest inconvenience. Among the matrilocal Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico, for example, inconvenient husbands were ejected by the simple expedient of placing their moccasins outside the front door. Iroquois women might at any moment decide to order a man to pick up his blanket and go elsewhere; as Lewis Henry Morgan noted of Iroquois marriage, “the most frivolous reasons, or the caprice of the moment, were sufficient for breaking the marriage tie.” Among the Nayars, a militaristic matrilineal caste of the Malabar Coast in India, the insignificance of husbands reached the point where joint residence was limited to nightly visits.

Households that consist of a resident core of mothers, sisters, and daughters with men either away on war parties or other expeditions or temporarily installed with their wife’s family are incompatible with the ideology and practice of patrilineal descent and inheritance.
It is no longer to his own children—scattered among the various households in which he sojourned during his peripatetic liaisons—that a man can look for the continuity of his hearth and lands; rather, it is to his sisters’ children, who will be brought up where he himself was reared. Or, to look at the same situation from the perspective of the children, it is not their father to whom they can turn for security and inheritance; rather it is their mother’s brother.

Let me face one additional complication. Not all expansionist pre-state societies that engage in external warfare are matrilineally organized. In Africa, for example, pastoral societies such as the Nuer and the Massai engaged in external warfare but were patrilineal-patrilocal. These groups require separate consideration. Most nomadic or seminomadic pre-state pastoral societies are expansionist and extremely militaristic, but strongly patrilineal or patrilocal rather than matrilineal or matrilocal. The reason is that animals on the hoof rather than crops in the field are the pastoralists’ main source of subsistence and wealth. When pre-state pastoralists intensify production and, as a result of population pressure, invade the territories of their neighbors, the male combatants do not have to worry about what’s going on back home. Pastoralists usually go to war in order to lead their stock to better pasture, so “home” follows right along behind them. Hence the expansionist warfare of pre-state pastoral peoples is characterized not by seasonal long-distance raiding from a home base, as is the case among many agricultural matrilineal societies, but by the migration of whole communities—men, women, children, and livestock.

The discovery of the relationship between external warfare and the development of matrilineal institutions clears up a number of puzzles which have plagued anthropologists
for over a hundred years. One can now see why patriarchy was never replaced by matriarchy, polygyny by polyandry, or bride-price by groom-price. Matriarchy is ruled out as long as males continue to monopolize the techniques and technology of physical violence. The reason residence with the mother’s brothers—avunculocality—is so common in matrilineal societies is that men refuse to let their sisters dominate the allocation of their joint maternal estate. The reason amitalocality does not exist is that women—the father’s sisters—are never able to exercise a degree of control over their paternal estate greater than that exercised by their brothers. The reason groom-price virtually does not occur is that husbands in matrilineal systems never occupy a position analogous to that of wives in patrilineal systems. They are not incorporated as dependents into the wife’s domestic group and they do not surrender control over their domestic affairs to their sisters; therefore, wives do not pay groom-price to their husband’s sisters in compensation for the loss of the man’s productive and reproductive services. And the reason that matrilineal societies are not polyandrous as often as they are polygynous is that sex continues to be used as a reward for male bravery. No battle-hardened head-hunter or scalp-taker is going to settle down to connubial bliss in the company of four or five of his boon companions under the tutelage of a single woman (although the sharing of concubines and gang rape are easily managed).

All of this is not to deny that the development of matrilineal institutions exerts a moderating influence on the severity of the male supremacist complex. For reasons associated with the explanation of the shift to external warfare, which I will discuss later on, matrilineality leads to a diminution of preferential female
infanticide and even to a reversal of preference for the sex of the first-born child. An Iroquois man, for example, wanted his sisters to have daughters so that his matrilineage would not die out, and where strict matrilocality is observed a man who wants to have several wives must restrict himself to women who are each other’s sisters. (Formal polygyny was often forgone in matrilineal societies as was true of the Iroquois.) And, as I’ve said, marriages in matrilineal societies are easily broken by the women. When a man is a guest in his wife’s homestead, he cannot mistreat her and expect her to take it lying down. Yet this moderation of the sexist hierarchy should not be confused with the nullification of that hierarchy. In their eagerness to overturn common stereotypes of male supremacy, some anthropologists cite the moderating effect of matrilineal institutions on the degree of male control as if it were evidence of sexual parity. One should not make too much of the fact that Iroquois women “greatly resented being beaten by their husbands.” And the fact that the women “might commit suicide to revenge themselves for the ill treatment” is not a sign of their equality with men, as one researcher has recently implied. The important point is that no Iroquois woman would dare to beat her husband. And if such a thing were ever to happen, the husband would certainly have “revenged” himself in a more convincing fashion than by committing suicide. I see no reason to doubt that Lewis Henry Morgan knew what he was talking about when he wrote that the Iroquois male “regarded women as the inferior, the dependent, and the servant of man, and from nurture and habit, she actually considered herself to be so.” Early observers who expressed opinions contrary to Morgan’s were completely befuddled by the difference
between matrilineal descent and female supremacy.

The moderating effect of matrilineality upon the Iroquois was stronger and perhaps even more unusual in the sphere of politics than it was in marriage and domestic life. As far as I know, of all the village cultures about which we have any reliable information none came nearer to being a political matriarchy than the Iroquois. Yet the role of Iroquois women as political decision-makers did not establish political parity between the sexes. Iroquois matrons had the power to raise and depose the male elders who were elected to the highest ruling body, called the council. Through a male representative on the council they could influence its decisions and exercise power over the conduct of war and the establishment of treaties. Eligibility for office passed through the female line, and it was the duty of women to nominate the men who would serve on the council. But women themselves could not serve on the council, and the incumbent males had a veto power over the matrons’ nominations. Judith Brown concludes her survey of the Iroquois sexual hierarchy with the remark that “the nation was not a matriarchy, as claimed by some.” But she adds that “the matrons were an
éminence grise
.” This is not the point. Women are always more influential behind the scenes than they seem to be out front. It is the fact that they are seldom out in front that is so puzzling and that, as I see it, can only be explained in relation to the practice of warfare.

Aside from the problems presented by warlike matrilineal societies, there is another reason that the influence of warfare on sex roles has been virtually ignored up to now. Modern theories about sex roles have been dominated by Freudian psychologists and psychiatrists.
Freudians have long been aware that some kind of link must exist between warfare and sex roles, but they have inverted the causal arrow and derived warfare from male aggressiveness rather than male aggressiveness from warfare. This inversion has penetrated to other disciplines and entered the popular culture, where it lies like a fog over the intellectual scene. Freud claimed that aggression is a manifestation of the frustrations of sexual instincts during childhood and that war is simply socially sanctioned aggression writ large in its most homicidal form. That men should dominate women followed automatically from the way in which the possessors of male sex organs and the possessors of female sex organs, respectively, experienced the pangs of childhood sexuality. According to Freud, boys compete with their father for sexual mastery of the same woman. They fantasize that they are omnipotent and that they can kill their rival, who in fact or fancy threatens to cut off their sex organs. This—the central scenario of Freudian psychodynamic theory—Freud called the Oedipus complex. Its resolution consists in the boy’s learning to direct his aggression away from his father toward socially “constructive” activities (which may include warfare).