The Creation of Patriarchy

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The Creation of Patriarchy

• Theories of Gender in Prehistory

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• Terms and concepts
• Joint control
• Patriarchy
• Matriarchy
• Androcentric
• Gynocentric
• Empowering
• Historicity
• Single-factor explanations
• Causal relationships
• The most basic dyad mother and child
• Functional division of labor on gender lines
• reification of womens reproductive abilities

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The basic assumption . . . Is that men and women
built civilization jointly . . .(p. 36) We must
abandon the concept of women as historical
victims . . . Abandoning the search for an
empowering past the search for matriarchy is
the first step in the right direction.
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Most of the speculative models have been
androcentric . . . And the few feminist models
have been ahistorical . . We must abandon
single-factor explanations . . . Gender has, in
most societies, such a strong symbolic as well as
ideological and legal significance that we cannot
understand it unless we pay attention to all
aspects of its meaning.
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Immanence and transcendence daily tasks vs.
heroic exploits Elise Boulding An egalitarian
sharing of work, in which each sex developed
appropriate skills and knowledge essential for
group survival. (p. 43)
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Catal Huyuk
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Figurines show the female body, and by extension
the body of the divine female, as a vessel of
nourishment or renewal. (7) The vulva appears
as a triangle, an oval, an open circle, or even
as a bud or a branch a fact that emphasizes its
life-giving, rather than erotic, role.
(8) Figurines sometimes directly assimilated
animal characteristics . . . which represent
the intimate relationship among humankind, nature
and the divine during the neolithic (10)
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• Gimbutas Dexter Characteristics of Figurines
• Exaggerated Body Parts
• Masks
• Life-Giving Images (The birth-giving goddess
  Mother and child The Bear and the Deer)
• Life-Sustaining Images (Birds and the Bird
  Goddess Snakes and the Snake Goddess )
• Vegetation Gods and Goddesses
• The pregnant vegetation goddess the vegetation
  year god
• The sacred marriage
• Images of Death and Regeneration
• Raptors, the Stiff White Goddess, the Gorgon

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To essentialize something is to reduce a complex
idea/object to simplistic characteristics,
thereby denying multiple meanings and
interpretations. (22)
Tringham and Conkey, Rethinking Figurines
We believe that women and men in prehistoric
societies are not identical and interchangeable.
The aim of rethinking our gendered accounts is
not merely to reclaim inventions and origins for
women . . . We should inquire into what were
surely variable, dynamic, and historically
specific gender roles, relations, ideologies, and
identities.
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• Some 20th century notions read into figurines
• male-female sex and gender bipolarity
• primary association of the female with sex and
  fertility
• conflation of anatomical sex with gender
• assumption that these images are unambiguously
  about femaleness of a limited nature
• politicized reading of weight / fat

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R. Mack argues that scholarly discourse about
these Upper Paleolithic female images relied
upon, and effects, a hierarchical and gendered
subject-object relationship that is, the
appropriation of a female body by a masculine
subject. (26) For the most part, androcentric
and gynocentric views differ primarily only in
the high status that the gynocentric view would
hold for the images within a different system of
gender ideology. (26)
Tringham and Conkey, Rethinking Figurines
figurine from catal huyuk
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finis
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