Tag Archives: gender

Susan Paulson: Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds

Coronavirus has provoked some of us to think about our worlds in new ways and to consider different horizons of change. Yet in many pandemic-related discourses and policies, I have been frustrated to see hegemonic ideals about care, kinship, and residence distract attention from empirical realities and adequate solutions. Examples range from the ubiquitous representation of care as embodied by women health workers and mothers to the shocking silence about disproportionate burdens of coronavirus illness and death born by men, and the wildly incorrect assumption that most humans live in and are cared for by nuclear family households.

Covid masculinities

Much attention has been drawn to vulnerabilities of women nurses, health aids, and caretakers. More gender awareness is needed for millions of men performing essential jobs as sanitation workers, truck and bus drivers, agricultural workers, miners, fishers, and loggers. These occupations are absolutely vital for public health, yet were already among the most dangerous and deadly before adding exposure to coronavirus. Around the world, they are performed overwhelmingly by men, in patterns of workplace violence so highly gendered that, in countries like USA, men suffer 92% of occupational deaths. The workplace, then, is a realm that calls urgently for improved care.

Data from countries around the world show that coronavirus infections tend to be much more severe among men than women, with death tolls as high as two times greater for men (Bhopal and Bhopal 2020). In the US, the death rate from coronavirus for men is 1.6 times that of women. This intersects with disproportionate burden of coronavirus infections and underlying conditions among racial and ethnic minorities, and among those who are less wealthy and less educated. In many contexts, then, it is poorer less-white men who are most vulnerable to suffer critical illness and death from coronavirus (Rushovich et. al 2021). Care for these groups needs to be much more visible in news and policy responses.

While analyses of structural inequalities in occupation, residence, and healthcare rarely address masculinities, some airtime has been dedicated to men’s behavior. Studies in various contexts found men to be much more likely than women to go without masks and to break quarantine. How can criticism of the behavior of individual men shift to societal commitments to supporting self-care among all humans, including variously positioned men?     

Is it useful to blame men for getting sick? Feminists have struggled to motivate compassion for women whose conditions constrain the development of skills and confidence needed to establish dignified lives for themselves. Transitions to care-full worlds will also require compassion for boys and men whose gender expectations push them to demonstrate their manliness by performing dangerous labor in hazardous conditions, by exercising and enduring violence, and by taking risks with their health and their lives. Perhaps the devastating gendered impacts of the virus can spark mobilization against gender-linked violence that harms men and women in different ways.

While some people find safety and comfort at home, others face conflict and crowding, or lack homes altogether. Reports from diverse countries indicate that domestic violence has intensified during lock-downs, impacting women disproportionately. People who don’t even live in homes face different kinds of vulnerabilities. In most countries, women outnumber men among residents in long-term care centers, while men make up majorities as high as 90% in prisons, jails, migrant labor camps, homeless shelters, immigrant detention centers, and military barracks, all of which became hotspots for the virus. In these residential patterns too, the forms of violence and discrimination borne by men intersect with ethno-racial and class inequalities. Demands of care for those not living in households call for moral and institutional shifts away from private family responsibility toward community and commons.

Normative households

Kinship and sexuality are also fundamental in the organization of care. Many public health messages, exemplified by those pictured below, reinforce the widespread—and incorrect—assumption that contemporary populations live mostly in heteronormative nuclear households. In the US, however, only 20% of households consists of nuclear families, as measured by the US Census Bureau. Can we do better at supporting the other 80% to respond to this pandemic and conditions of life beyond?

A public health announcement banner shows a photograph of a man and woman seated on either side of two small kids. Text reads: Covid-19. Es en serio! #QuédateEnCasa. AUS: Asociación de Usuarios Sanitas
Image 1: One of many COVID prevention posters depicting nuclear family households that dominate public health messages in the world

The false portrayal of residential life as reflecting a normative kinship model limits support for the actual residential and kin arrangements through which care and provisioning are organized in today’s societies. Inaccurate assumptions that all people live like the Flintstones, the Simpsons, or the Jetsons seriously limit public health efforts by obscuring empirical realities, which are plural. Those public messages also operate to demean and delegitimize other ways of living, and to stifle creative responses to coronavirus and other challenges.

An illustration of a Black person, wearing comfortable clothes, seated and reading a book with a houseplant in the background. Text reads: Stay Home, Yew Yorkers. Do your part to help stop the spread of coronavirus.
Image 2: New Yorkers Stay Home poster

Across wealthy countries, the most common household category is a single person living alone (27% US and Canadian households, 40% of Swedish households). This New Yorkers Stay Home poster taps into possibilities of nourishing companionship in uni-person households through literature and interspecies relations (human & plant). Another creative response to needs for care and conviviality is found in queer dance parties organized online with scopes ranging from local communities to celebrity-filled global gatherings. This is not a trivial example; opportunities to dance, laugh, move together not only provide care and acknowledgement needed in quarantine (and other isolating conditions), they can also build values and pleasures outside the realm of economic competition, consumption, and profit. Alliances with LGBTQ and related social movements help to honor the diverse household and kin arrangements that people are already living, and to support innovations provoked by the pandemic, as well as those motivated by desires for positive transformation.

Where did this ill-fitting model come from?

Generations of anthropologists and archaeologists have documented a rich variety of arrangements for care, protection, provisioning, and regeneration of human communities. These are often lumped together under the term “extended family,” reinforcing the false assumption that all kinship is based on the nuclear family, from which other relations may “extend.”

Today, much public discourse, together with a surprising amount of academic work, ignores the diverse realities of kinship across cultures and through history, and instead features an ideological model of (re)production that was established and disseminated with the rise of colonial capitalism, through the following historical processes:

  • conceptual and institutional divorce of market-oriented activities identified as “productive labor” from other activities identified as “reproductive care“   
  • designation of the first as “masculine” and the second as “feminine” allocation of disproportionate monetary value, resources, and power to masculine-associated production 
  • 20th century push toward nuclear family households as economic and residential unit
  • media, political, and educational messages convey expectations that human organization be based in heteronormative nuclear family households where men are excluded from care work
Images of three families from classic cartoons: The Simpsons, The Flintstones, and the Jetsons. All three family images include a father, a mother, one or more children, and at least one pet.
Image 3: Images from cartoon series suggesting that humans have always and will always live in single-family homes among heteronormative nuclear families with man bread-winner and woman care-provider. Audiences worldwide have watched the Flintstones since 1960, the Jetsons since 1962, and the Simpsons since 1989.

What drives ongoing pushes to keep imposing this model on populations that it so poorly represents? Why continue allocating responsibility of care to putative nuclear families in strategies that overburden some and fall short of needed care for many?

One key motive is the role this model has played as an instrument of industrial capitalist growth, adapted to engineer and to justify forms of appropriation that support profit and accumulation. The model has also been instrumental to the militarization of domestic and international conflicts related to this push. For me, then, challenging normative assumptions about this gender-kinship model is a vital move to curb and to heal eco-social damages provoked by the drive for growth.

What policies, practices, messages can support and motivate people of all identities to organize care with healthier arrangements of care?

A silver lining can be found in the potential of historical crises (like COVID-19 and climate break-down) to destabilize established orders, opening possibilities for new alliances toward healthier and more equitable worlds.

While respect for planetary boundaries demands degrowth of the total quantities of resources and energy transformed each day by the global economy, some features need to be nurtured and developed, namely infrastructures and institutions of care that enhance the well-being of more people in more places. Care-full paths forward are being explored by Degrowth and Feminism(s) Alliance (FaDA), in contexts including the coronavirus pandemic (Paulson 2020).

Amid the pandemic, we have been happily surprised to see governments experimenting with policies proposed in our book The Case for Degrowth (Kallis et al. 2020): companies and governments have reduced working hours, implemented work-sharing, and subsidized workers during quarantine and business closings. Enhanced public services have supported household and community economies, and mechanisms such as the US Defense Production Act have been mobilized to secure vital supplies and services.

Can we think about these moves as anticipatory strategies that may secure ongoing care for populations, and slow down the rush toward future disasters? For example, can provisional cash payments to sustain residents through the crisis lead the way to basic care incomes? Can defense budgets shift emphasis from updating military armaments toward protecting and regenerating human resources?

Policies like these may work in very different ways, depending on the degree to which they are institutionalized to stimulate economic growth or to promote equitable wellbeing; to prolong productivism or to support reproduction; to provide charity for vulnerable people or to replace hierarchical and exploitative social systems that produce those vulnerabilities.

Beware that these crises also nourish divisive and reactionary alliances. Amid the ongoing pandemic, powerful actors continue pushing to reconstitute the status quo, and to shift costs to others. There is danger that abilities to ally for change will be undermined by politics of fear, xenophobia, and blame; intensified surveillance and control; and isolation that constrains political organizing and all kinds of common efforts. Campaigns to discredit vaccinations and masks synergize with attacks against climate action, gender equity, and racial justice. All are rallied in the name of political economic stability and defense of geopolitical interests. On personal levels, this allied resistance to change is fueled by understandable fear of losing identities and relations that have been construed and experienced as natural, meaningful, and morally correct (even as I understand them as historically adapted to support growth). In the face of polarizing narratives and blame, what strategies can support shifts away from divisive competition toward mutual collaboration?

Conclusion

I would like to see economies slow down by design, not disaster, in ways that support societies to become more caring and equitable. However, it looks like transitions may be unplanned and messy, like those we are living through now. Finding ourselves amid global pandemic and climate change, we must seize opportunities to build healthier priorities, policies, and sociocultural systems. Such transitions depend on alliances among differently positioned actors. And they must involve attention to gender and kinship systems that honor diverse contributions, and that assure care and minimize vulnerabilities for all.


Susan Paulson is Professor at the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies. She studied and taught about human-environment relations during 15 years in Latin America, and taught sustainability studies during 5 years in Europe. Paulson contributes to theory and practice in political ecology; degrowth; and gender, masculinities and environment.


References

Bhopa, Sunsil and  Raj Bhopal. 2020. ‘Sex differential in COVID-19 mortality varies markedly by age.’ Lancet 396 (10250): 532-533.

Kallis, Giorgos, Susan Paulson, Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria 2020. The Case for Degrowth. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Paulson, Susan 202. ‘Degrowth and feminisms ally to forge care-full paths beyond pandemic.’ Interface: A journal for and about social movements. Volume 12 (1): 232 – 246. https://www.interfacejournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Interface-12-1-Paulson.pdf

Rushovich, Tamara, Marion Boulicault, Jarvis T. Chen, Ann Caroline Danielsen, Amelia Tarrant, Sarah S. Richardson, and Heather Shattuck-Heidorn 2021. ‘Sex Disparities in COVID-19 Mortality Vary Across US Racial Groups.’ Journal of General Internal Medicine 36: 1696-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-021-06699-4.


Cite as: Paulson, Susan. 2022. “Gender-aware care in pandemic and postgrowth worlds.“ FocaalBlog, 26 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender-aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds/

Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything

A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021.

The Dawn of Everything’s central idea is challenging. We are told that humans are politically adventurous and experimental – so much so that after a spell of freedom and equality, people are inclined to choose oppression just to make a change. History takes a rhythmic form, oscillating between one extreme and the next. In recent times, however, we’ve all got stuck in just one system and we must try to understand why.

All this is new and refreshing but hardly credible. I prefer the standard anthropological view that the political instincts and social emotions that define our humanity were shaped under conditions of egalitarianism. To this day, all of us feel most relaxed and happy when able to laugh, play and socialize among companions who are our equals. But instead of building on this experience so familiar to us all, Graeber and Wengrow (henceforth: ‘G&W’) oppose the whole idea that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were egalitarians. In their view, they would just as likely have chosen to be oppressed.

As they put it: ‘If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history?’ Among these possibilities, as the authors readily acknowledge (pp. 86-7), were abusive dominance hierarchies like those of chimpanzees. G&W seem to be arguing that if our ancestors were so adventurous, then surely, they would have experimented not only with egalitarianism but also with harassment, abuse and domination by aggressive, bullying males.

Image 1: Dawn or teatime? The new book by David Graeber and David Wengrow (photo: Chris Knight, 2021)

G&W make these points in the context of a consistent attack on any idea that we became socially and morally human during the course of a revolution. All my academic life, I have been exploring the idea that human language, consciousness, kinship and morality evolved in a process of gradual evolution which culminated in an immense social and political revolution. My motivation was always to challenge the popular prejudice that socialism is impossible because by nature we humans are selfish and competitive – and ‘not even a revolution could change human nature’.

I would always answer this way. Yes, we are a species of great ape. Yes, like our primate cousins, we have competitive, selfish, aggressive and often violent instincts. But these were not the ones responsible for our success. Everything distinctively human about our nature – our capacity to be brilliant mums and dads, to care for one another’s children and not just our own, to establish moral rules, to see ourselves as others see us and to use music, dance and language to share our dreams – these extraordinary capacities were precisely the products of the greatest revolution in history, the one that worked.

Chris Boehm’s theory of the human revolution

Nearly a decade after the appearance of my own book detailing the complexities of this ‘human revolution’ (Knight 1991), the anthropologist Christopher Boehm (1999) published a version of the theory that, despite its insights, played safe in political terms by omitting any mention of the most important element – the dynamics of sex and gender. It is this abstract, unisex version of human revolution theory that G&W consider safe enough to mention explicitly in order to discredit it.

Boehm points out that our earliest ancestors were neither one-sidedly cooperative nor one-sidedly competitive. Instead, they were psychologically disposed to dominate others while forming alliances to resist being dominated in turn. This collective resistance from below eventually culminated in everyone coming together to prevent any would-be leader from dominating the group. Our ancestors’ chimpanzee-style dominance was now turned on its head, culminating in ‘reverse dominance’ – rule by a morally aware community committed to an egalitarian ethos.

G&W go along with the idea that humans ‘do appear to have begun … with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do’ (p. 133). In this context, they agree that extant hunter-gatherers display ‘a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning …. none of which have any parallel among other primates’ (p. 86). What they’ve no interest in is the idea that such tactics played a crucial role in shaping human nature during our evolutionary past.

Summing up their objection to Boehm’s account, they describe any suggestion that hunter-gatherers consistently preferred egalitarianism as an ‘odd insistence’ that ‘for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened’. If our hunter-gatherer ancestors were consistently egalitarian, their political lives must have somehow been frozen, stuck in time. G&W conclude with these words: ‘Before about 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian . . . according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years [these] political animals all chose to live just one way.’ (p. 87)

The only problem is that this isn’t what Boehm wrote. His actual words are worth quoting:

‘Once one band, somewhere, invented an egalitarian order, this radical change in social ways of doing things would become visible to its neighbors. The advantages would have been evident wherever subordinates were ambivalent about being dominated, particularly in bands with very aggressive bullies…. One would expect a gradual cultural diffusion to take place, with attractive egalitarian traditions replacing despotic ones locally. … Over time, migration patterns over longer distances could have fairly rapidly spread this political invention from one continent to another.’ (Boehm 1999: 195)

This is how successful revolutions work. Plainly, Boehm’s argument was not simply that until 12,000 years ago ‘humans were basically egalitarian.’ Instead, he suggests that early humans developed a variety of different political systems while gradually converging around one particularly successful model – egalitarianism.

The Teatime of Everything

Quite unfairly, The Dawn of Everything conflates modern evolutionary theory with social evolutionism – the nineteenth century narrative of a ladder of stages progressing from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’. Darwinism claims to be scientific, we are told, but in reality, is pure myth. Quixotically, G&W expect readers to give serious consideration to a perspective on human origins that does not acknowledge evolutionary theory at all.

The only science these authors do recognize is ‘archaeological science’, and then only if the archaeology doesn’t go too far back. They justify dating ‘the dawn of everything’ to a mere 30,000 years ago on the basis that nothing about politics or social life can be gleaned from archaic human ‘cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint’(p. 81).

This excuse no longer works in the light of recent evidence that our species’ most unique trait – art and symbolic culture – emerged in Africa three or four times earlier than was previously thought. By no means limited to bones and stones, this evidence consists of beads, geometric engravings, burials with grave goods and artefacts such as grindstones and paint pots, all invariably found in association with red ochre (Henshilwood et al. 2009, 2011). G&W do notice one or two of these discoveries (pp. 83-4) but show little interest – despite the fact that when cutting-edge Darwinian theory is applied to the ochre record, the possibilities for generating predictions about social dynamics, patterns of ritual performance and gendered alliances become very real (Power 2009, 2019; Power et al. 2013; Power et al. 2021; Watts 2014).

Unfortunately, these authors won’t go near Darwinism in any shape or form. They concede that someone whom they term a ‘feminist’ (actually the highly respected founding figure in primate and human sociobiology Sarah Hrdy) has come up with a ‘story’ about the critical role of collective childcare in shaping our human instincts and psychology (Hrdy 2009). Commenting that ‘there’s nothing wrong with myths’, they describe this particular myth as ‘important.’ They then immediately cast doubt on it by quipping that ‘such insights can only ever be partial because there was no garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed’ (p. 82). Tricks of this kind – in this case ignoring the fact that Hrdy’s groundbreaking work is focused on the emergence of the genus Homo some 2 million years before the dating of our common mitochondrial DNA ancestor – are clearly aimed at undermining the very idea that human origins research is worth pursuing at all.

Readers interested in Mesolithic and Neolithic archaeology will find plenty of intriguing speculations in this book. But if you are interested in how we became human – how we developed our unusually revealing eyes, our extraordinarily large brains, our distinctively social emotions, our laughter, our innate capacity for music and language – you won’t find anything at all!

The title is seriously misleading. The Dawn of Everything? ‘Teatime’ would be more accurate. The story begins with the European Upper Paleolithic, best known for those spectacular cave paintings in Ice Age France and Spain. According to the authors, by that stage the archaeology is at last getting interesting because it indicates the emergence of an economic surplus allowing elites to arise. For the first time, we begin to see evidence for social complexity, hierarchy, sumptuous burials etc.

‘Tiny hunter-gatherer bands’

For G&W, the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors established an egalitarian lifestyle much earlier in Africa is of limited interest. They concede that extant hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza of Tanzania share their resources, but instead of admiring this, they complain that resistance to accumulation obstructs the emergence of ‘social complexity’, using this term where others might have spoken of ‘class’. The authors, it seems, are averse to the concept of social class.

So, hunter-gatherers obstruct complexity – i.e., prevent class society from arising – by resisting the accumulation of wealth. G&W invoke the authority of the hunter-gatherer specialist James Woodburn here. They conclude from his work that ‘the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all’ (p. 128). This, they argue, rules out social complexity and – with it – the full richness of human cultural and intellectual life.

Woodburn (1982, 2005) certainly did argue that deliberate resistance to accumulation underpins hunter-gatherer egalitarianism and represents a political choice consciously made. He observed that such egalitarianism was a feature only of non-storage hunter-gatherers, concluding that ‘immediate return’ was the original type of human economy. But Woodburn did not argue that such egalitarianism was lacking in complexity. In fact, he viewed the binary contrast between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ social forms as damaging and misleading. For Woodburn, maintaining egalitarianism was a supremely sophisticated achievement – demanding far greater levels of political intelligence and complexity than simply allowing inequalities to arise. The Hadza, he explained, have the intelligence to realize how dangerous it would be to let anyone accumulate more wealth than they need.

Wealth inequalities not OK

According to G&W, however, wealth inequalities are unproblematic. In support of their position, they invoke Kandiaronk, the seventeenth century First American critic of European ‘civilization’ to whom they devote an inspiring chapter. Somewhat unconvincingly, they assure us that Kandiaronk and his First American co-thinkers ‘had trouble even imagining that differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of power’ (p. 130).

G&W accept that immediate-return hunter-gatherers refuse to allow wealth inequalities to develop. But surprisingly, they regard this whole situation as disappointing:

‘This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store?’ (p. 129)

What kind of future? They answer this by suggesting that activists who take inspiration from African hunter-gatherers are inviting modern city-dwellers to become ‘stuck,’ like the unfortunate Hadza, in the repetitive simplicity of life in tiny nomadic bands.

To be clear, I am no primitivist. I am in favor of technological, social and political development. The Hadza illustrate that it is fulfilling and enjoyable to share wealth on demand, to laugh and sing, to ‘waste time’ in play, to resist letting anyone dominate us – and to prioritize caring for each other’s children over all other concerns. When it comes to development, these politically sophisticated bow-and-arrow hunters can teach us a lot.

In the beginning … private property?

G&W argue that private property is primordial because it’s inseparable from religion. By way of illustration, they refer to the trumpets and other paraphernalia used in some indigenous traditions during boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies:

‘Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist… It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts…, so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.’ (p. 159)

Note how ‘absolute’ here gets translated as ‘private.’ The claim seems to be that if ritual property is sacred to an ‘absolute’ degree, then it qualifies by definition as ‘private property’.

The conflation is reinforced when the authors seek authority for their association of religion with private property. At this point G&W (p. 159) invoke Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’:

‘Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning “not to be touched”. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?’

The authors then describe how ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonians discovered ‘that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals.’ (p. 161) A spiritual entity’s sacred ownership of a species or resource sets it apart from the rest of the world. Similar reasoning, write G&W, underpins Western conceptions of private property. ‘If you own a car’, they explain, ‘you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it’ (p. 159).

It is quite breath-taking to find G&W conflating traditional notions of spiritual ‘ownership’ with ideas about owning your own car. On what planet are they when they view modern private ownership as ‘almost identical’ in its ‘underlying logic and social effects’ with a supernatural being’s ‘ownership’ of natural resources?

When indigenous activists tell us that a lake or mountain is sacred to a powerful spirit, they are not endorsing anything remotely equivalent to ‘private property’. If the ‘Great Spirit’ owns the forest, the clear implication is that it is not for sale, not to be privatized, not to be claimed by a logging company.

One of the most powerful of Durkheim’s insights was that when people invoke Divinity, they are envisaging the moral force of their community as a whole. So, if a mountain belongs to God, that’s a way of declaring that it cannot be privatized. When G&W turn that round – claiming that the concept of ‘private property’ emerged inseparably from the very idea that some things are sacred – you can see what a crude misrepresentation this is.

What Durkheim really said

For Durkheim (1963, 1965), ‘setting apart’ was the antithesis of private appropriation. In his quest to explain the origin of the world-wide cultural taboo against incest, he puzzled over traditional beliefs investing women ‘with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the masculine population at a distance…’ (1965: 72). In such belief systems, Durkheim wrote, women’s segregating power is that of their blood, bound up intimately with notions of the sacred. If divinity becomes visible in women when they bleed, it is because their blood itself is divine. ‘When it runs out, the god is spilling over’ (Durkheim 1965: 89).

For Durkheim, then, the primordial concept of ‘setting apart’ had nothing to do with private property. The issue was what happened to a young woman on coming of age (1965: 68-96). Alerted by her menstrual onset, her kin would assemble as a body to lay claim to her – that is, to ‘initiate’ her – setting her apart from male company and from the world. Her seclusion was accomplished through a special ritual – her coming-of-age ceremony. This established that her body was sacred, her choices with respect to it accountable to her sisters and other kin. In association with such collective action, the emergence of human consciousness, language and culture, for Durkheim, was the point at which a new kind of authority – that of the community – first came into being.

If only G&W had shown an interest in modern evolutionary science, they would have recognized how these Durkheimian insights anticipated the most recent and authoritative modern archaeological explanation for the ochre record in human evolution, based on the idea that blood-red ochre was used by women as cosmetic ‘war-paint’ to alert men to the newly-established sacredness of the female body (Watts 2014, Power 2019, Power et al., 2021).

Seasonal or lunar?

Now we come to The Dawn of Everything’s central idea. It is that we were all once free because we could choose how to live, experimenting now with one political structure and now another – sometimes even oscillating between utterly different social states.

Anyone who has studied anthropology will have come across the Eskimo seal-hunters who traditionally practiced sexual communism throughout the winter months, only to switch over to patriarchal family life throughout the summer – returning suddenly to communism on a particular day announced publicly as the onset of winter. G&W apply this pendulum or oscillation model to the Ice Age cultures of the European Upper Paleolithic, arguing that these complex hunter-gatherers deliberately set up vertical hierarchies of elite privilege and power – only to enjoy the pleasure of tearing them all down as the old season gave way to the new.

Because they enjoyed this revolution so much, these Ice Age political geniuses realized that they shouldn’t hold on permanently to their revolutionary gains. They understood that in order to keep enjoying successive revolutions, they would have to fill the intervals with transient counter-revolutions – doing this by allowing ‘special’ individuals to establish dominance so as to present a nice target for the next revolutionary upsurge.

I love this idea. As it happens, it uncannily resembles the oscillatory principle that we in the Radical Anthropology Group have analysed as the inner secret of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism ever since Blood Relations was published three decades ago (Knight 1991). On the other hand, my oscillation model was not quite the same. Because we evolved not in sub-Arctic conditions but in Africa, there were good ecological reasons why monthly periodicities should take precedence over seasonal rhythms. So, if power was seized and surrendered in the way G&W imagine, then social life would have been turned upside-down on a monthly schedule, oscillating with the waxing and waning moon (Knight 1991: 327-373).

A pendulum of power

G&W’s history is bursting with oppositions and alternations among hunter-gatherers but its periodicities are one-sidedly seasonal. Don’t they know that hunter-gatherers follow not just the sun but the moon? Their most important rituals, bound up as these are with women’s menstrual ebbs and flows, are scheduled by the moon.

In the rainforests of the Congo, writes Morna Finnegan (2008, 2009, 2012), women deliberately encourage men to display their courage and potential for dominance – only to defy them in an all-female ritual known as Ngoku before yielding playfully in a ‘pendulum of power’ between the sexes. G&W (pp. 114-15) allude to this but then claim that:

‘… there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alternation, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for “the origins of social inequality” really is asking the wrong question.

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be “how did we get stuck?”’

This final question is a truly profound one. It can only be answered, however, once we have developed some realistic notion of the situation that previously prevailed. Was there ever a time when our prehistoric ancestors were truly free, truly ‘unstuck’?

When marriage became permanent

Among the Central African Bayaka forest people, the Moon is said to be ‘women’s biggest husband’ (Lewis 2008). From the standpoint of any man, his wife in effect abandons him for her celestial husband each time she bleeds. The reality behind this ancient metaphor (Knight and Lewis 2017) is a tradition in which women playfully ‘seize power’ for some part of the month before willingly handing over to men once they have made their point, establishing what Finnegan (2008) has termed ‘communism in motion’. Patterns of kinship and residence in such societies set up a pendulum swinging between menstruation and ovulation, brothers and lovers, kinship and marriage, communal solidarity and the intimacies of sex.

Given the probable antiquity of such patterns, G&W are right to view some kind of block on political oscillation as something which really did happen during the course of history. But accounting for the blockage will require us to deal with a topic that G&W will not touch. It will mean respectfully approaching indigenous peoples’ practices around menstruation (Testart 1985, 1986. Knight 1991. Lewis 2008. Power 2017). It is also important to understand variability in kinship patterns and post-marital residence – again a critically important topic that G&W scarcely mention in their book.

Among non-storage hunter-gatherers, women generally insist on living with their own mother at least until after she has had a couple of children (Marlowe 2004). Genetic studies have shown that in Africa where our species evolved, this pattern extends far back into the past (Destro-Bisol et al., 2004. Verdu et al. 2013. Wood et al. 2005). In place of life-long marriage, ‘bride service’ typically prevails, each African hunter-gatherer woman accepting her chosen lover while continuing to live in her mother’s camp. Her temporary husband must make himself useful by bringing back hunted meat to his bride and her household. If he doesn’t measure up – he is out! Under such arrangements, everyone alternates between kinship and marital life, in that sense switching between utterly distinct worlds.

Living with mum is a resilient pattern, but pressure from the husband can compel her to switch residence and live permanently with him and his kin. Where this happens, a young mother with her children may find it difficult to escape. As she loses her former freedom, her husband’s care for her may then morph seamlessly into coercive control. It was this disastrous outcome which Engels (1972 [1884]) described so eloquently as the ‘world-historic defeat of the female sex’. Across much of the world, the patriarchal forces that transformed marriage into a fixed bond correspondingly imposed fixity on social life as a whole.

How humanity got ‘stuck’

This looks like a promising answer to the question, ‘How did we get stuck?’ So, what answer do G&W give to this question? Their final chapter is so meandering that it is difficult to know. They mention how care for a person may morph seamlessly into coercive control – but for some reason don’t connect this with changes in postmarital residence or family life. The nearest they get is when describing spectacles of execution and torture in seventeenth-century Europe and among the North American Wendat. We are reminded that the King’s right to punish his subjects was modelled on the patriarch’s duty to discipline his wife and children. This political domination was publicly represented as his duty of care. By contrast, when the Wendat subjected a prisoner to prolonged torture, it was to make the opposite point – publicly distinguishing dominance and control from loving care. Since the prisoner was not part of the household he needed to be tortured, not loved.

And so it is that G&W find in the distinction between care and domination their long-awaited explication of how we got stuck:

‘It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by re-creating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck….’

Instead of exploring hunter-gatherer research and gender studies, then, G&W confine their horizons to the experiences of First American military leaders, torturers and European monarchs, exploring how we ‘got stuck’ by imagining these peoples’ psychological conflicts. If the bewildering words quoted above mean anything, they seem to suggest that we got stuck because certain power-hungry figures confused caring for people with violently dominating them.

Is this a serious explanation? Did people really get confused in this way? In place of an answer, G&W themselves seem to have got stuck. We are just offered the same question in slightly different words:

‘Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck?’

No further effort is made to answer the most crucial question of the entire book.

Morgan and Engels

What is missing here is any real understanding of human evolution. In Chapter 3, G&W criticize what they describe as the mainstream anthropological consensus for likening our foraging ancestors to extant African hunter-gatherers – simple folk living in ‘tiny mobile bands’. Then in Chapter 4 they change their mind. The mainstream anthropological consensus, they now tell us, is that hunter-gatherers such as Aboriginal Australians:

‘… could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as “brothers” and “sisters” (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners.’

It was Lewis Henry Morgan (1877, 1881) who founded our discipline on the basis of his discovery of so-called ‘classificatory’ kinship. Its principle can be summed up as the ‘equivalence of siblings’. Two brothers, for example, will step into one another’s shoes with respect to their relationships. A woman will say to her sister: ‘Your children are mine and mine are yours’. So, there’s no concept of ‘private property’ with respect to children. Family life is not ‘nuclear’. Every child will be free to move between her numerous different ‘mothers’ and other supportive kin, and she will continue to enjoy such freedom throughout her adult life.

When life is structured in this way, the result is extraordinary. Everyone can expect hospitality from ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ treated formally as equivalents to one another in chains of connection stretching across vast areas. One consequence of this is that the state has no soil in which to grow. When people are self-organized, allied to one another and where the joys of childcare, sex, dance and domestic life are more communally experienced, then there are no dead spaces – no social vacuums – for the state to enter and fill. You can’t abolish the state without replacing it, and communal family life – in today’s world, self-organised neighborhoods and other wider communities – is one way of doing this.

Curiously, Graeber and Wengrow say almost nothing about kinship in their long book. Instead of critiquing the Morgan-Engels paradigm, Graeber and Wengrow turn Engels’ vision in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Engels 1972 [1884]) upside-down. In the beginning, they say, was private property, religion and the state. To quote the concluding words of Chapter 4, ‘If private property has an “origin”, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself.’ In an earlier book with Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (2017), Graeber even suggested that since imagined supernatural agents such as divine kings and forest spirits have always exercised authority over people, the principle of the state is an immovable feature of the human condition. 

It may seem paradoxical for an anarchist to accept the inevitability of private property and the state. But The Dawn of Everything adds weight to that message. Yes, say the authors, anarchist freedom can be implemented, but only in precious moments or enclaves. Personally, I find it hard to imagine what kind of ‘enclave’ might be found in a planet already beginning to burn up. Graeber and Wengrow seem to have abandoned the revolutionary slogan that ‘another world is possible’. Instead, they offer only the sobering message that ‘hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one another’. (p. 208) They seem to be saying that we cannot have freedom in one place without accepting oppression somewhere else. 

Where do we go from here?

Despite these criticisms, the one important point about this book is its advocacy of oscillation. All living things have a pulse. They live and they die, wake and sleep, breathe in and out in ways driven by the changing seasons and the many other periodicities of our life-friendly, earth-sun-moon orbital system.

We need to get Planet Earth turning once more, not just physically but socially and politically, too. This will not be done by telling people to stop confusing care with dominance and control. It will be done by supporting the school strikes, singing on their picket lines, extending the action to workplaces, dancing in the streets, blocking traffic, bringing capitalism to a complete halt.

But once we’ve taken control, what next? If we stay on strike too long, we’ll soon starve. So, let’s oscillate. Those weekly school strikes, for example, could, perhaps, be lengthened, joined up and staged once a month, spreading across the world until we’ve released all humanity from wage-slavery. Carbon emissions immediately cut by 50 per cent. Then we go back to work, re-organizing it as necessary. We can risk returning to work only once we’re sure it won’t lead back to capitalism. And we can be sure of that only once we’ve all sworn to be back with our children on their picket line next New Moon. We keep doing this, seizing power and surrendering it, until the world is rocking and breathing once more. Reclaim the future. Neither patriarchy nor matriarchy but, something like, rule by the moon.

That would be to repeat the class and gender dynamics of the original human revolution, but this time on a higher plane. Might any of this be possible or practical? Let’s open up the debate to everyone and see what we can do. That surely is what the activist-anthropologist, David Graeber, would have wanted.


Chris Knight is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London, where he forms part of a team researching the origins of our species in Africa. His books include Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (1991) and Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016).


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Destro-Bisol, G. et al. 2004. Variation of female and male lineages in sub-Saharan populations: the importance of sociocultural factors. Mol Biol Evol. 21: 1673-82.

Durkheim, Émile. 1963 [1898]. La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines. L’Année Sociologique, 1, 1-70. Reprinted as Incest. The nature and origin of the taboo, trans. E. Sagarin. New York: Stuart.

Durkheim, Émile. 1965 [1912]. The elementary forms of the religious life. New York: Free Press.

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Finnegan, Morna. 2008. The Personal is Political: Eros, ritual dialogue, and the speaking body in Central African hunter-gatherer society. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis: Edinburgh University.

Finnegan, Morna. 2009. Political bodies: Some thoughts on women’s power among Central African hunter-gatherers. Radical Anthropology 3: 31-37.

Finnegan, Morna. 2014. The politics of Eros: ritual dialogue and egalitarianism in three Central African hunter-gatherer societies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 697-715.

Henshilwood, Chris, Francesco d’Errico and Ian Watts. 2009. ‘Engraved ochres from the Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa’, Journal of Human Evolution 57(1): 27-47.

Henshilwood, Chris, d’Errico, F., van Niekerk, K.L., Coquinot, Y., Jacobs, Z., Lauritzen, S.E., Menu, M., García-Moreno, R. 2011. A 100,000-Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science 334: 219-222. DOI: 10.1126/science.1211535

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. 2009. Mothers and others. The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. London and Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Knight, C. 1985. Menstruation as medicine. Social Science and Medicine 21: 671-683.

Knight, Chris. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Knight, Chris. 1997. The wives of the sun and moon. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3(N.S.): 133-153.

Knight, Chris, Camilla Power and Ian Watts. 1995. The human symbolic revolution: A Darwinian account. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5(1): 75-114.

Knight, Chris, Robin Dunbar and Camilla Power. 1999. An evolutionary approach to human culture. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight and C. Power (eds), The Evolution of Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 1-11.

Knight, C. and J. Lewis, 2017. Towards a theory of everything. In C. Power, M. Finnegan and H. Callan (eds.), Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology. New York & Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 84-102.

Lewis, J. 2008. Ekila: blood, bodies and egalitarian societies. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14: 297-315.

Lewis, Jerome D. 2014. Egalitarian Social Organization: The Case of the Mbendjele BaYaka. In Barry S. Hewlett (ed), Hunter-Gatherers of the Congo Basin. New Brunswick: Transaction, pp. 219-43.

Marlowe, F. W. 2004. Marital residence among foragers. Current Anthropology 45 (2): 277-284.

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Power, Camilla. 2009. Sexual selection models for the emergence of symbolic communication: Why they should be reversed. In The Cradle of Language R. Botha and C. Knight (eds). Oxford: Oxford University press, pp.257-280.

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Power, Camilla. 2019. The role of egalitarianism and gender ritual in the evolution of symbolic cognition. In T Henley, M Rossano, E Kardas (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Archaeology. Routledge, pp.354-374.

Power, Camilla, Ian Watts and Chris Knight. 2021. The Symbolic Revolution: a sexual conflict model. In N Gontier, C Sinha, A Lock (eds) Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution Oxford UP, 2nd edition. Online Publication Date: Mar 2021 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.13

Testart, A. 1985. Le communisme primitif. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

Sahlins, Marshall and David Graeber, 2017. On Kings. London: HAU Books.

Testart, A. 1986. Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs. Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.

Townsend, Cathryn, 2018. The Evolution Egalitarianism. In Hilary Callan (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: John Wiley.

Verdu, P., et al., 2013. Sociocultural behavior, sex-biased admixture and effective population sizes in Central African Pygmies and non-Pygmies Mol Biol Evol, first published online January 7, 2013 doi:10.1093/molbev/mss328

Watts, Ian. 2014. The red thread: pigment use and the evolution of collective ritual. In D. Dor, C. Knight and J. Lewis (eds), The Social Origins of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 208-227.

Watts, Ian., Michael Chazan and Jayne Wilkins 2016. Early evidence for brilliant ritualized display: Specularite use in the Northern Cape (South Africa) between ~500 and ~300 ka. Current Anthropology, 57(3).

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Wood, E. T et al., 2005. Contrasting patterns of Y chromosome and mtDNA variation in Africa: evidence for sex-biased demographic processes. Eur J Hum Genet 13: 867-76


Further Readings

‘The Evolution of Egalitarianism,’ in The International Encyclopaedia of Anthropology (https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)

‘Did communism make us human? On the anthropology of David Graeber,’ Brooklyn Rail, June 2021, Chris Knight (https://brooklynrail.org/2021/06/field-notes/Did-communism-make-us-human)

‘A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow’s “How to change the course of human history”,’ Libcom.org, Camilla Power (https://libcom.org/history/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-response-david-graeber-david-wengrows-how-change-cou)

‘What is Politics’ reviews of ‘The Dawn of Everything’, YouTube, (https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured)


Cite as: Knight, Chris. 2021. “Wrong About (Almost) Everything.” FocaalBlog, 22 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything/

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