Post on 30-Apr-2018
DEFERENCE, FAMILISM, AND PATRIARCHY
Naomi Quinn
Duke University
Chapter prepared for the volume
The Psychology of Patriarchy
based on an advanced seminar on that topic
at the School of Advanced Research
Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 18-22, 2015
For Notes on Contributors: Naomi Quinn is Professor Emerita in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is a psychological anthropologist whose enduring interest is in the nature of culture. She was awarded the Society for Psychological Anthropology’s 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. Contact Information: Mailing address: Department of Cultural Anthropology Rm 205 Friedl Bldg 1316 Campus Drive Duke Box 90091 Durham, NC 2008 Phone: 919-684-2810 Fax: 919-681-8483 E-mail address: naomi.quinn@duke.edu
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In this chapter I will argue that the particular historic formation we call patriarchy is built
upon certain universal human proclivities. Not all human societies are patriarchal, however;
patriarchy came to fruition in the context of a specific set of structural circumstances that
pertained across Asia and Europe, in what I think of as the patriarchal arc, from Japan to the
British Isles, and including all the settler colonies and the many contexts into which colonial
rule, and with it patriarchy, have been introduced.1 The two human proclivities I think are most
fundamentally implicated in patriarchy are deference and familism. In order to describe how
they are so implicated, I will first have to say more about the extent and shape of patriarchy itself
and the circumstances giving rise to this particular historic formation in some human societies.
Together, these particular human proclivities and these particular historical circumstances set the
stage for patriarchy.
THE EXTENT OF PATRIARCHY
My argument for the extent of patriarchy bears a strong family resemblance to that made
by Deniz Kandiyoti, a scholar of gender relations, politics, and economic development in the
Middle East, in her dazzling 1988 paper. Kandiyoti contrasts what she calls “the sub-Saharan
African pattern” of patriarchy—and which I elect not to label patriarchy at all, in order not to
dilute the term beyond its usefulness—to “classic patriarchy,” which she locates in South and
East Asia and the Middle East. At first blush these regional limits to the extent of “classic”
patriarchy may appear to be much more restrictive than my own designation of a “patriarchal
arc” reaching across all of Asia and Europe and beyond. However, Kandiyoti goes on to
consider that, historically, patriarchy has broken down in many places, even as it has fostered a
female conservative reaction. That her description of it, like mine, recognizes the historic reach
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of patriarchy beyond Asia and the Middle East is implicit in her acknowledgement that historical
“parallels” to patriarchal breakdown “may be found in very different contexts, such as the
industrialized societies of Western Europe and the United States. That its vestiges, which she
views as reactive female conservatism, live on in these latter societies suggests that patriarchy
was in full force at one time in their histories. Elsewhere in her article Kandiyoti (1888:278)
provides another clue to the extent of patriarchy across Eurasia when she notes in passing that
the forms of control and subordination common to classic patriarchy “cut across cultural and
religious boundaries, such as those of Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam”—to which list she
might have added Christianity. Hopefully, then, she would agree with me that patriarchy once
cut a continuous swath across all of Asia and Europe, including but not limited to the Middle
East and parts of Asia.
WOMEN’S ACCOMMODATION TO PATRIARCHY
However widespread across human societies some type or degree of male dominance or
attempted dominance may or may not be, what is especially distinctive of patriarchy is that
women accommodate to being so dominated. As Kandiyoti (1988:278) notes, her examples of
African “women’s open resistance stand in stark contrast to women’s accommodations” to
classic patriarchy. (In the southern Ghanaian case that I know best, men do attempt to assert
their domination over others, including their wives and other women, and this is so even in
matrilineal societies. But women will have none of it, and the result appears to be a continuous
war of the sexes.) North of the Sahara, women’s accommodation to male dominance amounts to
“their active collusion in the reproduction of their own subordination” (Kandiyoti 1988:280).
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(Of course, there are exceptions to this broad dichotomy between Eurasia and Africa, on both
sides of the Sahara.) This is a defining feature of patriarchy.
Kandiyoti offers insight as to why women’s accommodation to or collusion with male
dominance has occurred in these Eurasian societies. The most general factor that she names is
“the operation of the patrilocally extended household” (Kandiyoti 1988:278)—a “patrilineal-
patrilocal complex” that she declares has had “remarkably uniform” implications for women
across those societies characterized by agrarian peasantry. In this complex, more particularly,
“girls are given away in marriage at a very young age into households headed by their husband’s
father,” where “they are subordinate not only to all the men but also to the more senior women,
especially their mother-in-law” (Kandiyoti 1988:278). She notes further that, in the dowry
system once widespread across Asia and Europe,
women do not ordinarily have any claim on their father’s patrimony. Their dowries do
not qualify as a form of premortem inheritance since they are transferred directly to the
bridegroom’s kin and do not take the form of productive property, such as land…In
Muslim communities, for a woman to press for her inheritance rights would be
tantamount to losing her brothers’ favor, her only recourse in case of severe ill-
treatment by her husband or divorce. The young bride enters her husband’s household
as an effectively dispossessed individual who can establish her place in the patriliny
only by producing male offspring. (Kandiyoti 1988:279)
Virtually the only resource that wives marrying into patrilineal-patrilocal households can convert
into a modicum of influence and status is the offspring, specifically the sons, that they bear. One
consequence of this predicament is “a powerful incentive for higher fertility” (Kandiyoti
1988:281). Another consequence is the waiting game that in-marrying women are forced to play
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(described so well in Margery Wolf’s 1972 ethnography of rural Taiwanese families) in order to
ultimately become relatively influential mothers-in-law. As Kandiyoti (1988:279) concludes,
“The cyclical nature of women’s power in the household and their anticipation of inheriting the
authority of senior women” “encourages a thorough internalization of this form of patriarchy by
the women themselves.” In a subsequent article Kandiyoti expands on this insight:
[W]omen’s life cycle in the virilocally extended household may be such that the
deprivation and hardships they experience as young brides is [sic] eventually
superseded by the control and authority they enjoy over their sons’ wives. The cyclical
nature of women’s power in the household and their anticipation of inheriting the
authority of senior women encourages a specific kind of identification with this system
of hierarchy. (Kandiyoti 1998:143-144)
Elements of the patriarchal complex that Kandiyoti describes may receive greater or lesser
cultural elaboration, and/or may take on slightly different looks, in particular locales. But its
central features are highly identifiable. As such multiply motivated and deeply motivating
cultural practices tend to do, patriarchy takes on a cultural life of its own. As Cynthia Werner’s
discussion of campus rape in the United States, in this volume, illustrates especially well,
elements of patriarchy may proves very difficult to eradicate.
THE ORIGINS OF PATRIARCHY IN INTENSIVE AGRICULTURE
To find a comprehensive explanation for Kandiyoti’s “patrilineal-patrilocal complex”
among Eurasian agrarian peasantry we must go back even further in the anthropological
literature, to Jack Goody’s important comparative work published in the mid-1070s: his 1973
essay, “Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia,” and his 1976 book, Production and
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Reproduction. In Goody’s (1976) view, the impetus for dowry, and the distinctive Eurasian
complex of institutions and practices to which it belonged, was the introduction of the plough,
along with other features of intensive agriculture. This agricultural innovation made farmland
roughly ten times as productive as it had been under the hoe, encouraging a population
explosion. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, hoe cultivation persisted, and plentiful land and
corporate descent group land ownership with individual usufruct were the rule. The resulting
land shortage in Eurasia, and the solution to familial perpetuation of landholding rights that it
dictated, were at the heart of the Eurasian (dowry) system:2
Upon these differences status largely but not exclusively depended. Consequently it
became a strategy of utmost importance to preserve those differences for one’s
offspring, lest the family and its fortunes decline over time…Sons might inherit all the
productive capacity but daughters had to be assured of a marriage that would provide
them with the same (or better) standard of life to which they were accustomed. They
had to be endowed with property to attract a husband of the same rank. (Goody
1973:25)
Goody’s argument is not primarily focused on the implications of this gendered rule of
inheritance for women’s position. However, he does note a number of features of the Eurasian
system, absent in Africa, that have consequences for women: Along with arranged marriage,
monogamy, and concubinage the Eurasian dowry system was typically accompanied by a
concern for the virginity of unmarried women. In the latter instance,
sex before marriage could diminish a girl’s honour, and reduce her marriage chances…;
indeed premarital sex might also lead to a forced marriage, to an inappropriate husband.
(Goody 1976:17)
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Arranged marriage, of course, was necessary to make a good “match,” that is, a husband of the
same rank, for a daughter. Monogamy and concubinage followed from the unlikelihood of even
a relatively wealthy landholder being able to afford more than one full wife. Goody explains
that, under the dowry system,
it is difficult to repeat this type of funded marriage, since the spouses have to commit
their property in order to get a partner of the right standing. (Goody 1976:51)
True, the wife brings a dowry to the marriage, but the husband must match the resources she
brings with his own. Furthermore, multiple wives mean more heirs born, and “[o]nly the very
rich can afford the luxury of many children without dropping in the economic hierarchy” (Goody
1976:17). Concubinage, which does not require such a financial commitment on a man’s part to
either the concubine herself or the children she bears, is an adaptation to monogamy. In Africa,
by contrast, there is no such constraint on accumulating additional wives, each with the full
rights attendant to that role, and polygyny is widespread.
HUMAN PROCLIVITIES TOWARD PATRIARCHY
Now I want to suggest that the constraints on women in patriarchal societies are more
than circumstantial or learned; men and women are pre-disposed to patriarchy by their human
nature. First, though, I must briefly review some recent evolutionary arguments, laying the
groundwork for mine about patriarchy.
New levels of cooperation, and the distinctive biological capacities that evolved to make
such cooperation possible, are thought by a growing number of evolutionists to differentiate
humans from the other great apes and our common ancestor. This insight has led to a recent
explosion of books (Boehm 2012; Bowles and Gintis 2011; Hrdy 2009; Sterelny 2012;
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Tomasello 2014; but for an earlier rendition of this argument see Richerson and Boyd 1998) all
arguing, according to various scenarios, that the critical difference between non-human ape
social organization and that of the earliest humans was an unprecedented pressure for these
human hunter-gatherers to cooperate.3 In several of these scenarios, cooperation in large game
hunting is said to have provided the original impetus for this distinctively human trait. For
example, Michael Tomasello, whose theory rests most closely on the differences between
chimpanzee and human cognition, speculates that this cognitive evolution occurred not all at
once, but in two separate steps: a first stage in which pairs of individual hunters found it useful to
collaborate in hunting; and a second stage, when the cognitive skills evolved to serve such
collaboration provided the basis for full-fledged group cooperation in the hunt. Sarah Hrdy
instead attributes the new human capacities for cooperation not to any requirement of hunting,
but to cooperative reproduction—that is, the need for allo-parenting of uncommonly slow-
developing human offspring (e.g., Crittenden and Marlowe 2012013:69-70). Richerson and
Boyd (1998; 1999) stress the need to cooperate in defense against other, hostile, groups. Kim
Sterelny is skeptical of all such single “magic-moment, key innovation models” (Sterelny
2012:xii), arguing instead for a more general human syndrome of cultural learning and niche
construction that in turn grew out of, and fed back on, the interrelated needs for information-
sharing, cooperative hunting, reproductive cooperation, and likely also other collective ventures.
All of these accounts and others are interesting; each contributes to the general discussion
of human evolution, even if this is a debate that, for lack of more direct evidence, may never be
settled with finality. If I rest my case most heavily on Christopher Boehm’s 2012 book, Moral
Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame, it is only because his discussion takes the
notion of cultural strategies in directions most helpful to my argument. Boehm identifies three
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competing innate tendencies: egoism, or self-interest, nepotism, or kin selection, and altruism, or
willingness to help others unrelated to oneself, respectively. He agrees with most other writers
that human altruism cannot be reduced to reciprocal altruism or kin selection in the interests of
inclusive fitness, but occurs independent of sheer self-interest or genetic relatedness, probably
deriving instead from group selection.
The central assumption behind group selection is that individual members of groups
having more or better cooperators will out-reproduce other less cooperative groups. For a long
time biologists resisted this idea, assuming that systems of group selection would always be
vulnerable to so-called “free riders”—those who assert their own egoism or self-interest and
exploit gullible altruists by taking without giving. “Thus these freeloaders can cash in on the
benefits of cooperation without paying any of the costs, which means that they will easily
outcompete the altruists, whose genes thereby lose out and—in theory—all but go away”
(Boehm 2012:60). Boehm identifies two types of free-ridership: cheaters who sneak more than
their share, and bullies who take it by dint of force or threat of such force. Bullying, it can be
noted, draws on a more general motivation that humans share with chimpanzees and many other
animals—the impulse to dominate. But Boehm posits yet another counter-impulse innate to
humans (and at least incipient in chimps)—perhaps also an aspect of self-interest, or perhaps a
wholly independent disposition: aversion to domination, or, more broadly, inequality aversion.
Sterelny (2012:181) recognizes this as a somewhat narrower disposition to retaliate. Richerson
and Boyd (1999: 254) add, “People’s egalitarian impulses and love of autonomy rebel at the
striking inequality and coercion present in complex societies.” Whatever its origins and however
broad its influence across human history, this aversion to inequality insures that, in hunter-
gatherer groups at least, bullying as well as cheating will be vigorously suppressed through a
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gradation of cultural strategies—perhaps through shaming gossip, curtailing these would-be free
riders’ opportunities for allies and for mates; perhaps through the more severe tactic of ostracism
or shunning; or if necessary through even sterner means such as exile from the group or, in
extremis, murder (which is hardly unknown among hunter-gatherers). As Boehm (2012:65)
concludes, free riders are thus either put at a net genetic disadvantage, or their behavior is
completely suppressed, opening the way for group selection to effectively support altruism
toward non-kin.
I recognize the common knee-jerk cultural anthropological resistance to any such claims
about human biology. I think it behooves us to overcome this resistance. I advise against this
anti-biological bias even though these particular claims about human nature remain very iffy, in
the sense that they not backed up by experimental findings or genetic evidence. And, along with
the various stories about human evolution that accompany them, imagined reconstructions about
what may have happened in the distant past, the roles of these assumed human propensities in
these stories are difficult if not ultimately impossible to verify. Nevertheless, I am enough
persuaded by these evolutionary anthropologists’ accounts to see where they might lead.
This is where culture enters in. Egoism and nepotism, Boehm asserts, are both stronger
instincts than the altruism that fosters non-kin cooperation. Cultural practices evolve to reinforce
altruism and cooperation. For example, he posits, two cultural practices that work against
domination and for cooperation are the emphasis on the value of harmonious relationships and
explicit injunctions to behave generously. As the example of the Golden Rule suggests, such
cultural emphases, widespread among hunter-gatherers, also survive the transition to groups who
cultivate.
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Here I want to draw attention to two other such cultural strategies, ones that also survive
into the post-forager world and, as we will see in all the chapters in this book, receive distinctive
elaboration and significance in patriarchal societies.4 The first of these strategies is deference.
Systems of deference, so widespread in farming communities, may be overlooked by
evolutionary scholars because, as I have noted, deference in interpersonal relationships tends to
be actively suppressed or at least de-emphasized in hunter-gather groups in favor of their prized
egalitarianism. But it is there in humans, awaiting strategic use and cultural elaboration in more
complex societies. These rules for deference, I will be arguing, go a long way towards
accounting for the position of women in patriarchal societies.
The second cultural strategy revolves around reputation. In hunter-gatherer societies,
Boehm notes, gossip is pervasive, and can damage the reputations of individuals, operating not
only as a first line of defense to punish free riders, but also as a threat to keep everybody else in
line. Too, gossip can escalate into the more severe social sanction of ostracism. Settled farming
communities continue to be rife with gossip, but now the reputations at stake are not just those of
individuals, but of the larger, stable households and the (typically extended) families who inhabit
them, that these persons represent. As I will argue, this concern with family reputation provides
a powerful control on egoism or self-interest, in favor of that of the group. And, like the
requirements of deference, this familism has an undue effect on the position of women under
patriarchy.
Both these strategies have likely roots in human and pre-human biology: deference in the
inclination to submissiveness and reputation in the inclination to status hierarchy. Indeed, as an
innate propensity submissiveness in the face of domination, a crude form of deference, can be
traced back to the primate and even more remote mammalian past of humans. As Richerson and
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Boyd (1998:79) comment, “Coercion and deference to coercion are very widespread in animal
societies in the form of dominance hierarchies and similar principles of social organization.” Of
course, the strategies are culturally elaborated. Without language non-humans cannot gossip,
and without culture more generally they can neither know what to gossip about nor learn the
local rules specifying to whom deference is owed or from whom it is to be expected.
COOPERATION AFTER FORAGING
Before going on to consider more closely the implications of reputation and deference for
patriarchy, let me briefly call attention to a limitation of the evolutionary theory on which I have
been relying so far, for my purpose here. Boehm’s and the other new evolutionary works on the
origins of human cooperation largely stop with consideration of hunting-gathering societies.
This is because these writers are intent on capturing the transition from ape to human life, which
they identify with the acquisition by earliest humans of the new cognitive, emotional,
motivational and cultural skills needed to cooperate. As Boehm (2012:313; see also Richerson
and Boyd 1999:254) states, that evolutionary transition is viewed as having been completed with
the acquisition of these new skills, modern humans bearing the same biological equipment as did
these early hunter-gatherers. Therefore, as Tomasello puts it,
we have given only cursory attention to humans after agriculture and all of the
complexities of mixing cultural groups, from literacy and numeracy, and from
institutions such as science and government. And so our attempt is less of an explicitly
historical exercise than an attempt to carve nature at some of its most important joints,
specifically, at some of its most important evolutionary joints. (Tomasello 2014:152)
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Moreover, it has to be said that even with regard to hunter-gatherers, these writers, not being
cultural anthropologists after all, tend to give only passing consideration to human culture.5
Unlike these evolutionary anthropologists, I am concerned here with the implications of cultural
inventions for farming societies of a certain kind—those exhibiting patriarchy.
What we do know of the farming—horticultural and subsequently agricultural--societies
that followed and overtook the hunting-gathering way of life comes from the ethnographic
record, which I can only summarize here. As I have noted, early farmers, and some farming
communities up to the present day, appear to have continued the cooperative tradition that
characterized hunter-gatherers before them. In addition to their continued emphasis on harmony
and on generosity, these farming societies were and still are, like hunting-gathering groups,
predominantly kin-based in their reckoning of relationships, including fictive kin and adoptive
ties. As with hunter-gatherers, kinship serves as both a claim on cooperation and an idiom for
reinforcing it and extending it beyond actual nepotistic ties. Indeed, it could be said that kinship
plays an even greater role in the lives of early farmers, governing household structure and rules
of inheritance, both absent among nomadic peoples but important among settled ones.
Extended households, which do not exist in most hunting-gathering societies, are the rule.
The reason for this is that most agriculture requires more labor than just one or two people alone
as is the case with hunting-gathering, but also is productive enough to support these additional
members. As Eric Wolf (1966:65) has put it, “extended families and domestic groups larger than
the nuclear family occur more frequently among cultivators where the tasks of cultivation and
the pursuit of part-time specialties both permit and require a larger labor force” (italics in
original). These larger family groups may be composed of three or more generations of kin, and
may also include single divorced or never-married relatives such as (great) uncles and aunts—all
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living, if not under the same roof, in the same compound or in otherwise close proximity, under
the authority or direction of one senior resident man or couple.
In addition, separate farming households may share labor and resources with one another,
sometimes in the form of work cooperatives (especially at harvest time) or rotating credit
associations or ceremonies expressing the generosity of one or another family, sometimes more
informally. Such arrangements may have the effect of at least temporarily leveling emergent
social differences within communities. Further, these farming communities are still isolated and
insulated enough from outside influences—a feature of them that Eric Wolf (1957) once
captured in the term, “closed corporate communities”—to prevent the influx of new ideas and
artifacts and discourage the out-migration of community members with the exposure to these
new influences that this would bring.
Taken together, the emphasis on kinship, cooperation, harmony, and generosity that are
common features of hunting-gathering and farming communities are what are likely to have led
cultural psychologists, who have been preoccupied with a distinction between so-called
collectivist and individualist societies, to lump the two as “collectivist.”6 In important ways,
however, hunter-gatherers and farmers are different. New strategies had to be invented to
reinforce cooperation under the more complex, circumstances presented by life in farming
communities, with their extended households. One of these new strategies, one largely absent
among hunter-gatherers, is a distinctive kind of hierarchical system based on relations of
deference.
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HIERARCHY IN HUMAN SOCIETIES
In this respect, post-hunter-gatherer societies differ quite radically from their forebears.7
That is, they become, as the evolutionary theorists (e.g., Tomasello 2014:133) recognize,
markedly more inegalitarian. Boehm suggests the following minimal explanation,
For tribal people who are tied to agricultural land use, it’s much more costly to pick up
and move, and such sedentary egalitarians are more likely to invest some limited
authority in their headmen so that preemptive conflict resolution can become more
effective. (Boehm 2012:255)
Sterelny (2012:190-197) likewise recognizes that post-hunter-gatherer or Holocene societies are
more inegalitarian than the hunter-gather societies that peopled the Pleistocene, but concludes
that this is not just because they are sedentary, but because, as a result of this sedentary life, they
are larger and, especially, more vertically complex, composed of many more “functionally
important units intermediate between individual agents and the social world as a whole” and
therefore requiring “top-down mechanisms of command and control” (Sterelny 2012:194). As
Richerson and Boyd elaborate,
In complex societies, we are expected to live in social systems whose size, degree of
division of labor, requirements for subordination, frequency of interaction with
strangers, degree of status differences, and so on, are far outside the range of even the
most complex foraging societies.8 (Richerson and Boyd 1999:165)
I think these explanations in terms of sedentary life, size and complexity are only half
right. A clue to what is missing is provided in the way that some of the evolutionary
anthropologists (e.g., Richerson and Boyd 2012:196-197) conflates the distinctive kind of
hierarchy that characterizes these isolated farming communities with later forms of domination
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and power-mongering that emerged with the state and state-supported economies. Richerson and
Boyd (1999:265), for example, appear to skip right from hunter-gatherer egalitarianism to
“beliefs and institutions that allow deep hierarchy, strong leadership, inegalitarian social
relations, and an extensive division of labor.”9 Sterelny (2012:195) does recognize the retention
of cooperative life in post-foraging communities, but cannot reconcile these cooperative
impulses with the rise of other seemingly coercive ones; as he says, “The survival—indeed, the
elaboration—of collective action throughout this period is puzzling.” He (2012: 196-197)
worries about the “unsolved chicken-and-egg problem in the transition from the bottom-up
organization of collective action in small, relatively egalitarian worlds to the top-down, coercion-
backed organization of collective action in larger inegalitarian social worlds.” In other words, he
wonders how such formerly deeply egalitarian societies become so inegalitarian?
The problem resolves itself if we recognize an intermediate stage between “the bottom-up
organization of collective action” and its successor, “the top-down coercion-backed
organization.” This stage is represented in the farming communities that supplanted hunter-
gatherers, that indeed combine some of the egalitarianism of hunting-gathering life in a
distinctive and carefully delimited kind of hierarchy. It is true that in these farming
communities, too sedentary, large, and complex as they may be for communal consensus to be
any longer possible, hierarchy is a new cultural resource that evolved to foster a continuation of
the cooperative way of life. Studiously suppressed in foraging societies, hierarchy becomes one
of the signature traits of post-foraging ones. However, and importantly, while humans, with their
innate inclination to dominance, are predisposed to hierarchy, this earliest kind of hierarchical
system is culturally distinctive. It is based, not on top-down coercion as Sterelny imagines, but
on deference.
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SYSTEMS OF DEFERENCE
Deference and the cultural beliefs and practices surrounding it are staples of these
farming societies. It is true that, in such societies, egalitarian relationships are still valued and
inequality de-emphasized. This egalitarian value persists albeit in abridged form. Within
households, deference is paid in every paired relationship: juniors to seniors, women to men,
children to adults, young people to elders. Deference is even observed within the fine-grained
distinction between younger and elder siblings: the younger must defer to the elder. At each of
these levels, the requirement of deference insures the compliance of juniors with instructions and
orders and advice from their seniors. But these seniors must not overstep their bounds either. As
Jocelyn Marrow’s chapter so vividly portrays in her ethnography of North Indian family
relationships, they are expected to act in the best interests of those in their charge. Thus the
system of deference is reciprocal; it insures that neither those owed deference nor those who
defer to them will act out of sheer self-interest.
It can be questioned whether deference systems originated in community-wide authority
relationships and filtered down into households, as some researchers argue or, as I assume,
originated within extended households and were later adopted by wider authorities.10 I assume
the latter, that deference first emerged within post-foraging extended households. Undoubtedly,
deference requirements, with the reciprocal obligations they impose on those deferred to, often
do get extended to relationships in the community beyond the household. In many societies,
chiefs and other community leaders hold their positions only as long as they do not overreach
their power and influence, but instead exercise humility, bow to public opinion, and cultivate a
perception of themselves as no more than wise elders. As in the wider community as within the
household, kinship operates as a rich tool for keeping track of hierarchical relationships, for
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enforcing the deference owed to those above one in this hierarchy, and for inculcating this
deference in children.
First of all, extended households pre-date the emergence of states. Moreover, the newly
extended households of settle cultivators must have posed new interpersonal problems non-
existent or at least not as severe in the nuclear families that came before them. Wolf (1966:68-
70) describes well the tensions that commonly arise between successive generations, between
siblings, between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, and between core members of the
household and peripheral ones such as unmarried aunts and uncles, step-children, or servants
who may be living in extended households. (By contrast, the tensions between husband and wife
that arise in nuclear households pale.) As Wolf (1966:69) concludes, “we may expect that a
society containing such family units will have to provide strong reinforcements to keep the unit
from flying apart,” and that they do so “by inculcating appropriate behavior patterns in the
young” such as dependence and impulse control training. I propose that deference systems
emerged not only as the vehicle for training such individual traits, but for inculcation of a whole
complex of appropriate behaviors, starting with the requirement of deferring to appropriate
others itself. Such a system of deference is a general cultural device to preserve cooperation in
these newly-extended households, across the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. It
does so, within the household and then beyond, not only by making clear the limits of juniors’
autonomous rights, but also by containing the domination of those more senior within acceptable
limits. It is true that being deferred to may serve nepotistic ends, in giving senior household
members, both male and female, control over juniors who may well be sons, daughters, or
grandchildren, or, like in-marrying wives and daughters-in-law, may be key to the reproduction
of such kin. However, the reciprocal requirements of deference relationships limit such self-
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interest in the way I have described. Nevertheless, girls and junior women were unfailingly
among those who had to defer, and who had to learn to do so. These deference requirements
play a key role in insuring women’s willing subordination in patriarchal societies.
SYSTEMS OF FAMILISM
The second kind of system that is critical to reinforcing cooperation in patriarchal
societies is familism. In settled farming communities, I have said, individuals are representatives
of the larger, stable households, often extended over generations and laterally, that characterize
this kind of group living among humans. Now the reputations at stake are not just those of
individuals, but also those of the households in which these individuals reside, or more broadly,
of the families for whom these households stand. Family reputations rise or fall with individual
propriety or misbehavior, and one’s effort to preserve the reputation of one’s family becomes
highly motivating for everyone belonging to it. Thus we have the famous renditions of
household reputation known as “family honor” in the Middle East and India (and, as the two
chapters in this volume by Adriana Manago and Holly Mathews take up, in Mexico as well, via
Spain and perhaps north Africa), or as “family duty” and “filial piety” farther to the east in
Asia.11 As so many of the chapters in this book illustrate, their concern with family honor or
family obligation means that individual family members are not only willing to accept their
families’ dictates with regard to important life decisions regarding, e.g., marriage, schooling, and
choice of profession, but are also at pains to deport themselves in public in ways that reflect well
on their families. And they do so even when they may harbor different, conflicting wishes for
themselves.12 Thus, as we saw, Goody suggests that “sex before marriage could diminish a girl’s
honour,” and presumably also that of her family. Nor are households at liberty to pursue
19
collective family goals unimpeded. The larger community exerts actual and anticipated pressure
on its households to see not only that members of each behave according to community dictates,
but often also to see that households as units distribute wealth, participate in community-wide
events, and otherwise act in the perceived interest of the whole community. Both deference and
familism, then, suppress individual self-interest in favor of the interests of these larger groups,
the household and the community, and the senior members of each. And neither deference nor
familism are ever good for women.
To begin with women are undersized in average physique in comparison to men, due to
the developmental requirements of childbearing. Alesino et al. (2013), taking up a possibility
suggested by Ester Boserup’s (1970) contrast between hoeing and ploughing economies,
attribute women’s exclusion from employment outside the home (which the authors use as a
proxy for gender inequality; see Alesino et al. 2013:471, fn. 2) to the assumption that women did
not have the upper body strength, grip strength, or capacity for bursts of power (Alesino et al.
2013:470) necessary to plough, or to control the animals that pulled the plough. This is an
ambitious cross-cultural study, relying on information about both plough use and women’s
employment outside the home. The authors find a strong set of correlations (beautifully
illustrated with a series of color maps) between the use of the plough and women’s historic
exclusion from employment outside the home, not only across nations, but across the finer grain
of sub-national districts and within districts, ethnicities. I should mention that they also agree
with my inclusion of European and Asian “settler colonies” in the range of patriarchal societies,
noting that the correlation they find, and the associated cultural beliefs, outlast plough agriculture
in many places, either because these beliefs have found institutional reinforcement, or because
they complement not only plough agriculture, but also the subsequent industrial structure of
20
society, or because they “are inherently sticky” (Alesino et al. 2013:476), providing people with
helpful rules of thumb.
However, their explanation of the correlation that they have found—that “[s]ocieties
characterized by plough agriculture, and the resulting gender-based division of labor, developed
a cultural belief that the natural place for women is within the home” (Alesino et al. 2013:475)—
does not tell us how such a cultural belief may have come about. They merely conclude,
Boserup’s hypothesis suggests that in societies that engaged in plough agriculture,
cultural beliefs about gender inequality were relatively beneficial. Therefore, these
norms may have evolved in plough agriculture societies but not hoe agriculture
societies. (Alesino et al. 2013:476)
But how might have cultural beliefs about gender inequality, and specifically women’s
confinement to the home, been beneficial? These authors do not, but Goody’s account of land
shortage and the resultant emergence of patrilocal extended households, patrilineal inheritance,
and the dowry in Eurasia does, provide an explanation for women’s exclusion from employment
outside the household, and for a whole cluster of related patriarchal institutions and practices.
While the plough, and the greater upper body strength that its use required, may have contributed
to the division of labor leading up to patriarchy, it is only a fraction of the story. Of course, the
other “traits” implicated in this longer story may be impossible or difficult to measure using the
codes supplied by the Ethnographic Atlas.
Moreover, these authors pin on physical strength an assignment of ploughing to men that
may be attributed instead to the demands of nursing and subsequent care for infants and small
children, everywhere (except where institutions for alternative care are provided or older child
caregivers are available—though even in this latter case adult women are called upon to
21
supervise) the primary responsibility of women. Brown (1970) long ago argued that these
requirements limit women to tasks not requiring rapt concentration, dull, repetitive tasks that can
be easily interrupted and then resumed, non-dangerous tasks, and tasks keeping them relatively
close to home—such as hoeing or food processing. Child care is incompatible, however, with
large game hunting, large animal herding, deep-sea fishing, and ploughing, since it cannot be
conducted simultaneously with these tasks. Brown (1970:1074) rejects explanations like that of
Alesino and his co-authors as “naïvely physiological,” saying that such explanations are
“contradicted by numerous ethnographic accounts of heavy physical labor performed by
women.”13
For so many reasons, then, women, and especially young women of childbearing age,
tend to end up low in importance and recognition, especially in agricultural societies. Their low
rank within both their natal and marital households may translate, not only into their owing
deference to everybody else and everybody else’s wishes, but also into others’ control over their
public demeanor and their very life choices. Of course, the degree to which social systems
actually spell women’s inferiority, denigration, subjugation and/or exploitation will vary cross-
culturally with a number of mediating factors. So while such systems of deference and familism
certainly do not dictate women’s secondary status, they lend themselves exceptionally well to
patriarchy, which does—for all the reasons, male heirship, patrilocality, arranged marriage,
women’s socialization to their role, that I have already referred to. In other words, both
deference and familism lay the groundwork for patriarchal control over women, which then
arises under the structural conditions I have laid out. Patriarchy is but the culmination of a
potentiality.
22
I must add that there is a third leg to the overall argument, grievously neglected by me
but documented and discussed in the ethnographic context of north India, in the excellent next
chapter by Susan Seymour. This is the way in which the twin proclivities toward deference and
familism are brought to the service of patriarchy by being taught to, indeed entrained in, the
young as part of the cultural model for raising children into virtuous adults. While these
proclivities among others are part of human biological equipment, they are only proclivities,
requiring cultural emphasis and shared regimes of early learning to become incorporated into
culturally distinctive ways of being. (Conversely, these proclivities may be minimized or
entirely suppressed in the course of child socialization. Thus many hunter-gatherers suppress
domination and subordination, including the proclivity for deference, in the interests of their
assiduously practiced egalitarianism.)
I wish to make one last point regarding the relation between deference and familism. I
have speculated that households are the crucibles of deference systems may have originated in
extended households. Minimally, these households may be crucibles for the enculturation and
enforcement of deference behavior. In this way of thinking, the household could be regarded as
what Richerson and Boyd (1999) have called a work-around. As they explain this concept, the
more complex societies are organized into nested sub-groups, the lowest-level of these sub-
groups being small units, each replicating the structure of a hunting-gathering band and thus
“preserving (or recreating) the sense of living in a small-scale society” of the sort to which
humans are adapted (Richerson and Boyd 1999: 268), their evolved “social instincts” depending
on the face-to-face relationships therein. These sub-groups are the work-arounds. While
Richerson and Boyd seem to be thinking largely in terms of political and military organization
(their extended example is of the nested organization of the German army in World War II), they
23
(Richerson and Boyd 2000:11) also mention families as an example of such a work-around. I
believe this to be the case here. The extended households with their resident families that
characterize farming communities provide the small-scale context in which the innate human
propensities for subordination and concern for one’s reputation, I would argue, can be recruited
to a set of culturally learned and perpetuated practices having to do with family reputation and
interpersonal deference. These practices, in turn, help to preserve some degree of cooperation in
human communities of a size and complexity as to make hunter-gatherer forms of cooperative
action no longer feasible.14
24
Endnotes
1 Mukhopadhyay and Seymour (1994:4-5) elect to use the term “patrifocal,” and the longer designation “patrifocal
family system and ideology,” in favor of “patriarchy,” which they deem to have become over-politicized and over-
generalized, saying that it is now used “to describe any system of gender hierarchy in which males are construed to
dominate.” Instead, in keeping with the other contributions to this volume, I wish to reclaim the term
“patriarchy,” returning it to what I believe is its original narrower meaning. My quibble with the term “patrifocal”
is that in these authors’ usage of it is tied to a particular (patrilocal extended) family system, which may well
describe patriarchy in India but does not do such a good job of describing it, say, in the United States, where it
survives in association with a nuclear family system.
2 Kandiyoti (1988:282) only hints at the same independent variable when she speaks of “a system in which men
controlled some form of viable joint patrimony in land, animals, or commercial capital.”
3 These writers come from an array of fields, including evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology,
economics, and philosophy. They also employ a variety of methods. Boehm, for example, works from a carefully-
selected sample of extant foraging societies. Tomasello summarizes years of his own and others’ research on task
performance by chimpanzees and other apes, compared to that of young human children. Bowles and Gintis use
mathematical modeling. All rely to varying extent on ethnographic evidence.
4 Psychological anthropologist Robert Paul (2015) adds yet another candidate to the list of those that various
writers have identified as being vital to such cooperation, arguing that a wide array of practices cross-culturally
evolved to rein in men’s otherwise disruptive competition for mates. (Neither Paul nor I insist that the cultural
strategies we address are the only ones that have been invented in support of societal harmony and cooperation,
or the only ones with implications for women.)
5 See Paul’s (2015:286-306) interesting critique of Richerson and Boyd’s readiness to dismiss cultural practices that
seem to them not to have any adaptive function, in the sense that they detract from reproductive fitness in their
terms, as “runaway” processes, akin to the peacock’s tail.
6 This tradition was initiated in cultural psychology with the publication of a now-classic article by Markus and
Kitayama (1991), who illustrated the hypothesized difference between collectivism and individualism most
25
extensively with the contrast between Japan and the United States. Several valid critical points have since
emerged (see, especially, Spiro 1993; Kusserow 2004). What has struck me most forcefully is that those who
advocate the collectivist/individualist distinction so often stop with this typology, never explaining why the world
should be so divided. I would argue that what are lumped together as collectivism can better be understood as a
collection of disparate cultural strategies evolved to support and preserve cooperation in human societies, against
the ever-present and powerful motivation for pursuing self-interest. These cultural strategies include the
hierarchical system of deference I will be discussing next, though those who address collectivism tend to overlook
this feature of some of these societies (for an exception, see Triandis 1995). In my view, what gets labeled
individualism is the breakdown of strategies for cooperation in ever more complex and stratified societies.
7 I hasten to add that there is certainly variation that I am eliding in this brief account. Specifically, there are more
cases of hierarchy on one side of the transition from hunting-gathering to farming, and there may be more
egalitarian cases on the other, than my dichotomy suggests.
8 With these authors, I use the terms “forager” and “foraging” as synonymous with “hunter-gatherer” and
“hunting-gathering.” Sometimes the shorter label is handier.
9 Richerson and Boyd (1999) recognize a “tribal” level of social organization that unites even hunting-gathering
bands in larger political units. They (1999:263) observe for example that in one such foraging society, “chiefs could
only use the respect accorded them to guide the emergence of a consensus; they could not successfully dictate to
followers.” However, they do not make clear the extent to which this kind of leadership may have endured, across
the transition into farming, as a feature of a larger system of deference in such post-foraging societies.
1010 Specifically, cross-cultural research by William Stephens (1963:326-339) would seem at first blush to suggest
that household deference is modeled after that owed to higher-ups in the larger society: As he puts it, “The
kingdom,” by which he means a socially-stratified state, and which he contrasts with the tribe, “emerges as a kind
of pecking-order in which similar deference behavior is repeated throughout many social relationships: wife to
husband, child to father, child to father’s brother, commoner to noble.” However, what Stephens is measuring is
the intensity of deference behavior, or, in his terms, how “marked” are these deference customs. Thus the scale
he reports using in his Appendix (Stephens 1963: 408-424) treats “son kneels or bows to father” and “son speaks
softly to father,” occurring together, as the most extremely marked (the wife to husband scale is similar). As he
26
claims, there is some tendency for these practices to be more marked in the states than in the tribes in his sample.
Instead, I am concerned not with whether deference requirements grew more extreme in state societies, but with
deference more generally, which I believe to have emerged within post-foraging households, as one cultural
strategy for preserving cooperation within them.
11 In order to preserve the distinction among these variants, the seminar participants agreed to use the more
general term familism to refer to both, and I have adopted this suggestion here.
12 See Quinn (2006) for an analysis of the instructive case of the Pakistani woman presented by Ewing (1990; 1991).
13 There may be other more psychological reasons, as well, why men dominate women so often cross-culturally.
For example, Paul (2015:243) explains the oft-made observation that there are no societies in which women
dominate men (the seeming converse of male domination in human societies being relative gender equality) as
being due to the fact that so many (though not all) of the cultural strategies for containing men’s competition for
mates have the side-effect that they disproportionately position or advantage them over women in some way or
other. (These cultural strategies are quite varied, and therefore would also be impossible or difficult to measure
with existing atlas codes; Paul instead bases his argument on his own re-analyses of a large number of well-
documented ethnographic cases.) No such cultural strategies for women have evolved, because none are needed;
human females do not, in general, disrupt the social order to compete for mates.
27
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