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When Tim writes,

The question of patriarchy as such gradually slides from view.

and Dustin endorses this view, a part of me says, “Fair enough. The history of science is full of ideas that once seemed of central importance and then faded away. Could it be that patriarchy is anthropology’s equivalent of phlogiston, vortices in the ether, or Lamarckian evolution, an idea that is destined to fade away, replaced by anthropology’s equivalents of rapid oxidation, gravitation conceived as distorion in space-time, or the theory of natural selection acting on genotypes?”

Could be. But in all these famous cases, an old idea was replaced by a new and better one. Where is the better idea here?

I am reminded of Terry Eagleton’s wry remark that it was just at the moment that certain sociologists were announcing the death of ideology that American cowboy Christians were waiting for the rapture to waft themselves and their Cadillacs into Heaven and Muslims seeking martyrdom suddenly seemed to be flourishing. I note, too, the political potence of what social conservatives call traditional family values, which George Lakoff has analyzed in terms of what he calls the patriarchal family (contrasted with the nurturant family model favored on the left).

On one level, the advice to explore the relevance of these or other ideas in particular ethnographic contexts seems simply sound academic advice. On another, to say that a problem has disappeared because we are no longer interested in it sounds as thoroughly dismissive as the 19th century missionary’s labeling of all of Chinese religion as mere superstition because it didn’t fit his own theology. We take ideas that much of the world takes altogether too seriously (costing literally hundreds of thousands of female babies their lives in India and China) and reduce them to something of merely local significance that, of course, has no bearing on how we, the enlightened ones, choose to live our own lives. Relativizing and contextualizing we neatly separate “them” from “us.” I say, haven’t we been here before?

I, of course, have my own issues with patriarchy. Here, for your consideration, is an ethnographic document, the eulogy for my father that is printed in the bulletin for his funeral service tomorrow.

Our father was a rock. My brother Dan says that to Pop everything was black and white— and Pop was always absolutely sure that he knew which was which. My mother just called him hard-headed.

That didn’t make him the easiest of father’s for a smartass kid eager to move in his own directions. But part of that rock was the rock-solid belief in family. And his sons did a lot of things that he didn’t understand or accept, and we were never able to change his mind, his support was unwavering.

He was a man quick to anger when he thought that his rights or property were being invaded, but also a man of huge generosity. He taught his sons the pleasure of giving. I can’t begin to count the people who visited the McCreery’s and went away with corn or tomatoes or watermelons or whatever else happened to be in season. And what a grand gift that was to his children.

Our father was a romantic. Through seven years of engagement and sixty years of marriage, no couple was ever more devoted than he and Mom. On their sixtieth wedding anniversary, I snuck a picture of them, taken through the kitchen window. There they are, both in their eighties, locked in a passionate kiss.

The romantic in Pop also loved nature. He didn’t just love growing things and sharing their fruits. He loved just sitting quietly, absorbed in observing the world around him and admiring their natural beauty. I remember once, asking him why he liked going fishing so much. He replied, “Well, if I just sat and stared at the water, people would think I was crazy.” Just a few months ago, the last time I saw him, he told me about sitting at the end of his pier one evening, his fishing pole in his hand. A great blue heron flew across the creek and sat beside him, barely an arm’s length away.

Pop was the most rooted man I’ve ever known. I heard an old friend say just the other day that the thing about Jim McCreery was that he knew every inch of his place, every plant, every animal, phylum, genus, and species. In a world where more and more of us seem to spend most of our time skittering over the surfaces, he had found his niche, his personal bit of paradise and knew it in every detail.

As I sit looking at old photographs, I see the dashing young man who won my mother’s heart. I know that he fenced as well as playing football and singing in the church choir. I just heard recently that my grandfather once caught him and mom skinny-dipping, so perhaps he wasn’t as strait-laced as I grew up thinking he was.

I look up from the desk where I’m writing and see a picture of the USS Enterprise and think of the ships he helped build in his forty-one years in the shipyard. (I remember, too, the excitement of being taken to see some of them launched.)

I sit in the house that he and his father’s and brothers built when the house that was on the place when he bought it burned to the ground just a few months later. I sit in a room that he added to that house when my maternal grandfather, who had loaned him the money to buy his place, was diagnosed with cancer and came to live with us. I remember Mom telling me how he had put aside his own dream of going back to college and becoming an engineer when that happened.

I think of the churches he helped to found and grow, the trees and the bamboo he planted, the grandchildren and the great grandchildren he adored. His was a life well lived, an example to us all.

That’s where I’m coming from.

Oneman wrote:
“fairly well-accepted that a woman in man’s clothing is making a reasonable choice in taking on a more-empowered social presentation”

You *had* to know that I would respond to this. The thing is, women in what is marked men’s clothing (as opposed to unmarked men’s clothing – unisex clothes like jeans and t-shirts) such as plaid shirts, ties, work pants, construction boots are not necessarily in a position of power. Actually, they are often targets of ridicule or disdain by both men and women. It may not be of the same nature as the ridicule and disdain faced by men in “women’s clothing” but it’s often there. If a woman goes into “real” cross-dressing and wears a packer in her shorts, wear’s a “man’s” haircut and facial hair, this is even more the case.

Of course, there is the issue of “passing” as well. It’s quite possible that female to male cross-dressers have an easier time passing, sometimes as “effeminate” males and therefore become less noticable.

The question of patriarchy as such gradually slides from view.

That’s what I’ve been trying to get at.

While we’re on the subject, I was thinking of something today. As it happens, among cross-dressers in the ostensibly patriarchal American society (and, unless I’m wrong, Western societies in general), there are more men who adopt women’s dress* than vice versa. Aside from the general terror at boundary-crossing, it seems to be fairly well-accepted that a woman in man’s clothing is making a reasonable choice in taking on a more-empowered social presentation, while a man in woman’s clothing brings on herself the righteous wrath of a society that simply cannot comprehend the decision to willingly *choose* to give up the privileges that maleness offers. So here’s the question: is the prevalence of male-to-female cross-dressing (prevalent among cross-dressers, anyway) the product of male privilege, in that men are more empowered to appropriate the symbols of weakness than vice versa, or is it rather a poke in the eye to the notion that the male position is, in fact, the position of privilege? Where does patriarchy dwell in the decision to be female?

*Let’s just accept that a phrase like “women’s dress” is way overdetermined and move on, shall we?

N. Pepperell makes an important (and not at all opaque) point. Any theory of patriarchy would have to contain a meta-critique of why we are interested in it. Additionally a definition of patriarchy is enabled by the ability to imagine its absence.

I do have a definition of patriarchy though I am not sure one could ever be fully ‘articulate’: it is simply the state in which men are recognised as wielding power in whatever way or form is judged to be important in a particular society. Crucially, it is when men hold a disproportionate amount of power (i.e. over 50%) in society’s institutions. My definition attempts to avoid defining patriarchy by its particular effects or the form the abstract notion of ‘power’ takes – control over property, form of sanctions/punishment, ability to vote etc. – which obviously vary from society to society, and can of course be subjected to the kind of sub-classification you, John, are attempting. It also attempts to recognise that women hold power in various spheres within most societies, and that men too are ruled. I accept this may be an inadequate definition for some purposes – it might need to be refined or challenged in particular cases.

John, the reason I suggested you go ahead and do the research is because the questions you ask are yours, not mine – i.e. why is patriarchy expressed differently in China and Sweden or any other society. Surely you recognise that in these posts I have not been interested in constructing arguments about why patriarchy takes the forms it does in different societies? I have said several times that I think that question is appropriate to ethnographies that take into account all of the particularities of a given society – that is, by comparing local case studies rather than making general theories. My main objection to your theory has been that it amounts to a classification of the way power is expressed, rather than an explanation for why it is men in particular who wield power. The latter is what I thought was at issue. I am absolutely not against the notion that we can study the expression of patriarchy in property relations say, or women’s rights, or violence etc. I am just saying that such studies are unlikely to explain why it is always the men.

Again: I don’t have an answer for why it is always the men. I just have an idea for the point from which I would start looking. Your critique of this point (“No duh”) is valuable and I thank you for it. It suggests we agree.

This approach doesn’t, of course, invalidate research that points out that, e.g., you can almost always find an historical exception to any notion that a particular social role is uniquely performed by women, or by men. It also doesn’t invalidate John’s suggested research program of attempting to analyse factors that influence the form in which patriarchal relations are expressed in a given social configuration – although it may be able to historicise the emergence of this kind of research program, and perhaps begin to cast some light on the normative standards being expressed within it…

Apologies if this post is a bit opaque – like many others in this thread, I don’t have a “theory of patriarchy” and, to be honest, don’t usually find the category of “patriarchy” very useful for answering the sorts of questions I usually ask. I am, however, very interested in the historical emergence of particular ideals of freedom – and the flip side of the emergence of an ideal of freedom is usually the condemnation of a particular kind of unfreedom. So I’m extrapolating, perhaps naively, that this might be a problem that can best be worked “from both ends” – by examining what other societies (in all their diversity) have done, but also by examining why this seems to be a relevant problem “for us”…

By a strange and terrible coincidence I must now turn to writing a eulogy for my father, who died last Friday. There was a patriarch, reactionary, romantic, and rooted in a way that his son will never be. Yet unlike a Roman pater he would never lift a finger to my mother. Through seven years of courtship and sixty years of marriage, he loved her passionately. One of my favorite photographs is the one I caught through the kitchen window on their sixtieth wedding anniversary, both over eighty and locked in an embrace you’d expect from horny teenagers. If my theories are weak, it is not because they fail to grasp what they talk about. It is rather because so much still lies beyond their reach.

Re: “essential attributes” – you will note that I said ’suffcient’ not ‘necessary’.

As to why I disagree with your own theory, the reasons are kind of convoluted but I will try to order my thoughts. To begin, as you have noted it is not a theory of patriarchy. Instead it is a theory about the relationship between inherited assets and what you call the ’strength’ of patriarchy within a particular social and historical context (ie: post Neolithic cultures in Europe and Asia). In some ways it is just an excercise in classification. If you ever developed it to the degree that it could be called explanatory it would simply attempt to explain the conditions of why some of these societies have ’stronger’ patriarchies than others. Does this relate to the original question? Probably (depending on what ’strength’ means – see below). Does it answer it? No.

In developing this theory the problems that you will have are many: the ’strength’ of patriarchy is measured by the ’severity’ of ‘legitimate sanctions’ but what is your measure of severity? Judging from your Roman-Pakistani-Swede continuum it is based on your own assumptions and applies cross-culturally. Why do you think sanctions are the best measure of patriarchical strength? Is Sweden somehow less of a patriarchy than ancient Rome simply because people frown at unsanctioned sex instead of kill? If patriarchy’s strength is measured by severity of punishment why isn’t punishment the critical variable? What is your measure of ‘weight’ of inherited assests? What are counted as assets? What if control over the importance of assets is an epiphenomena of a patriarchy whose crucial governants lie elsewhere? Could you tell if it was not? What does your focus on property say about what you think patriarchy actually involves? You seem to suggest patriarchy is to be measured by the control of women’s sexuality and the control of property – I am not sure this is a sufficient definition…

Putting aside these niggles the larger problem is that your theory attempts to do double service by being a general account of the rise and fall of patriarchy’s ’strength’ in one context, and a sufficient account of the cross-cultural conditions of patriarchy. In respect to the latter: as I said before many ethnographers have provided very detailed analyses of patriarchical structures in many different social groups, and as such have studied these conditions in a way that undermines the value of general accounts – single society analyses will always be better in the sense that they are more detailed and complete. Thus, in terms of understanding the conditions of patriarchy in all their variety we are already very knowledgeable. But why does patriarchy always arise given that there is variation in its conditions and form? We dont really know, and this, to me, is what is at issue. An answer would need to begin with the fundamentals of social life.

I will leave it at that because I really don’t feel I have anything else to add. I also suspect I have exceeded my Savage Minds Comment Quota for the year before it has barely begun.