[LMB] SP:TSK:B, The bad guy so far

[B. Ross Ashley]

On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:12:12 -0500, Sylvus Tarn <sylvus at rejiquar.com>
wrote:

 > On Mon, 2006-11-06 at 19:59 -0700, PAT MATHEWS wrote:
 >> > >S
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 >> > >
 > > Without defending Sunny's conduct - he acted like a supreme cad - does
 > > anybody here understand that Fawn was expected to know about his 
arranged
 > > marriage? That everybody in the village knew except her? And does 
anyone
 > > understand that in a culture like that, Nice Girls Don't?!?!? That 
if Fawn
 > > did, she had instantly placed herself in the category of "easy" 
because she
 > > had proven she would "Put out"? And that it is not just stupid 
unenlightened
 > > follied? Think about what rides on marriage and reproduction in 
that world.

 > [snippage]

 > If the farms passed down mother to daughter, then it wouldn't
 > matter who the father was, because the women could support
 > themselves and their babies.  As indeed we see in the
 > lakewalker culture.  So it's not the era, or the farming;
 > it's the patriarchal structure of the society, that
 > devalues women, that makes them vulnerable to accusations
 > of `sluttiness'.

 > >
 > > Agricultural Age mores look strange to moderns, but there was a 
rationale
 > > behind them as surely as sex can bring babies.

 > But only because *men* control the assets---farms.


As a Marxist I'm probably more familiar with Lewis Henry Morgan's study 
of the _League of the Hodenosaunee_ than some people ... even though 
Morgan's work is deprecated these days, I still feel it has some point, 
especially in discussions like this.

The Iroquoians were practitioners of shifting horticulture rather than 
large-scale agriculture; the village would move to a new location every 
five or ten or fifteen years when the fertility of the fields was exhausted.

Every cornpatch was assigned to a particular woman. Every married woman 
had a section of the longhouse that was hers, where her husband and 
children shared her fire. Clan descent was matrilineal, the clan mothers 
elected the peacetime leaders of the clan, the clan mothers could and 
often did adopt a captured enemy warrior into the clan. Divorce was as 
simple as the woman placing the man's moccassins outside the doorflap.
I don't recall Morgan getting any farther into Iroquoian sexual mores 
than that ... of course he was a rather straightlaced nineteenth-century 
banker from upstate New York. (But Kahn-tineta Horn, single mother, fits 
right in to her role as a clan mother at Kahnawake.)

So, Engels' conclusions from Morgan in _The Origin of the Family_: the 
patriarchal/matriarchal structure of the society is at least 
interdependent with the property forms and the technological level of 
the farming. Where horticulture is women's work, the garden/cornpatch 
belongs to the woman; when it becomes a major food source, e.g. with the 
development and spread North of the corn/beans/squash trinity of North 
America, she potentially gains cultural/political influence; when it 
becomes heavy farming, and men's work, she loses.

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-- 
B. Ross Ashley
http://www.brashley46.livejournal.com
http://brashley46.no-ip.info
"It would be too painful to think that there are worlds somewhere
where I got everything right."  Sulien, in _The King's Name_, by Jo Walton
Registered Linux user # 402119
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