Compelling evidence has come along to support at least parts of her theory, leading others to also wonder if Gimbutas wasn‘t quite the fringe thinker she had been painted out to be. 😉 This turnaround came about not through any exciting new archaeological finds but because of a series of breakthroughs in biology. Back in 1984, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, had managed to retrieve and reproduce short bits of DNA taken from
🤬😤. “For some,the pushback against Gimbutas began to take a more bitter tone. In one notably caustic article published in 1999, the Classics professor Bruce Thornton at California State University described her work as being full of “fanciful interpretations and leaps beyond the evidence.A shaky edifice of question-begging,special pleading, unexamined assumptions, and circular reasoning”He took aim at goddess worshippers but also at feminists
“But then, every feminist wave brings along its own notions of “female specialness,” notes Eller. This is understandable in societies in which women have been undervalued. It‘s a way of regaining a sense of pride and self-belief. For some, this is the lexicon of female empowerment.The cracks appear when this “specialness” proves to be another straitjacket, distancing women from what are considered to be “masculine” traits and defining “femininity”
“Goddesses didn‘t disappear entirely, but they did morph into more patriarchal versions of themselves. “Greek goddesses…now served male deities” as wives and daughters, Gimbutas wrote. They were retained by Ancient Greek cultures but faded into shadows of their former selfs. Now they would be subservient to powerful male gods, she argued, eroticized and sometimes rendered weaker.” “The Indo-European female figures were very naturalistic, weakly -
“Gimbutas had been raised on the rich folklore of Lithuania, on its fantastical tales of women with supernatural powers. There was the “Baba Yaga,” for instance, considered a witch in Russian folklore, whom Gimbutas described as a Slavic goddess of death and regeneration. In Celtic cultures, she wrote, women enjoyed a relatively high status and were known for fighting in battles. In many of the stories she collected,goddesses,witches,or otherwise
“In the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, there was no such thing as an illegitimate child in the Seneca Nation, notes Nancy Shoemaker, an expert in Native American history based at the University of Connecticut. All children born to Seneca mothers were automatically legitimate citizens.”And there is no suggestion in the records that within Seneca society there was any social stigma attached to unmarried women having children,” she writes. -
“A “female cross-gender role in certain Native American tribes constituted an opportunity for women to assume the male role permanently, and to marry women,” the anthropologist Evelyn Blackwood has written. These cultural practices confounded Western ideas about gender and were poorly documented by outsiders. According to Blackwood, it may have been easier for people to cross genders in egalitarian Native communities,because neither men nor women
“Western anthropologists have long insisted that there are no real matriarchies in the world, if by matriarchy we mean the opposite of patriarchy. But if patriarchy begins with the domination of the father over his family and ends with the ruler over his subjects, as the English political theorist Robert Filmer wrote centuries ago in his “Patriarcha”, its hard to argue that matrilineal and matrilocal societies are really patriarchal at all. Even
“I‘ve been preoccupied by images of goddesses while writing this book.But there‘s one to which I keep coming back.It‘s a popular lithograph produced in India just over a century ago.Kali, slayer of demons , symbol of death and time,dares us to survey the carnage she‘s wrought.Eyes wide and tongue protruding,but her bright blue skin pops from the page..Wavy black hair falls below her waist,circled by a skirt of disembodied arms.Severed heads are -
pickIn The Patriarchs, Saini looks at historical and current societies to look at how patriarchy came to be, dispelling myths and dispensing with the idea of inevitability or some inherent superiority in men. Really interesting (especially the re-interrogation of how prehistory has been interpreted), but a bit denser than I was expecting.
#bookhaul
Long overdue purchases from birthday gift voucher! Had something else on order that never arrived so spent on these instead.
Thanks Helen 😘
Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality | 
