Ungendering Civilization

K. Anne Pyburn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415260572
• eBook ISBN: 9781134509140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

With nine papers examining a distinct body of archaeological data, Ungendering Civilization offers a much needed scrutiny of the role of women in the evolution of states.

Studying societies including Predynastic Egypt, Minoan Crete, ancient Zimbabwe and the Maya - to determine what the facts actually show, the contributors critically address traditional views of male and female roles, and argue for the possibility that the root historical cause of gender subordination is participation in modern world system, rather than 'innate' tendencies to domesticity and child-rearing in women, and leadership and aggression in men.

With an interdisciplinary potential, students of archaeology, cultural studies and gender studies will find this full of useful information.

Chapter 1
Gendered states
Gender and agency in economic models of Great Zimbabwe

Tracy Luedke

African archaeology has been slow in coming to the topic of gender. This does not mean that there has not been much said and implied about gender in the writings of Africanist archaeologists. On the contrary, where gender is not explicitly addressed may be where it is most profoundly embedded in scholarly perspective and most radically reliant on assumptions and essentialisms. This seems to be the case in the scholarship on Great Zimbabwe. While very little is said about the nature of the gender roles and ideologies that may have existed on the Zimbabwe plateau, assumptions about the gendered division of labor and male primacy in political life have led to a body of scholarship which places the rise of the state firmly in the male domain. Women are at best considered pawns in the social and political maneuvering of men, signifiers of male power. This essentializing of gender roles and ideologies is particularly entrenched because it is entwined with another strand of essentializing, that which regards Africans and African cultures as timeless and unchanging, without history, incapable of innovation. The women who lived and worked at Great Zimbabwe are thus doubly essentialized, as examples of women’s timeless, economically marginal roles and as the bearers of primal African cultural systems. These assumptions are utilized in a sleight of hand in which the processes of state formation are assumed to have been the work of men alone, and the profound social changes accompanying these processes are nonetheless assumed to have had no effect on gender roles.

Theorizing gender and the state

The feminist anthropology of the 1970s included a number of approaches which attempted to locate the watershed dynamic or event that might provide a universal explanation for the subordination of women. Ortner (1974) suggested the root of gender inequity lay in the universal symbolic differentiation between nature and culture. Rosaldo (1980) located it in another binary opposition, that of the public versus the private domain. A third attempt at a universal explanation was undertaken by feminist scholars drawing on Engels (Leacock 1981; Sacks 1982). These scholars built on Engels’ model in The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State, which suggested that the transformation of gender ideologies which accompanied private property and state formation constituted the “world-historic defeat of the female sex.” The model was attractive to feminists in part because it allowed a way out of what di Leonardo has called the “feminist conundrum” (1991). Feminist anthropologists struggled with the contradiction between denouncing male domination in all its guises and honoring the anthropological mandate of cultural relativism. Engels’ model solved the conundrum by locating the source of women’s subordination not in cultural ideologies but in the history of global political economy.

For Engels, the creation of economic and political inequalities inherent to the state was accompanied by equally profound changes in gender hierarchies within family and society. In short, women lost out, as economic opportunities gave men the leverage and the incentive to establish social control over women and children. Engels considered the family a microcosm of the larger society of which it was a part. Thus power dynamics among individual family members mirrored those between classes, such that for modern capitalist society, “in the family, [the husband] is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat” (p. 744). For Engels, this social configuration constituted only a temporary stopping point on the evolutionary road to the revolution. Ironically, while Engels describes this patriarchal stage in political economic terms, the “original” condition of “mother right” is described in essential, biological terms. Even in this most materialist of analyses, biology is the starting point; gender, and specifically women’s identities, are based in biological reproduction, and, significantly for a discussion of politics, this identity is defined as inherently communal. Thus, even in a model which attends to the gender implications of profound social and economic change, women are described as being affected by this change, not themselves effecting it (cf. Silverblatt 1988). Thus while Engels’ model in one sense resolved the feminist conundrum, it also created new theoretical problems.

All of these universalizing models came under critique during the 1970s and 1980s. The elegance of explanations based on nature versus culture, private versus public, and the disempowering of women in state formation fell prey to the plethora of counter-examples, the difficulties of applying categories like “public” and “private” to the multitude of configurations and conceptions cross-culturally, and a general critique of evolutionism.

This feminist theorizing and re-theorizing took place in the context of certain trends in the social sciences. A number of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s were engaging in what di Leonardo glosses as a “history and critique of science” approach (di Leonardo 1991: 20). These scholars argued for “attention to history rather than structure, for the recognition of short-term, nonrecurrent historical regularities or of sheer randomness in human affairs” (di Leonardo, 1991: 19).

In this camp was Eric Wolf ‘s Europe and the People Without History (1982). Wolf recognized the effects that the assumption of and search for an unfolding narrative about the past had on anthropological scholarship. Western conceptions of history as unilineal and developmental had the effect of turning history into a “moral success story” (Wolf 1982: 5). This story assumed that the way things have arisen historically is not one of many possible trajectories of events that might have occurred, but the result of a natural and inevitable progression toward the emergence of nations and cultures whose essential identities are ahistorical. It is a process of “turning names into things”: “By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogenous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls” (6). The reification of cultures by anthropologists grew in part out of the methodology of fieldwork. The need to limit one’s fieldwork in time and space led to the demarcation of boundaries of an identifiable cultural whole as the limits of the researchers case study. Thus “a methodological unit of inquiry was turned into a theoretical construct by assertion, a priori” (14). Wolf, in contrast, privileges intersocietal processes over decontextualized case studies:

Once we locate the reality of society in historically changing, imperfectly bounded, multiple and branching social alignments… the concept of a fixed, unitary, and bounded culture must give way to a sense of the fluidity and permeability of cultural sets. In the rough-and-tumble of social interaction, groups are known to exploit the ambiguities of inherited forms, to impart new evaluations or valences to them, to borrow forms more expressive of their interests, or to create wholly new forms to answer changed circumstances… “A culture” is thus better seen as a series of processes that construct, reconstruct, and dismantle cultural materials, in response to identifiable determinants.

(387)

Wolf ‘s critiques are useful for thinking about all kinds of essentialisms, although Wolf himself focuses on the essentializing of culture, nation, and society and does not attend to gender. Feminist archaeologists’ critiques have recognized similar dynamics in past research, particularly with a focus on what this means for theorizing gender. Much as Wolf identified Western approaches to history as a “moral success story” (5), Conkey and Williams recognize in archaeology a “methodology of narration” (Conkey and Williams 1991: 104). The pursuit of a continuous narrative about the past informs the “origins research” (104) that is so prevalent and favored among researchers of the human past. Conkey and Williams suggest that “origins research” is fundamentally essentialist and promotes “the definitions of phenomena in terms of their putative essential features: what are the essential features of the earliest hominids, of the pristine states, of the division of labor? If, however, one holds that there are only states, in particular historical settings, or that gender relations and the division of labor are socially and culturally constructed and highly variable, then there is nothing essential to be located at a point of origin; there is nothing essential about gender nor about women’s experience” (p. 113). Conkey and Williams’ desire to get beyond archaeological essentialisms regarding the course of human history is important in relation to Engels and his critics mentioned above, for, as Conkey and Williams point out, the specific story that archaeological narratives tell privileges the rise of the state as a key, recognizable evolutionary moment. The origin of the state, the rise of “civilization,” is posited as a basic dividing line in human history, a qualitative and immutable shift in the nature of human social life (Conkey and Williams 1991: 106). Thus a critique of archaeology that takes both Wolf and Conkey to heart must pay particular attention to presentations of the “rise of the state.”

The insights of Engels, Wolf, feminist anthropologists, and feminist critics of archaeology provide the framing questions for this paper’s attempt to make sense of how archaeologists and ethnohistorians have modeled socioeconomic processes and relationships at Great Zimbabwe. Following Engels I ask in what ways gender ideologies are formed or transformed in the process of state formation. From Wolf comes the impetus to uncover historically specific social identities and relations, to identify and critique the ahistorical assumptions about gender and culture that are so often employed. From Wolf and Conkey and Williams, the recognition that it is not just that essentialisms about gender and culture are parallel, but that they are intertwined, mutually constitutive, and mutually reinforcing.

Archaeologists’ models for the processes which gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe bear many of the assumptions critiqued above. Like Engels and subsequent theorists, these models provide an unfolding narrative which for all its depiction of profound transformations, clings to certain assumptions about the essential natures of the individuals and social groups involved: men as public producers, women as private reproducers; men as actors, women as acted upon; men as innovative, women as static; men as central, women as incidental. Despite the shortcomings of Engels’ model, it should not be abandoned entirely. The insight that political economic transformation fundamentally entails or is perhaps even dependent upon transformations in gender roles, gender relations, and the gendered division of labor is crucial and undeniable. But less should be assumed about the “natural” state of men, women, or any other social group, either before, during, or after such political economic transformations. The question should be: what are the productive and social roles of men and women and in what ways do they precipitate and in what ways are they transformed by political economic change?

My more immediate interests in this paper are in examining the gender implications of archaeological explanations for the mechanisms that gave rise to the state centered on Great Zimbabwe, which controled much of the Zimbabwe plateau between 1275 and 1450. I am interested in the ways in which archaeological evidence is used in models of the rise of the state, in terms of what those models imply both about the role of women’s production in the transition to statehood and the shifts or continuities in women’s roles and status that accompanied that transition. I am looking as much at what is not being said as at what is being said about gender and the roles of women in these models. For despite a general lack of explicit discussion of these aspects of social relations within the state, there are telling assumptions to the models of the state being employed. Specifically, the state (and the “people” or “nation”) is implicitly gendered male by the researchers describing it; the gendering of the state is accomplished first by attributing the rise of the state to specific economic and political activities which are considered or assumed to be part of a male domain. Aspects of productive life that are known to have been or may have been equally or wholly women’s domain are denied a role in state formation. The gendering of the state is also accomplished by a discourse about patrilineality which envisions women as chattels in the system, ignoring that, if a world full of ethnographic analogies is any indication, even in the most patriarchal of patrilineal systems, women have some leverage and recourse, if only by virtue of the fact that they are valuable to the economic status of their fathers. These social scientific discourses about the nature of the Zimbabwe state are also discourses about gender.

Discussions of early state formation in Zimbabwe characterize men as the innovators, as the movers in a process that is fundamentally about change, development, progress. Women and their products, on the other hand, are relegated to the position of signifying men’s economic and political power; women are the “moved” not the “movers” in these political and economic processes. In deconstructing these models, I will give particular attention to which aspects of economic life are privileged and suggest that this privileging has gender implications. Further, I will suggest that the depiction of women as static is tied to more general depictions of African cultures as static, as incapable of indigenously generated innovation, a legacy, in Zimbabwe, of what Garlake (1982) has called the “settler paradigm.” I would suggest that this legacy informs particularly the depiction of women implied by archaeological models of the rise of the Zimbabwe state. Women are relegated to the background in these models, implicitly tied to an unchanging primal culture. I will approach this by examining what archaeologists have suggested about the two “prime movers” that are offered as the mechanisms for the rise of the Zimbabwe state: cattle and trade in luxury goods with the east coast of Africa. I will begin by contextualizing the example with background on the history of investigation of archaeological sites on the Zimbabwe plateau.

Archaeology on the Zimbabwe Plateau

The region under discussion is the Zimbabwe plateau, the 4 000–5 000 foot high plateau which is the watershed between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. Ecologically the plateau is characterized by temperate rolling plains covered in savanna woodlands. The plateau offered many resources to its early inhabitants: agricultural land, timber, wild animal resources, and a supply of building materials in the form of granite domes which exfoliate sheets of rock that are easily broken into building materials (Garlake 1973: 15).

As many as 150 stone-walled hilltop ruins have been identified on the plateau. These sites are referred to as Zimbabwes, the Shona word which has been variably translated as meaning houses of stone, venerated houses, and court, residence, or grave of a chief (Connah 1987: 192). Most of the Zimbabwes are situated throughout the Zimbabwe plateau, with a particular concentration on the edges of the plateau, but several outlying Zimbabwe-type sites have also been located as far away as coastal Mozambique.

Great Zimbabwe is the most impressive of all of the stone-walled ruins of the region. The site is located near Masvingo in south-central Zimbabwe and consists of a series of stone ruins covering an area of 720 hectares. The site includes a multi-chambered stone ruin perched on a hilltop and a series of stone ruins on the floor of the valley below, dominated by the extraordinary “Great Enclosure,” an elliptical enclosure formed by a stone wall 244 meters in length and in places 5 meters thick and 10 meters high. It is no wonder that these dramatic structures have attracted a great deal of attention, popular, scientific, and political, over the years.

The ruins at Great Zimbabwe were encountered in 1871 by Carl Mauch, a German geologist who was searching for the gold of King Solomon’s mines. Other early investigators shared Mauch’s delusions and spent their time looking for evidence to support the thesis that Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenician colonists and represented the biblical Ophir of Solomon. In 1890 the area was occupied by Cecil Rhodes and his British South Africa company. Rhodes encouraged the view that the site represented the work of “ancient colonists” as it buttressed his claims to sovereignty and legitimacy in Africa. Recognizing “the considerable propaganda value that evidence of ancient foreign settlement , preferably white and successful and with Biblical origins, would have” (Garlake 1982: 1), Rhodes consciously evoked parallels between the Phoenician colonizers and the British. In 1891, 1892, and 1902, several investigators worked on the site in search of evidence to support this hypothesis. These were not trained archaeologists, and they were clearly pursuing a very specific agenda. In fact, these investigators succeeded in doing considerable damage to the site. Of note in this regard is a journalist named R. N. Hall, who was hired by the British South Africa Company. Over two years he excavated almost the entire site, removing trees, undergrowth, the excavation heaps of the two previous investigations, fallen stones around the outside of the walls, and at least 3–5 feet, and in some places 12 feet of stratified archaeological material (Garlake 1973: 72). Thus imperialism left marks both tangible and intangible on Great Zimbabwe.

In 1905, the first trained archaeological excavations were undertaken by David Randall-MacIver, who confirmed that the site was indeed indigenous. This work was followed by Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s excavations in 1929. Summers, Robinson, and Whitty’s excavations of 1958 established a chronology for the site, and provided the basis upon which all further archaeological work rests. Later important researchers include Thomas Huffman and P.S. Garlake. These researchers established an archaeologically derived chronology of Great Zimbabwe which dated the beginning of stone wall building and evidence of social stratification to 1275. Great Zimbabwe continued as a major regional power from this time until it was abandoned around 1450.

Despite substantial archaeological evidence for Great Zimbabwe’s indigenous origins, claims to the contrary were made by Rhodesian nationalists as late as the 1970s. In particular, the Rhodesian Front regime of 1962–1979, intent on declaiming anything that might buttress African claims to equality and sovereignty, denou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Ungendering Civilization
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction Rethinking Complex Society
• Chapter 1: Gendered States Gender and Agency in Economic Models of Great Zimbabwe
• Chapter 2: The Use and Abuse of Ethnographic Analogies in Interpretations of Gender Systems at Cahokia
• Chapter 3: The “Marauding Pagan Warrior” Woman
• Chapter 4: Tracing Women in Early Sumer
• Chapter 5: Leaders, Healers, Laborers, and Lovers Reinterpreting Women’s Roles in Moche Society
• Chapter 6: The Benefits of an Archaeology of Gender for Predynastic Egypt
• Chapter 7: All the Harappan Men are Naked, but the Women are Wearing Jewelry
• Chapter 8: Oh My Goddess a Meditation on Minoan Civilization
• Chapter 9: Ungendering the Maya