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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