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Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

economist.com

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Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#11

Post by hackinthebochs »

jostmey wrote: post #7
bradddd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users." So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial…

If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer. Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.

Farming promoted "development", but it was also the cause of the majority of social inequality in society. Those who controlled the food supply had an inordinate amount of power over the population, far more than could be achieved in hunter-gatherer societies. Read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for a decent introduction regarding this.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#13

Post by mmatants »

jgj wrote: post #9
tokenadult wrote: post #5

A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much n…

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#14

Post by Jun8 »

"Their primary source of information was a detailed ethnographic description of over 1,200 language groups across the world."

This method could be extremely error-prone, due to borrowings, etc. between languages, e.g. see some of the criticisms against gluttochronology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glottochronology#Discussion) which uses similar techniques to determine relation between languages.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#15

Post by abduhl »

mmatants wrote: post #13
jgj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

I'm sorry, but when did pornography start implying objectification? Last I checked, both men and women watched porn.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#16

Post by jgj »

mmatants wrote: post #13
jgj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

> pornography implies objectification

That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue.

And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors shared the shame-based perspective 21st century humans have on the human body. No doubt some statues/drawings of vulvae were made because vulvae were fun things to interact with, and some were made because they were meant to be revered; I'd argue that it's possible for some percentage of those works of art to be motivated by both respect and eroticism, and further that the two motivations need not be considered so inherently at odds.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#17

Post by jbattle »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #11
jostmey wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer. Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.

Farming promoted "development", but it was also the cause of the majority of social inequality in society. Those who controlled the food supply had an inordinate amount of power over the population, far more than could be achieved in hunter-gatherer societies. Read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for a decent introduction regarding this.

I think you have that backwards - in an agricultural society, food production is distributed - so you can't have control over the food supply unless you have an inordinate amount of power over the population.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#18

Post by im3w1l »

mmatants wrote: post #13
jgj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

>pornography implies objectification

what exactly do you mean by this?

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#19

Post by speeder »

abduhl wrote: post #15
mmatants wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

I'm sorry, but when did pornography start implying objectification? Last I checked, both men and women watched porn.

I'm sorry, but when objectification started implying it was a gendered thing? Last I checked both men and women could objectify other people.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#20

Post by rada »

tokenadult wrote: post #5

A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much n…

It sounds like your problem with the article is that its "mother goddess" interpretation is baseless because there is no written record of that time period. That's valid, except you then proceed to offer your own modern interpretation that is equally as baseless. Just because we are inordinately pre-occupied by porn today, doesn't mean pre-historic people were. If anything, they were hungry, hand-to-mouth wilderness survivors so those big-bellied women are much more likely to symbolize a well-fed person than a pornographic ideal (especially since breasts were not the sex symbol they are today for much of human history, and neither was masturbation to external visual sources). Or they could be literally anything else - kids toys, voodoo dolls, whatever. Like you said, no written record = speculation.

Also:

the ancient artists of surviving ancient art were mostly teenage boys

Sources?

Edit: Anyone care to reply instead of downvoting?

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