Monica Wood’s suggestion (in The Pocket Muse: Endless Inspiration), to write about an ‘inexplicable menace in a seemingly neutral object’ intrigued me. It reminded me of my own rather extreme irritation—based on a sense of inequity, a kind of menace—with several, interconnected, academic studies I’ve been reading. The studies and my response seemed to fit her suggestion nicely.
The studies were conducted by a team of (mainly) economists from IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute), who wanted to investigate the causal interactions among matrilineal systems, land tenure, efficiency of production, and population. They selected sites in Ghana, Indonesia, and Malawi, among others, where they looked at matrilineal and patrilineal systems side by side. They explained their conceptual framework, much of which seemed reasonable in the abstract. It focused on the impacts of population and what they saw—as others have seen before them—as consequent intensification of agriculture, with various possible implications for efficiency and productivity. They used complex and sophisticated regression analyses to look at the data they collected, and tried to tease out casual connections among these variables. This does not seem a likely topic to inspire anyone’s ire or concern, a ‘seemingly neutral object’.
There are, in fact, a number of reasons I should have welcomed this study. It included clear attention to women’s roles in production and land management; it acknowledged the significance of lineality [how people trace descent in many societies] and of ethnicity in social and economic relations; it examined differences in efficiency and profitability of different farming systems (agroforestry, food crops) across nations; and it acknowledged the importance of both land tenure and the adverse effects of many systems on women’s status around the world.
Instead my response is a surprising sense of menace and outrage, founded on my own contrasting understandings. I too have a firm foundation of knowledge about the systems studied. In the late 1990s, I heard the principal architect of the study speak about his research. He was studying a Sumatran site that I knew well—very well. I’d worked quite near to his sites for three years, living in a Javanese transmigration community and working with nearby Minangkabau villages in the 1980s. Then throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and much of the 2010s, I continued research involvement nearby—one step removed, as a supervisor of related research. At the time of the researcher’s talk, early in the research process, I felt it was seriously flawed, and said so—gently, diplomatically, and fairly privately—explaining my views of the conceptual and empirical problems. His thanks for my input seemed lukewarm at the time. Subsequently I also learned more about life in Ghana and Malawi, by supervising field research and collaborating with researchers from both countries; and like all anthropologists, I’ve read about many other matrilineal and patrilineal systems.
As I read more and more of the related studies this past week, my sense of ‘menace’ intensified. There were assumptions underlying these analyses that rendered their results not only scientifically suspect, but also subtly dangerous, from policy and gender perspectives. I knew that many of these assumptions and perceptions—reflected in these decade-old studies—remain powerful in contemporary scholarship. The menace is an intellectual one, deriving from questionable basic assumptions and from ethnographic misinterpretations pervading these writings. Some impacts filter throughout the fields of development and conservation, as well as policy and gender studies; others cause more local damage in specific human systems.
The first problematic assumption is the idea of a kind of unilineal evolution—an idea that was prevalent in the late 1800s and early 1900s within anthropology, but that has since been roundly rejected by most anthropologists. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) wrote extensively about human societal evolution, which he saw as comparable to biological evolution; many communist countries—among others—took up these ideas wholeheartedly. The discredited notion remains powerful, for instance, in Vietnamese, Laotian and Chinese policies toward swidden agriculturalists, who are seen as at a ‘primitive stage of development’. This is despite their active, centuries-long involvement in markets; their decades-long, routine use of modern technologies from chainsaws to outboard motors, and more recently cell phones; a variety of societal values and behaviors that are surely as (or more) inherently valuable than our own. The 2001 studies in Indonesia, Ghana and Malawi have sections explicitly discussing ‘the evolution’ of this or that—but more troubling, in my view, is the underlying simplifying assumption that some societies, some systems are more ‘advanced’ (in totality) than others. Particularly annoying is the assumption (consistent with Morgan’s original theory and conveniently ‘proven’ by these authors’ research; see below) that matrilineal societies are inferior to, less advanced than, patrilineal ones.
A second objectionable assumption is that the individualization of ownership is ‘better’, more ‘advanced’, than shared ownership. Although the authors anticipate some criticism of this view, their own value on individual ownership comes through loud and clear, permeating their writings. Then, while indicating their lack of understanding of how matrilineal systems actually operate, they explicitly conclude that patrilineal systems are more likely to evolve into individual ownership (what they seem to consider the apex of evolution) than matrilineal ones.
My third critique, rather than an assumption, applies to these researchers’ interpretation of matrilineal systems. From my perspective, matrilineal and patrilineal systems are at least partially symmetrical. In matrilineal systems, descent is traced through the mother’s line—so for instance, rather than taking our father’s name (as most do in the US), we would likely take our mother’s name (and we would definitely take her clan or other descent group membership). In most matrilineal systems, significant goods (such as land) pass from a mother to her children, with the daughters’ rights being clearest. The matrilineal group typically has a say in the disposition of group property. Patrilineal systems are the reverse. A man passes his group membership to his children, with his sons’ rights being strongest. [In the US, we have a bilateral system, with a matrifocal emphasis—-our dominant system fits neither the matrilineal nor patrilineal model].
This symmetry falls apart, however, when we consider politics and decision-making about lands. Men, in both systems, have more power and authority than women. In the matrilineal case, it is traditionally the woman’s uncles and brothers who make land-related decisions and who bequeath some of their goods to her children, their matrilineal nieces and nephews. There is often a kind of balancing act for men between the expectation that they bequeath to their nieces and nephews on the one hand, and their desire also to bequeath to their own children on the other. In the patrilineal case, it is the husband (and often his brothers as well) who bequeath to the children of the patrilineage.
The authors of this set of studies inaccurately describe matrilineages as inherently larger than patrilineages. They conclude that one reason matrilineages’ days are numbered is that they are too large and unwieldy. In fact, although both patrilineages and matrilineages come in various sizes, there are probably more large patrilineages than matrilineages (simply because patriliny is more common than matriliny). It may be that the patrilineages in the areas investigated were smaller than nearby matrilineages, but size is not an essential characteristic of either system—so inefficiencies based on group size can not logically or legitimately be used to argue against matriliny in general.
Another problematic assumption in these studies is that the husband-wife link is fundamentally, universally the most important—as is probably true in their own cultural systems. They assume that if a woman does not receive goods from her husband, she does not receive them from any man [what, one wonders, of a man’s rights to receive goods from his wife? Never considered]. In their research in Ghana, for instance, they asked specific questions [only to male heads of household, incidentally] about what a woman received from her husband; and they lumped her maternal uncles (the most likely controller of much of her traditional wealth) and her brothers together with all other matrilineal kin. The researchers concluded, because a woman’s husband did not traditionally have an obligation to provide much to her, that she and her children were in danger of being left with no sources of support at all, in case of divorce or desertion. What women’s husbands lose in matrilineal systems in case of divorce is not addressed. It’s quite possible that Ghanaian women are indeed often left without sources of support—-I don’t know, but it’s very hard to tell from this research, because of their inappropriate focus on husband-as-provider and their probably-incorrect assumption that the husband-wife relationship is the most fundamental.
In Sumatra, the same assumptions marred the research, which was divided into high-, mid- and low-lying regions, characterized by different cropping systems. In this case, I focus on the low lying area (near and in western and central Jambi), which I know best. The authors argue that the matrilineal system is changing to a patrilineal one, which they see as good news, since this indicates that the system is heading for the most desirable type of tenure: individual ownership. They build their case partially by drawing on 1980s ethnography from the highlands of West Sumatra (Kahn 1980; Errington 1984), which was quite a different system (and much more strongly matrilineal) than that existing in the lowland, rantau [or pioneer] area where this newer research was conducted. These authors fail to mention the interplay of cultures between the strongly patrilineal Jambi ethnic group and the matrilineal Minangkabau of West Sumatra and western Jambi. This local kinship context is further complicated from the 1980s onwards by the arrival of thousands of Javanese transmigrants with a bilateral kinship system, which in turn is reinforced by a national political system dominated by the Javanese. A lot of change is definitely underway, but there are a number of interlocking ‘causes’ that are ignored in these studies.
The researchers attribute what they see as the changes in the kinship system to the effects of population increase (something that has definitely occurred), and to a ‘sensible’ (perhaps ‘inevitable’) evolution of systems from matrilineal to patrilineal to private ownership by male household heads. Another important pressure—totally ignored in these analyses—has been from the Indonesian government, with its policies that recognize, encourage, and provide resources via husbands. The Indonesian government assumption, as with these researchers’, has been that male household heads of nuclear families are the ‘normal’ way of things, that matrilineal systems are either an anachronism or an aberration (see Elmhirst 2011, for a good discussion of the pressures to shift to a male-headed, ‘conjugal partnership’ family model in Sumatra).
The menace of such analyses—though surely originally well-intentioned—is that they reinforce widespread assumptions that have done, and continue to do, so much damage to human well being around the world. These include assumptions about:
- the inherent goodness of uncontrolled capitalism;
- the ‘equity-enhancing’ nature of the market (ignoring its blatant imperfections; one of these studies, for instance, praises tenancy systems for their role in enhancing tenure equity—something I find improbable);
- the ‘naturalness’ of male domination;
- an inherent primitiveness of women and systems that tend to give them higher status;
- the elevated position of western countries (whose practices, incidentally, include both individual ownership and bilateral kinship), and
- the ‘otherness’ (‘alterity’, implied inferiority) of systems that differ.
These are the sources of my sense of menace and my abiding irritation with these studies.
References
Errington, Frederick K. 1984. Manner and Meaning in West Sumatra: The Social Context of Consciousness. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kahn, Joel S. 1980. Minangkabau Social Formation: Indonesian Peasants and the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.