THE LONG HOUSE MEME AND MATRILINEARITY PATRILIEARITY VS MATRIARCHY AND PATRIARCHY
Much of my (our) work depends on ‘disambiguation into unambiguous measures’
It’s not matriarchal. It’s matrilineal. Meaning that it’s the most primitive agrarian (and late to post-hunter-gatherer) family structure, consisting of all those birthed by a woman, her mother, her sisters, and defended by uncles and brothers. Cohabitation, if it exists, varies from one direction to the other.
There is no ‘risk or trust’ required in this family structure. Where uncles and brothers ‘inseminate’ women in other matrilineal households, but maintain the workload in their own families, or share the work between the two. Why? Because men and women live very separate lives. Men are external to the household, and women are internal to the household. And because the concept of ‘individual’ hadn’t arisen because the capacity to survive outside of a family structure was impossible. And we, as products of the West, the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, have a hard time envisioning that paradigm of existence.
Matriarchy is impossible since all disputes are eventually resolved by force, as the lowest common denominator of dispute resolution.
Patrilineality is an innovation over Matrilineality because (a) scale, (b) property inheritance and especially the prohibition on dividing land and weakening the family in relation to others and (c) the increase in per person productivity – creating opportunity for independence, and increase in freedom of choice, (d) and the increasing dependence on warriors for defense of higher-value territory and resources.
So i) Patriarchy always exists everywhere, and ii) patrilineality always arises from matrilineality, producing iii) patriarchy and patrilineality except in temporary conditions where the majority of men have been killed in war, but there are no present existential war threats that cause demand for males – usually because the territory women and assets aren’t worth conquering and taxing/tithing/tributing.
So let’s not conflate:
Agrarian Patriarchy (Male Head of Household(assets) > headman > chieftain > king > monarch > emperor > (complex government)
With:
Pre-agrarian ‘family’ (limited to prohibition on reproduction with offspring) > matrinlineality > patrilineality.
And let’s not assume that the future, if we have one, will fit either of those models. When it certainly appear that we will, as in all things, diverge into family structures that represent class structures because class structures roughly represent adaptability, and durable relations require paying costs of adaptability – good of the common – over the good of the self, by all parties in the relationship.
Cheers
Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute
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