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“An Odor of Man”: Melanesian Evolutionism, Anthropological Mythology and Matriarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Bernard Juillerat
Bernard Juillerat*
Affiliation:
C.N.R.S., Paris
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The evolutionist theories of Bachofen on the priority of matriarchy are today no more than one of the most unusual pieces of the historical museum of anthropology. The wealth and diversity of historical and literary sources therein are juxtaposed with the construction of a conjectural chronology organizing the relationship between the sexes in a progressive mode and in accordance with an immanent finality. But it is also necessary to distinguish, on the one hand, Bachofen's historicism as an expression of the evolutionist tendencies of that time, based on natural sciences and the results of Darwin's work, and, on the other, interest in the inter-sexual relationship within the social institution. For the invention of successive stages in order to propose a social history of sexuality is based as much on evolutionism as on constitutive psychic representations of the individual. By projecting these representations into a pseudo-historical period and by ordering them, at each level, in terms of the two parameters of domination / subjection and collectivity / individuality, Bachofen assigned semantics to history and an evolutionary sense to transformations in marriage and the family. And by conferring historical validity on the myths of Antiquity, he set forth an implicit denial both of the work of the imagination (not to say sub-conscious, which would be an anachronism for this pre-Freudian period) as well as of ideological ruses in the political field. Bachovian evolutionism thus developed a new myth out of the ancient myths, false witnesses of the past but authentic representatives of the ahistorical present of the psyche, endowing with scientific color the image of humanity progressing from dominance of the mother and collectivism to the triumph of the father and individualism. The idea of “matriarchy” (Mutterrecht) in Bachofen is indeed to be taken in the sense of “maternal dominance” (as the German expression better suggests), and not that of political power of women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 36 , Issue 144 , December 1988 , pp. 65 - 91
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 The reference editions are J.J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaekokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur, Stuttgart, Krais & Hoffmann, 1861; Du règne de la mère au patriarcat, Pages choisies de Das Mutterrecht, Introduction by A. Turel, Paris, F. Alcan, 1938 (re-edition by Editions de l'Aire, Lausanne, 1980); Myth, Religion and Mother Right. Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, Preface by F. Boas and an Introduction by J. Campbell, Princeton University Press (Bollingen Series LXXXIV), 1967.

2 B. Juillerat, Les enfants du sang. Société, reproduction et imaginaire en Nouvelle-Guinée, Paris, Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1986.

3 On this totemic ritual and the problem of its interpretation see A. Gell, Metamorphosis of the Cassowaries: Umeda Society, Language and Ritual, London, The Athlone Press, 1975 (the Ida ritual of the Umeda); B. Juillerat, A. Gell, D. Jorgensen, "Order or Disorder in Melanesian Religion?", Man, 15(4), 1980; B. Juillerat, op. cit., 1986, and B. Juillerat (ed.), The Mother's Brother is the Breast: Ritual and Meaning in the West Sepik. Ida Revisited, to be published; R. Wagner, "Ritual as Communication: Order, Meaning and Secrecy in Melanesian Initiation Rites", Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 1984.

4 Similar myths have been noted elsewhere in Melanesia as well as in Australia (A. Gell, op. cit.; M. Godelier, La production des Grands Hommes, Paris, Fayard, 1982; G. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes. Idioms of Masculinity, N.Y., McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1981; L.R. Hiatt, "Secret Pseudo-Procreation Rites among the Australian Aborigines", in Hiatt & Jayardene (eds), Anthropology in Oceania; Essays Presented to Ian Hogbin, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1971; I. Hogbin, The Island of Menstruating Men: Religion in Wogeo, New Guinea, San Francisco, Chandler, 1970; D. Tuzin, The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Religion, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980; etc.); and in Indian America (J. Bamberger, "The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society", in Roslado & Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture and Society, Stanford University Press, 1974; A. Chapman, Drama and Power in a Hunting Society, the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego, Cambridge University Press, 1982; C. Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques II, Du miel aux cendres, Paris, Plon, 1966 [3rd part, chap. 1]; R.F. Murphy, "Social Structure and Sex Antagonism", Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 15(1), 1959; Murphy & Murphy, Women in the Forest, N.Y., Columbia University Press, 1974; G. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians, The University of Chicago Press, 1971).

5 This same situation is described in the corresponding myth of the Fuegan Yanama. The Sun-Man "hid himself in the bushes and saw the girls "who were washing the paint that symbolized the spirits when they appeared" [disguised for the men]" (Gusinde, cited by J. Bamberger, op. cit., 269). See also F. Héritier, "Le sang du guerrier et le sang des femmes: Notes anthropologiques sur le rapport des sexes", in Africaines: Sexes et Signes. Cahiers du GRIF, n. 29, 1984-5:11.

6 M. Ballini: L'identité sexuelle et ses représentations chez les Sulka de Nouvelle-Bretagne. Thèse de 3e cycle, Paris X-Nanterre, 1983: 149.

7 G. Herdt, op cit.

8 G. Gillison, "Image of Nature in Gimi Thought", in McCormack & Strathern (eds), Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge University Press, 1980, 156.

9 A. Chapman, op cit., 68-9.

10 On the notion of "consent" of women before masculine power, see M. Godelier, op. cit., but also the critique of N. Mathieu in Mathieu (ed), L'arraisonnement des femmes, EHESS, Cahiers de l'Homme, 1985.

11 B. Juillerat, op. cit.

12 S. Moscovici, La société contre nature, Paris, Union Générale d'Editions 10/ 18, 1972; G. Mendel, La chasse structurale, Paris, Payot, 1977.

13 See the critical approach of A. Testart, Essai sur les fondements de la division sexuelle du travail chez les chasseurs-cueilleurs, Paris, EHESS, Cahiers de l'Homme, 1986.

14 G. Gillison, op. cit.; see also Herdt, op. cit. and G. Herdt (ed), Rituals of Manhood, Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982.

15 F. Héritier, op. cit.; C. Kirsch, "Relation entre les différenciations biologique et sociale des sexes", Revue Canadienne de Sociologie et d'Anthropologie, 13(4), 1976.

16 G. Herdt, op. cit., 1981, 168.

17 The Nature/Culture comparison so often made by analyses of cultural representations of sexuality has recently been questioned (C.P. MacCormack, "Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique", in McCormack & Strathern (eds), op. cit.). It is certain that this dichotomy has unfortunately masked the extraordinary subtlety of representation systems. The Yafar example, however, shows here that nature only serves as metaphor for the idea of regression, of return to the maternal bond.

18 S. Freud, "Au-delà du principe de plaisir" (1920), in Essais de psychanalyse, Paris, Payot, 1984.

19 E. Fromm, La crise de la psychanalyse: Essai sur Freud, Marx et la psychologie sociale, Paris, Denoël, 1970.

20 The purpose of this article is not to seek to find a reason for the permanence of such an imago in Yafar culture; serious ethno-psychoanalytic research would be required into the conditions of socialization of the child. Anticipating a question the reader might raise, we can indicate that weaning occurs in the third or fourth year; until that time the child lives almost constantly with its mother who carries it with her to the places where she works.

21 Fromm, ibid., 164 and 167.

22 Bachofen, op. cit., 67 and 85.

23 Bachofen, op. cit., 66.

24 Bachofen, op. cit., 78.

25 In his ecological references, Bachofen passes directly from the "swamps" to grain agriculture (proper to the Mediterranean basin). Equipped with more extensive ethnographic information, the German-speaking anthropologist later, in the flush of the diffusionist and still evolutionist school of Father Schmidt, contrasted the growing of tubers (Knollenanbau) with the cultivation of grain (Körneranbau).

26 J. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection, Paris, Seuil, 1980, 85.

27 Vom Weibelrecht, 1856.

28 J. Kristeva (op. cit., 87), among other authors, confirms this primacy by speaking of the maternal as basis for the feminine. F. Héritier, on the other hand, emphasizes that "it is not sex but fertility that creates the real difference between masculine and feminine" (op. cit., 18).

29 "Introduction" in Bachofen, op. cit., 1938 (1980).

30 It is also clear that Bachofen was hardly interested in the writings of Marx; but we know, on the other hand, that Engels used Bachofen's theories and those of Morgan (who also postulated the priority of matriarchy in his Ancient Society, 1871). Bachofen did not know the work Primitive Marriage (1856), by his Scotch colleague McLennan, until 1859; but Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) sought proof for the priority of matriarchy in contemporary "primitive" societies. The fundamental idea of the diffusionist method, which was to be developed from Frobenius, and particularly in the Vienna School, is already present in Bachofen (Cf. F. Boas and J. Campbell in Bachofen, op. cit., 1967; M. Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; K.R. Wernhardt, "L'école d'ethnologie de Vienne et la situation actuelle de l'ethnohistoire", L'Ethnographie, n. sp. 90-91, 1983).

31 Op. cit., 1980, 52.

32 Op. cit., 63.

33 Fromm, op. cit., 127.

34 Bachofen, op. cit., 1980, 42.

35 Op. cit., 78.

36 Op. cit., 86-87.

37 For a brief analysis of the relationship between the imaginary and ideology in Yafar culture, see B. Juillerat, "Male Ideology and Cultural Fantasy in Yafar Society", in Lutkehaus et al. (eds), Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, Carolina Academic Press, in publication.

38 "Notes Toward a Theory of Ideology", L'Homme, XVIII (3-4), 1978.

39 See for example E.G. Davis (The First Sex, New York, G.P. Putnam, 1971) or, less caricatured, F. D'Eaubonne (Les femmes avant le patriarcat, Paris, Payot, 1977), who, tempering Bachofen's thesis, upholds the hypothesis of intermediate stages between matriarchy and patriarchy still discernible today (Trobriand Islands); or else E. Reed (Féminisme et anthropologie, Paris, Payot, 1979).

40 The Mothers: A Study of the Origin of Sentiments and Institutions, New York, Macmillan, 1927; (reprinted 1969).

41 See, for example, the critical approach in P. Webster, "Matriarchy: A Vision of Power", in R.R. Reiter (ed), Toward an Anthropology of Women, N.Y., London, Monthly Review Press, 1975; C. Kirsch, op. cit.; B. Arcand, "Essai sur l'origine de l'inégalité entre les sexes", Anthropologie et Sociétés I (3), 1977; and J. Bamberger, op. cit., who comments on the influence of Bachofen on "anthropological" feminism.

42 R.A. Paul, "Did the Primal Crime Take Place?", Ethos, 4, 1976.

43 La violence et le sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972.

44 P. Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations. Essais d'herméneutique. Paris, Seuil, 1969, 321.

45 Op. cit., 118.

46 A. Green, "Le mythe: un object transitionnel collectif. Abord critique et perspectives psychanalytiques", Le Temps de la Réflexion, 1, 1980.