|
 |
|
|||
|
|
|
|
||
 |
|
||||
|
|||||
|
The URL of this article is: www.rootsie.com/articles/2005/3004.html |
|
||||
|
|
||||
Blood StoryPages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture by Chris Knight A Review by Rootsie April 30, 2005 "The constructs of the natural sciences arise out of humanity's growing power to harness the forces of the world around us. Astronomy made possible the earliest calendars, predictions of eclipses, accurate marine navigation and so on...The modern sciences of physics, chemistry, information technology and the natural sciences in general have today given us collectively an immense power to harness natural forces of all kinds...Is science in one respect, as Knight suggests, a story which gives power to the many? We in the West are under the sway of Enlightenment-era beliefs about the absolute authority of 'science.' Here it is essential to recall that a most pervasive feature of 18th-20th century European and American science across its entire range, from philology, to archaeology, to psychology, to anthropology, 'natural philosophy', and the many branches of biology, was its virulent racism, its vigorous attempts to prove beyond refutation the beauty and superiority of white skin, and perhaps even more deeply, of maleness. G.Herve, a colleague of Paul Broca (founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris) in 1881 gave this piece of evidence to prove the inferiority of blacks: "Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women." (Gould, 103) Craniometry, the measuring of skulls and the weighing of brains, was the principal statistical method employed in 19th century biological science. It almost goes without saying that white males have appropriated the right to tell the human story. From 1650 or so well into the twentieth century, white male supremacy has been the guiding myth of the West, masquerading as science. The material power it bestowed to a privileged few is undeniable, and to this day its power is not yet broken, though it is being bit-by-bit inexorably chipped away. Knight insists that we have not seen the last of the culture-creating and culture-sustaining aspects of our ancestors' 'science.' "The most basic teaching of dialectical materialism is that evolutionary time is not linear but curved, like Einstein's space, and that its curves form spiral-like patterns, each return to the point of origin being in fact not a simple return but a 'return on a higher plane.' We have been here, on this point on the spiral-before. The revolution's outcome is not simply 'in the future' conceived as something abstracted from the past. As we fight to become free, it is as if we were becoming human for the first time in our lives. But in this sense, because it concerns becoming human, the birth process we have got to win-our survival depends on it-has in the deepest sense been won already. None of us would be here had it not been." (533)Knight's counter-narrative in Blood Relations concerns itself with the monolithic European construct of gender. He describes "the origin myth of Western capitalism" (52) as the general anthropological conclusion that "...females are and always have been passive sexual valuables to be fought over, renounced, exchanged or otherwise manipulated by dominant males...Male dominance is said to have preceded the establishment of human society, and to have continued unbroken and unchallenged throughout humanity's origins and subsequent development...the status of the male is measured by his control over females." (55)Knight argues to the contrary that distinctively human culture (language, symbol and ritual, hearth and home, the ability to flourish in resource-scarce environments) could not possibly have arisen had humans not found a way to move beyond the sort of social organization we see in lower primates, so marked by male/female tension, but has its origins in an amazingly widespread "revolution," conceived and executed by females. "'Primate dominance' is, from this perspective, the antithesis of culture. It is the pseudo-law, the pseudo-order of alliances in the service of purely sectional interests-the patterned, structured outcome of self-seeking interaction based on inducement, threat, and fear. Such a situation leads each individual to look to itself, to use its intelligence only in the most Machiavellian of ways to attempt to bend others to its sectional interests (interpretable ultimately as those of its genes) and to display ultimate indifference to the fate of the wider community of which it is a part. There is no way that this could have led to culture-except along the road of revolutionary, point-by-point negation and overthrow of its logic" (298 )In spite of the exhaustive evidence Knight presents to defend his thesis, I have come to realize that it is not particularly important to me whether the narrative he has woven is in all respects 'true': others have obviously taken the same evidence to draw radically different conclusions. What matters is that there are increasing millions of us on this planet who yearn for a story that will take us forward into a more humane, less destructive dispensation. The value of Knight's work may lie more in his methodical deconstruction of white male assumption, which many of us view with nothing short of terror for the future of the planet itself. We love stories like his because we love humanity, and because we resist the pessimistic, even nihilistic view of human nature that tells our children they are hopelessly violent, competitive creatures who will never find a way to conquer their brute impulses. I like to believe that the first time a group of us did better is proof enough that we all can. And must. As much as any material artifact, the stories which have been handed down over the tens of thousands of years of our human history tell us who we have been and how we came to be as we are. Sociobiologists like to look to primate behavior for human cultural roots. Knight discusses the problem with this view, for if nothing else, it is clear that the antagonistic sexual politics of apes goes far to prevent the solidarity that would have had to exist in order for human culture to evolve. Males maximize their reproductive fitness by impregnating as many females as possible (vi). Primate males are in constant, and often violent, competition with each other for the right to inseminate. There is not a single instance in monkey or ape society in which males reliably bring food to their offspring. It must be the complexity of social life that created the selection pressure for larger brains, and the metabolic needs of bigger brains are such that infants need close care and high-level nutrition. This translates into relatively sedentary groups of women and children, i.e. hearth and home. Knight suggests that it is this imperative that gave rise to the hunt for meat by groups of males. But what would compel males who were in constant competition for sexual access to females to leave them for days at a time to go out on a hunt? It is quite common for primate males to murder offspring in order to increase their access to females. Females, as the caregivers of children, would obviously have to be the agents of such a revolutionary change in priorities. Continue... Pages: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4  
|
|
||||
|
|
||||
|
|||||
