The lost Eden of primitive societies? Perhaps not
The lost Eden of primitive societies? Perhaps not
Nonsense about the "modern" nuclear family continues to be churned out
One never ceases to marvel at the ingenuity with which those intent on destroying western family norms find material to justify their positions.
The Times of London (£) reports:
Parenting tips gleaned from hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa may be the key to bringing up more contented children in Britain, researchers from Cambridge University have suggested.
The idea is based on studies of communities such as the Kung of Botswana, where each child is cared for by many adults in an arrangement known as alloparenting…According to Nikhil Chaudhary, an evolutionary anthropologist at Cambridge, research already hints that these practices lead to less anxiety for children and the adults who care for them…
In a paper published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, the researchers said that the western nuclear family was a recent invention that broke with evolutionary history and that this abrupt change was likely to have been harmful.
They say that an unhelpful “intensive mothering narrative” has taken root, which suggests that mothers should use their maternal instincts to manage childcare alone. “Such narratives can lead to maternal exhaustion and have dangerous consequences,” they write.
By contrast, in hunter-gatherer societies alloparents can provide almost half of a child’s care. One previous study looked at the Efé people of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It found that infants had an average of 14 alloparents a day by the time they were 18 weeks old, and were passed between caregivers eight times an hour.
Ah, the lost Eden of primitive societies! Or perhaps not.
An article by John Horgan in Scientific American in 2010 discussed a book by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Horgan wrote:
The key to our humanity, Hrdy contended, was the emergence of group child-rearing — also called co-operative breeding, or “allocare"— some two million years ago. This remained the pattern in hunter-gatherer societies like the African !Kung, Hadza and Aka. Morgan continued:
Mothers in these societies get lots of help from other females, including grandmas, sisters and friends, who may even breast-feed an unrelated child. Dads and other males often hold, feed and play with children, too, which ape males never do.
There is a dark underside to all this group nurturing. A human mother's care for her infant is more contingent on circumstance than the care of ape moms. If a hunter–gatherer mother feels she's not getting enough support from others, she may abandon or kill her newborn. Natural selection thus favored babies who excel at "mind-reading"; they can intuit and manipulate the emotions of their mothers and other potential caregivers, to ensure that they get the care they need to survive. Empathetic kids become empathetic adults. In this way cooperative breeding promoted the emergence of our extraordinary “hypersocial” intelligence.
Good news from the hunter-gatherers for our “hypersocial intelligent” society, then. Less good news for their children.
While it is true that parents and children often benefit from close connections with their extended families, it is simply untrue that the “nuclear” family composed of a mother and father bringing up their children together is a modern invention. Nor is it true that it was a formula for immiserating mothers and children.
As Kay Hymowitz wrote for the Institute for Family Studies, referring to a book by the sociologist Brigitte Berger The Family in the Modern Age:
Not so long ago, family scholars laboured under the assumption, half-Marxist, half-“functionalist,” that before the Industrial Revolution, the extended family was the norm in the western world. There was more than a little romanticism associated with this view: extended families were imagined to have lived in warm, cohesive rural communities where men and women worked together on farms or in small cottage industries. That way of life, went the thinking, ended when industrialisation wrenched rural folk away from their cottages and villages into the teeming, anonymous city, sent men into the factories, and consigned women to domestic drudgery. Worse, by upending the household economy, the Industrial Revolution seriously weakened the family. The nuclear family, it was believed, was evidence of family decline.
But by the second half of the twentieth century, one by one these assumptions were overturned. First to go was the alleged prevalence of the extended family. Combing through English parish records and other demographic sources, historians like Peter Laslett and Alan MacFarlane discovered that the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.
Rather than remaining in or marrying into the family home, as was the case in Southern Europe and many parts of Asia and the Middle East, young couples in England were expected to establish their own household. That meant that men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity.
Far from being weaker than an extended family clan, Berger shows, the ordinary nuclear family was able to adapt superbly to changing economic and political realities. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving.
In my 1999 book The Sex-Change Society: Feminised Britain and the Neutered Male (now sadly out of print) I discussed the way feminists of the time mythologised the supposed lost paradise of primitive societies in order to write men out of the family script. I wrote:
In their assault on the sexual division of labour, feminists have held out these societies as an ideal of male behaviour. Adrienne Burgess, for example, has celebrated the male Aka pygmies of the African Congo as the “stars of paternal involvement” who do ‘more infant caregiving than fathers in any other known society’. This paradigm of gender symmetry has produced one of the most backward societies on the globe. The male of the Aka tribe is nevertheless to be hailed, apparently, as a shining example of the New Man.
In fact, the study of the Aka pygmies made clear that the mothers were still the principal infant caretakers. In the forest, where men’s and women’s subsistence activities overlapped, the fathers didn’t help with the infants, and despite taking part in the tribe net hunt the mothers remained the main infant caretakers there. Even when the fathers were near their infants in the forest, where they were more available than in the camp, they didn’t hold their infants any more often, and when they went searching for palm wine they became even less available…
Undaunted, however, Burgess also hailed the “paternal enthusiasms” of the Trobriand Islanders, observed by Malinowski in 1927, and the Arapesh tribe, observed by Margaret Mead, where fathers were “intensely involved throughout pregnancy” and where the minute by minute care of little children was as congenial to men as to women. In addition, wrote Burgess, the Manus tribe had inspired Mead “to question Western assumptions about biological programming in parental behaviour”. Manus women had low status; boys and girls were encouraged to identify with their fathers; and the little boys played with baby dolls Mead offered the children. Burgess concluded that “the message from the ‘natural world’ is that anything is possible”.
In fact, neither the Manus nor the Arapesh could be described as a conspicuous advertisement for parental care, nor indeed for a happy and successful adult life. According to Mead, the Manus devalued not just women but sex, which was perceived as a form of excreting. The birth rate was correspondingly very low. Boys remained attached to their fathers but after a few years fathers returned girls to their mothers with whom identification was never as happy. The women didn’t enjoy being women, maybe because they had been looked after by their fathers rather than their mothers, and their lack of self-worth was not unconnected with the fact that they were despised by men…
For the last fifty years, these ethnographers’ accounts have been misinterpreted and wrenched out of context in the attempt by others to prove that patriarchy was not only not universal but that where it didn’t exist the people lived blissful lives of sexual freedom and interchangeable family roles…Yet those who leapt upon these accounts to further their ideological crusade against the traditional family failed to report the downside to these societies, or to relate their behaviour to a particular cultural context which made comparison with western society utterly inappropriate and misleading. They failed to note, for example, that in some Pacific islands the problem of illegitimate children was solved by infanticide…
What these studies also actually showed was that in the absence of patriarchy, these tiny societies tended to dwindle and collapse. As George Gilder pointed out, the Arapesh children died for lack of food. The Tchambuli men, abused by women from birth, spent their lives in a futile pursuit of masculinity, with fearful and ineffectual males devoted to various masculine displays. Groups of aggressive and competitive women who were uninterested in motherhood produced ruthless men and a disintegrating society. Men preoccupied with child-rearing became incapable of effective sexual behaviour and were paranoid about aggressive women. Far from pointing the way to an androgynous nirvana, these studies were object lessons in the absolute necessity of patriarchal norms...
The distortion of anthropology was nothing new. Indeed, that was precisely how Engels had constructed his theory of patriarchal oppression, the inspiration of modern feminism. Malinowski had previously described how false views of “mother-right” and the importance of the clan had been used to misrepresent the facts of human sexual organisation and undermine the traditional family. Savages, he wrote, had been used as “pawns and props” to paint a false picture.
The truth was that both primitive and developed societies showed the same features; mothers tied by physiological bonds to their children, fathers watching over their safety and guiding them through life. Even in matrilineal societies where fathers were mainly absent, they still had to marry if their children were to enjoy full legal status, they remained the guardians of the family in certain matters, still performed economic duties and acted as representatives of their wives on many occasions.
And as the latest Cambridge study shows us, this nonsensical mythologising of anthropology still continues.
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