The Myth of Universal Patriarchy: A Critical Response to Cynthia Eller's Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory (original) (raw)
Related papers
Brent Davis & Robert Laffineur (επιμ.), Νεώτερος: studies in Bronze Age Aegean art and archaeology in honor of professor John G. Younger on the occasion of his retirement, Annales d’archéologie liégeoises et PASPiennes (Aegaeum 44), Leuven & Liège: Peeters, 2020, 67-80.
✽ […] the figurines are a part of Neolithic material that causes me a strange pleasure. A malicious pleasure, because I am certain that they will never reveal to us their secrets and that there will always be many unanswered questions about this secret. This, of course, is the allure of the archaeological material: that it always remains a provocative enigma […] Certainly, nobody prevents us from proposing solutions, attempting interpretations which all together, whether they are correct or not, ultimately make up the history of archaeological thought. 1
This article surveys literature on history, archaeology, and ethnography, from Lafitau, Morgan, Marx and Engels to Matilda Joslyn Gage and Barbara Mann, Bachofen to Jacquetta Hawkes. It also proposes that patriarchy is a historical development, questions functionalist interpretations of myths (or oral histories) of male takeovers. It looks at the furor over the work of Marija Gimbutas, Eller's charges of "essentialism" and "goddess monotheism," and theories about whether patriarchal social organization originated among foragers or agriculturalists. All the heated rhetoric about "matriarchy" avoids the real issue, which is the existence of cultures that did not enforce a patriarchal double standard or make females legal minors ruled by fathers, brothers, and husbands. Matricultures still exist today in some parts of the world, albeit under threat as all Indigenous cultures are. Whatever terminology we choose to use for them is not the point; it is that they existed and have existed in the past.
Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni, 2023
From the 1970s to the 1990s, archaeologist Marija Gimbutas developed the “Goddess Theory,” focusing on a divine female figure worshipped in “Old Europe” and displaced by Metal Ages’ patriarchal warrior cultures. Influenced by Joseph Campbell’s views on the contrast between Neolithic “mystical-emotional religion” of a Great Mother Earth and Iron Age patriarchal religions of groups like the Indo-Ary- ans and Semites, Gimbutas crafted an archaeological narrative of these supposed Neolithic beliefs. Her theory significantly influenced the second wave of feminism in North America and Europe during the 1970s and 1980s. However, Jo Ann Hackett observed that postwar feminists adopted not ancient “religions” but “modern West- ern scholars’ fantasies.” Hence, the article explores how the Eranos circle’s propa- gation of Great Mother theories from 1933 to 1948 influenced Gimbutas’s research, and how these scholars helped forge new mythologies. These mythologies, influenced by Jungian psychology, were projected onto archaeological data, thereby altering its interpretation up until the late twentieth century.
Archaeology, 1992
Fads and fancies come and go not only among the general public but within the academic community as well. One of the latest of these popular with some feminist scholars and New Age groupies, is the cult of the Mother Goddess. Marija Gimbutas of the University of California at Los Angeles is a principal advocate for this cult, having worked at Neolithic and Bronze Age sites in central Europe for decades. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41766076
Goddesses, Gimbutas and archaeology 'New Age'
Antiquity, 1995
For a century a notion of a prehistoric Mother Goddess has infused some perceptions of ancient Europe, whatever the realities of developing archaeological knowledge. With the reverent respect now being given to Marija Gimbutas, and her special vision of a perfect matriarchy in Old Europe, a daughter-goddess is now being made, bearer of a holy spirit in our own time, to be set alongside the wise mother of old.