Karen,
<<<<
Keith, when you refer to "hunters and gatherers" are you not
usually commenting on ancient tribal survival behavior? Ed seems to be
commenting on current behavior in the present tense. Are today's
population of First Nation peoples concerned about dwindling
numbers? Anxiety about mixed breeding? Is there a baby boom?
Anyone know? -- KWC
>>>>
I know very little in detail about First Nation peoples, apart from what
I have read about them in general concerning hunter-gatherers,
hoe-agriculturalists, etc.
But there's one very interesting aspect which is coming to the fore in
this country -- and almost certainly in America, too, though I haven't
seen it commented on so far. This harks right back to original
hunter-gatherer mores.
All primate species are unilocal -- that is, at puberty, one sex or the
other leaves the parent group/tribe and goes elsewhere. Baboons are
matrilocal. In the case of baboons, for example, the young males leave
and attempt to join other groups. (In Sapolsky's "A Primate's
Memoir" there's an amusing story of an incident where the eldest
female in the group calmly, though temporarily, took over the reins from
the alpha male because of this. The male had recently arrived in the
group and after much fighting and so forth established himself as the top
male. One day, he was leading the group on a foraging expedition.
Suddenly found himself totally alone. The eldest female, who was
following closely behind him, decided that he was leading them into
unpromising territory foodwise ('cos he didn't know the area as well as
she) and went off in a different direction -- whereupon the rest of the
group followed her! When the alpha male realised he was on his ownio, he
threw a tantrum (as observed by Sapolsky), sought out the group in due
course and then quietly inserted himself again as though nothing untoward
had happened and that this was the place he was going to bring them to
anyway!
In the case of the human species, we are patrilocal -- that is, in
hunter-gatherer times, it is almost invariably the boys who stay in the
group and the pubertic girls who leave. They are either stolen by a
neighbouring group, or they are exchanged between groups, or they are
traded for other goods, or sometimes, as in the nomadic tribes of north
Africa, there are grand ceremonies where several groups meet together
once a year. All the young men put on make-up, dress in fancy clothes and
prance about while the girls look on and decide which male they fancy.
Gradually, after much discussion between themselves (during which they
establish their own rank order as regards being beautiful and
well-dressed) they allocate the young men to themselves on a one-to-one
basis, and then each goes off to her choice's group.
Because of the succession of innovation and narrow-focus enterprise that
characterised the industrial revolution, it was not surprising that the
developed countries became strongly male-dominated, and this cultural
variation overlay the deeper instincts for a while (for 200-300 years, in
fact!). But, more recently, since the job structure has been changing to
services and managerial-type jobs then girls are once again becoming more
mobile. In England, they are doing far better than boys at school at many
subjects so that they can get away from their area in order to go to
university in other cities. They dominate the night clubs. They back-pack
around the world more than boys -- despite their apparent vulnerability.
They are, well, simply more enterprising than boys these days.
Women are not getting to the very top slots in business or in politics as
often as they might be expected to because the sort of aggressive rank
ordering that goes on there is not the female forte, but they are quietly
establishing powerful influence in secondary, less public roles. I would
say that they are beginning to dominate the direction of the overall
culture. The ratio of female/male magazines is something like 20/1 and
girls are now even entering scientific disciplines such as astronomy,
physics, engineering and mathematics which were more strictly male than
most others in recent times. As in Tudor times, females once again
possess most of the wealth of the country.
Smooth progress in females' careers are compromised by their maternal
instincts and this is why males will still be able to earn higher incomes
than females for some long time to come. What fascinates me is this: in
all developed countries the fertility rate is dropping fast and I think
this is because females want to get out of their homes during the day
where they are largely isolated and bored. They are tending to have one
child and no more -- which, of course, will start to cause a population
collapse in the developed countries within a decade or two. Increasingly,
there will be the burden of larger numbers of old people. How are the
daughters going to react to this when the burden become overwhelming? And
what are they going to think about their own old age -- with maybe only
one child who might be of help to them? I think that the
replacement rate of 2.2 children per family will be restored in due
course because the maternal instinct is too strong, but it will only come
when there are profound changes in the work-life balance, the structure
of jobs, the actual location of jobs, and so forth. I cannot begin to
think how this will happen, but I think the reaction to the present
trends of community and family destruction will be powerful in due
course.
Keith
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
