Women, Religion, and Archaic Civilizations: An Introduction

Author(s): Rayna Rapp

Source: Feminist Studies , Oct., 1978, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Oct., 1978), pp. iv+1-6
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3177534

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 WOMEN, RELIGION,
AND ARCHAIC CIVILIZATIONS:
AN INTRODUCTION

RAYNA RAPP

Feminist Studies is pleased to present three articles concerning

the problematic relation between the rise of civilizations and the
status of women. Although much of nineteenth-century socia
theory (most notably, Engels's famous The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State) considered how the rise of civili-
zation affected kinship and male-female relations, modern aca-
demic investigators have shied away from the issue until recentl
Much work on this question, rephrased in contemporary terms,
remains to be done.
Anne Barstow's article presents an examination and interpreta-
tion of the work of one archaeologist whose findings call into
question the presumed chronology and meaning of both early
urbanism, and the religious forms associated with it. In interpret-
ing James Mellaart's work at Catal Huyuik on the Anatolian Pla-
teau, Barstow shows us a very early urban culture which appears
to have venerated women's activities, especially their procreative
ones. Mellaart's interpretation of the culture of Catal Hiuyuik does
not conform to the deeply entrenched Western tradition of associ-
ating women with nature, and then denigrating both as realms
which must be controlled. The examination of the relation be-
tween perceptions of nature and of women is central to contem-
porary feminist theory.2 Barstow summarizes the evidence avail-
able to Mellaart in the form of agricultural sites, household spaces,
shrines, burials, and artistic work, evidence which suggests that
women at (atal Hiiyiik held power, and were not suppressed in
this goddess-worshiping urban culture. In assessing the meanings
of fatal Hiuyuik's data, Barstow shows that archaeological evidence
can stimulate a revision of our understanding of women's power
expresed through religion in prehistory.
While Barstow focuses on the positive aspects of neolithic reli-
gion for women, Sherry Ortner suggests the ways in which later

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 w - ·11

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Barbara Morgan, Ikons in Time-Stream, photomontage, 1965. The goddess figure is

Ishtar, the building the Empire State.

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2 Rayna Rapp

archaic state religions may have acted on women. She presents us

with a classic anthropological puzzle: why do so many societies
require virginity, purity, and the sexual control of women? Draw-
ing on extensive evidence in the classic civilizations of both the
Old World and the New, she proposes a solution: creation of codes
of female purity is associated with the rise of state-organized soci-
eties in which social relations in four areas-labor, religion, family
forms, and marriage patterns-are becoming increasingly stratified.
Ortner discusses each of the four; and marriage patterns form an
especially intriguing aspect of her argument. She sees an associa-
tion between female hypergamy (women marrying men with high-
er status than those men in the families from which they come)
and general social stratification. The tensions and contradictions
associated with ranked status and mobility come to be represented
religiously in women's purity and mobility through marriage alli-
ances that potentially link them to an elite group. As part of the
same complex process of stratification, Ortner posits a transition
in the meaning assigned to female sexuality. Virginity and purity
become the idioms in which changing relations between men and
men, as well as between men and women, come to be expressed.
Irene Silverblatt's case history of the rise of Inca civilization in
pre-Columbian Peru also shows how cosmological relations both
express and deeply affect gender relations. She focuses on kin-
ship, productive relations, and the political-religious hierarchy to
show the ways in which gender-linked activities and cosmologies
were reorganized as the Inca empire expanded. The state used
indigenous religious symbolic systems to redefine relations be-
tween conquered and conquering groups. Male symbolism was
identified with Inca conquerors, while female symbols came to
represent conquered communities. A complex religious and polit-
ical hierarchy manipulated such symbolic relations in order to ex-
tract tribute and labor services. It also manipulated marriage codes
in ways that illustrate Ortner's discussion of hypergamy. The Incas
created an elite group of women who were drawn from conquered
communities. They were sent in service to the state, and given as
brides to noblemen. While individual women gained wealth and
status through their association with the conquerors, they no long-
er had any autonomy with regard to marriage alliances. Their
home communities, which rendered women as part of their tribute
to the Incas also ceased to have autonomy. Ambiguities already
available in kinship relations and religious symbols were used to
express the transformation of both class and gender relations.
All three articles focus on the problematics of religion and
cosmology as they both affect and express relations among women,

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 Women, Religion, and Archaic Civilizations 3

men, and nascent state structures. The centrality of religious sys-

tems as vehicles for expressing these relations is worth underlin-
ing: such cultural codes provided the idioms which legitimated
social relations in archaic societies.3 The codes were used (as the
Inca case illustrates) to underwrite and justify changes in political
hierarchy. Cosmologies exhibit signs of ideological warfare on the
battleground between local and elite groups, between producers
and extractors, and between men and women. The intertwined
nature of these emerging hierarchies linking gender and class are
crucial to our understanding of how women's inferiority was ex-
pressed and legitimated.
The postulated link between the rise of gender hierarchy and
class hierarchy is, of course, a classic one. It is the central focus
of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State, which maps the territory in which many feminist anthro-
pologists, historians, and economists are now implicitly or explic-
itly working.4 Engels speculated that the growth of private pro-
ductive property was linked to the dismantling of a communal
kinship base in prestate societies. In that process, marriage grew
more restrictive, legitimation of heirs more important, and wives
became means of reproduction to their husbands. As kinship was
curtailed as an organizational base, and class stratification grew,
the patriarchal family emerged. For Engels, restrictions on wom-
en's autonomy were a necessity of class society.
Engels was working with a paucity of ethnological, archaeolog-
ical, and historical materials. He lacked data on primary or pristine
state formation and knew only minimally of highly stratified pre-
state societies.5 We now, however, have access to a great deal of
modern information with which to examine his theory. Twentieth-
century archaeologists and social theorists provide us with copious
material to which we can, in principle, turn. Yet when we do, we
discover that our questions are certainly not theirs. We face a
double bias in their work which affects our access to information
needed to examine archaic state formation from a feminist perspec-
tive. Their first bias lies in their general search for evolutionary
"prime movers": they want to explain complex histories in terms
of "scientific" unilinear variables. They therefore tend to propose
variables which are technological, or ecological but often scant in
social contexts and consciousness. Measuring population pressure,
or abundance and control of water resources, for example, makes
for simple generalization from complex histories. The reduction
to such variables, however, already presumes the efficiency and
success of the state as a mechanism for solving inevitable environ-
mental problems. In the process, a careful examination of the less

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4 Rayna Rapp

measurable social contexts out of which archaic political relations

developed is often missing. The search for scientific models of
evolutionary success which downgrades the histories of political
relations often leads to a second bias: the role of kinship in state
formation is ignored or underplayed. But political structures in
the primitive world both arise from and encounter resistance with-
in the kinship base that organizes prestate societies. Notably, it is
within the kinship domain that women's subordination deepens.
Kinship barely exists in prime mover theories, except as a back-
drop to the progress of the growing state. Yet the dialectic of
kinship and state is crucial. Kinship structures were the great
losers in the processes which formed civilizations; and they must
be examined in relation to the great winners-political elites-if
we are to understand both incipient class formation and the chang-
ing domains of women. With the rise of state structures, kin-based
forms of organization were curtailed, sapped of their legitimacy
and autonomy in favor of the evolving sphere of territorial and
class-specific politics. Yet emergent elites needed access to the
primary resources of kin-based groups, especially to their labor.
Formerly autonomous kinship domains had to be domesticated
to the increased institutional demands of production and distri-
bution. What was once the realm of total social reproduction got
stripped and transformed to underwrite the existence of more
powerful, politicized domains. In the process, not only kinship,
but women lost out.6 Patriarchy has a history; it can be examined
as we dissect these processes.
One of the aspects of this process is the increasing politicization
of kinship. This is illustrated in Silverblatt's case history of the
Incas, and it is evident in materials on proto-states researched in
Polynesia and Africa.7 Another focus important to an investiga-
tion of women and the state is the one stressed by all three authors
in this issue of Feminist Studies: the use of religious and cosmo-
logical systems to make statements concerning gender and class
stratification. Feminists working on classical societies (notably,
Greece and early Rome) have also given us revised information
about women's power and powerlessness as it is expressed in reli-
gion.8 Other themes that would bear investigation for a revised
feminist perspective on state-origins include the roles of intensi-
fied warfare and of extensive trade. In both, we know that extrac-
tion of surpluses accompanied hierarchical organization.9 We need
to know whether women's public activities increased, decreased,
or were in any way transformed. It is only once we have thorough-
ly investigated the activities and ideologies associated with women

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 Women, Religion, and Archaic Civilizations 5

in early states that we can begin to write a true history of the inter-
twined nature of class and gender dominance.
Feminist Studies offers these three articles as a contribution to
that task. We believe that the questions they raise about women
and civilizational processes deserve our serious attention. The use
of kinship, cosmology, and culture to mediate contradictions of
gender and class needs unmasking. These issues are more than
academic: state-making is a process which has a history and a
present. As feminists working with a vision of a world without
hierarchies, we need to consider where the state stands (or falls)
in our struggles to shape the future.

NOTES

1For an overview of nineteenth-century social theory as it relates to this question, see

Elizabeth Fee, "The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology," Feminist Studie
1 (Winter-Spring 1973): 23-39. See also Susan Carol Rogers, "Woman's Place: A Crit
Review of Anthropological Theory," Comp. Studies in Society and History 20 (January
1978): 123-162.
2The classic source is Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, trans. and
ed. (England: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1953). The subject is central to the analysis of Shu-
lamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1970) and
Sherry Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Feminist Studies 1 (Fall
1972): 5-32 and reprinted in Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman,
Culture and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
3The significance of cosmologies for archaic civilizations is discussed in Robert Mc.
Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society (Chicago: Aldine, 1966); in Gordon Wiley,
"The Early Great Styles and the Rise of Pre-Columbian Civilizations," American Anthro-
pologist 64 (1962); in G. Wiley and D. Shimkin, "The Collpase of the Classic Maya Civil-
ization in the Southern Lowlands," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27 (1971);
and in Mircea Eliade, "Structures and Changes in the History of Religions," in Kraeling
and Adams, eds., City Invincible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).
4What follows is an abridged version of an earlier paper, Rayna Rapp, "Gender and
Class: An Archaeology of Knowledge Concerning the Origin of the State," Dialectical
Anthropology 2 (December, 1977): 309-316. An overview of Engels's own position is
provided by Eleanor Leacock, "Introduction," in Frederick Engels, The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972):
7-68.
5Anthropologists have developed a battery of words with which to identify the
ambiguous area in which kinship-based societies are turning into class-stratified ones.
Primary or pristine states refer to those ancient civilizations which have indigenously
developed full-blown states such as Mesopotamia, the Aztecs, or the Incas. Archaic
states or civilizations include pristine states plus others which are thought to have
developed in interaction with them, for example, Egypt or India. Highly stratified
prestate societies are those in which kinship relations are contradictorily being trans-
formed into relations of domination, as in the chiefdoms of parts of Africa or Polynesia.
Proto-state is a label applied to a society in which the balance of social relations appears

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6 Rayna Rapp

to be tipping from kinship into class (e.g., Dahomey or Hawaii) at the period in which
a highly politicized public domain is emerging. I want to stress that these concepts are
used to organize our understandings of social relations which are inherently unstable
and contradictory; they do not describe a frozen or fixed reality.
6Rayna Rapp, "Gender and Class," p. 310.
7For Polynesian examples see Christine Gailey, "State and Kinship in Tonga," Dia-
lectical Anthropology 3 (1978), forthcoming; and Elman R Service, Origins of the
State and Civilization: the Process of Cultural Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1975), chapter 9. For African examples, see Karen Sacks, "Engels Revisited:
Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property," in Michelle Z. Rosaldo
and Louise Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society; Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna
G. Bay, eds., Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1976); Audrey Wipper, ed., "Rural Women: Development
or Underdevelopment?" Rural Africana 29 (Winter 1975-76); and Elman R. Service,
Origin of the State, chapters 5, 6, & 7.
8For feminist scholarship on classical and early Christian religion, see Marilyn Arthur,
"Liberated Women: the Classical Era," in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds.,
Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1976);
Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (New York: Schocken Books,
1974); and Elaine Pagels, "What Became of God the Mother? Conflicting Images of
God in Early Christianity," Signs 2 (Winter 1976): 293-303.
9The importance of warfare in state-formation is discussed by Mc.Adams, The Evo-
lution of Urban Society; Wiley and Shimkin, "The Collapse of the Classic Maya Civil-
ization"; and Julian Steward, The Theory of Culture Change (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1955). The relation between extensive warfare and women's status is
a complex issue which is rather sloppily presented in Marvin Harris and William
Divale, "Population, Warfare and the Male Supremacist Complex," American Anthro-
pologist 78 (September 1976): 521-38. I have been unable to locate information on
women in pristine state formations; but for the impact of warfare on the status of
women in Sparta, Athens, and Rome, see Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and
Slaves; for Medieval Europe, see JoAnn McNamara and Suzanne Wemple, "The Power
of Women through the Family in Medieval Europe: 500-1100," Feminist Studies 1
(Winter-Spring 1973): 126-41; and Viana Muller, "The Formation of the State and
the Oppression of Women: A Case Study in England and Wales," Radical Review of
Political Economy 9 (Fall 1977): 7-21. Trade is another process implicated in analy-
ses of state formation, e.g., Robert Mc.Adams, "Anthropological Perspectives on
Ancient Trade," Current Anthropology 15 (September 1974): 239-58; Gordon
Wiley, "Precolumbian Urbanism" and "Commentary on the Emergence of Civiliza-
tion in the Maya Lowlands," both in Jeremy Sabloff and C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky,
eds., The Rise and Fall of Civilizations (Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings, 1974), Part
II; and Philip Kohl, "The Archaeology of Trade," Dialectical Anthropology 1 (Novem-
ber 1975): 43-50. Women's participation in it is mentioned in Mc.Adams, The Evo-
lution of Urban Society and in Ruby Rohrlich-Leavitt, "Women in Transition: Crete
and Sumer," in Bridenthal and Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible, pp. 36-59. For a
modern discussion of the roles of women in trade, see Sidney Mintz, "Men, Women,
and Trade," Comparative Studies in Society & History 12 (July 1971): 247-69.

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