Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (18 page)

Kristen Hawkes, another well-respected Hadza researcher, has argued that men hunt only to show off, gain status, and improve future mating opportunities. She has long held that grandmothers matter overwhelmingly in provisioning young children, while fathers matter little. I think this is an unnecessary forced choice. Hawkes is probably right to think that menopause evolved, prolonging women’s lives well beyond reproduction, in part to supply grandmothers. And as anthropologist Ruth Mace argued in 2013, it also reduces competition between generations of women for men.
But even among the Hadza, fathers and stepfathers complement grandmothers in caring for the young, while among the !Kung it is impossible to specify which relatives the flow of calories to children is mainly coming from, because so many contribute.

The important point, first made by anthropologist Jane Lancaster over three decades ago, is that among higher primates, only humans have such extensive provisioning of the young, before and after weaning, by individuals other than the mother; the result is earlier weaning and greater survival afterward. Fathers, grandmothers, and other caregivers also provision the mother herself when she is pregnant or lactating. Sarah Hrdy’s 2009 book,
Mothers and Others,
showed decisively that we are what biologists call cooperative breeders, and our great success compared to other apes is due largely to others helping mothers. This analysis has been further confirmed in the past few years by Karen Kramer, Nancy Howell, and other scientists.

But we need to look directly at the lives of women in hunter-gatherer societies. The one I know best is that of the !Kung San, or Ju/’hoansi, of northwestern Botswana and nearby Namibia. (They are commonly called Bushmen, which is sometimes considered derogatory.) My late wife, Marjorie Shostak, and I spent a total of two years there in 1969–71 and 1975. We were two among many anthropologists who have visited and studied these patient, resilient, and good-humored people from 1950 through the present, although they are now no longer hunting and gathering. I have followed this research closely, and in 2005—almost a decade after Marjorie’s untimely death—I briefly visited our old friends in Botswana with two of our grown children, a moving and eye-opening experience.

Marjorie studied women through life-history interviews, on our field trips together and on a third she made in 1989. She wrote a classic book called
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman
and a follow-up,
Return to Nisa,
published after her death
.
My own work on infancy involved me with mothers and fathers, and of course we both absorbed much about gender roles from living among the
!Kung. I have already said that there is no single model for our evolutionary past; there are many. The !Kung provide one. They represent hunter-gatherers in some important ways, but not in all.

We were quickly initiated on the day we arrived, in August 1969. A group of women sat in a circle in a village, talking in animated tones when a physical fight broke out between two of them—surprising to us, since the people were known for being peaceable. We later found out that they had been discussing an accusation of adultery in a young couple with a stormy relationship; since there were as yet no children, the husband and wife might divorce. As usual with marital crises in this tightly knit community, this one was everybody’s business.

But the fight was not about them. It had been triggered by a woman mentioning another episode of alleged adultery many years earlier. The two (now middle-aged) rivals in that old dispute were present in the group that day, and the knockdown, roll-in-the-sand wrestling match was between them. Other women soon pulled them apart.

This event revealed much about the people’s lives. First, there was no privacy to speak of. They lived in bands fluctuating from fifteen to forty or so, depending on seasonal food and water as well as on relationships. Bands split when talking could not resolve a conflict, but they might reunite in a few months. Band membership was through kinship, although there were no strict rules, so two random members might not be related at all; you might be, say, my daughter’s husband’s sister’s husband’s mother.

After learning enough of the language, we moved into a grass hut in a village for several months, until it was clear we were more welcome at a distance. But those months were tremendously instructive. Many if not most nights, people collected around a fire in front of one of the huts and talked, sometimes for hours. Women had infants asleep on their hips or nursing; small children often slept across a parent’s lap. There might be three or five or eight adults speaking; participation was optional. Voices were active, sometimes argumentative,
sometimes lyrical, and they were usually in both male and female registers.

They might be talking about a sighting of migratory antelope tracks by a man or woman that day, and whether they should move the village to follow them. Or about how much water had been left standing in a certain temporary pool after a light rain. Or recollecting memories of an episode of conflict over meat sharing in the past. Or about a hyena heard prowling near the village on more than one recent night. Or someone’s illness and whether they should get up a trance dance to try to cure her. Or a young woman’s readiness for marriage and who a likely lucky boy might be.

Probably the predominant subjects of these fireside chats were interpersonal issues: a couple not getting along, a teenager being lazy, a good hunter growing a little too full of himself, a woman suspected of flirting with someone else’s husband. Gossip? Sure. But this was not just behind people’s backs, or not for long. It was open airing of difficulties that, if not solved, could affect everyone. And people expressed their feelings; they sought advice, they helped each other. After falling asleep to enough of these conversations, I came to wonder if the hunter-gatherer era had been one interminable encounter group. Certainly, these exchanges were one of the vital adaptive advantages of the evolution of speech. As my first anthropology teacher, the linguist Dorothy Hammond, used to say, “What would we talk about, sitting around the fire at night, if we didn’t have language?”

Were women’s voices listened to as much as men’s? Richard Lee, one of the greatest of !Kung ethnographers, estimated that men did about two-thirds of the talking in these group conversations, but that is far from a monopoly. Women were not shy about airing their opinions, and if they had arguments supporting those opinions, they could lay them out in full. These conversations were matters of adaptation, deep emotion, even of life and death. How stupid would it be to not listen to all informed opinions?

Did some men have a gender ideology uncomplimentary to women? Yes. Once a visiting colleague and I were interviewing a group of men about their knowledge of animal behavior, on which my friend was an expert. The subject of women’s intelligence came up, and one man ranked it below that of a lizard. Others found this funny. But it was just a tasteless jab in an endless battle of the sexes; women had unflattering things to say about men, too. In the battle of day-to-day life, the sexes were more or less joined in confronting natural dangers and human tragedies and foibles alike.

Then, too, women produced about 70 percent of the food and did 90 percent of the child care—the working mother was no modern invention. Actions spoke louder than words. Women’s hands more than earned them the right to have their voices heard, and they were—in mixed groups around the fire at night but also during the days when they were away from men. As in other hunter-gatherers, men’s hunts were often carried out in silence, but women’s gathering expeditions, in addition to supplying most of the food, were an endless opportunity for talk—small talk, serious talk, exchanging ideas and facts, giving and getting advice, expressing feelings, creating and sealing alliances. Men, whatever their prejudices might be, could be only so dominant in the face of those contributions, those alliances.

Yet men do have a certain appeal. Megan Biesele, the leading scholar of !Kung folklore (and a lifelong proponent of their rights), titled one of her books
Women Like Meat.
Men do almost all the hunting in this culture, and so meat is one of the reasons women like men. Another is that the main religious and healing rite, the trance dance, was traditionally male-centric, because—although women have a separate healing dance—in this ritual only men were said to have healing powers, and they would go into trances to activate those powers.

However, the ritual depends as much on women as on men, since
women sit in a circle and sing in eerie, beautiful, yodel-like voices and clap in difficult-to-master syncopated rhythms so that the men can dance in a methodical, plodding, marchlike style made up of little jumps in a larger circle around the women, in order to enter trances. Those capable of trances—up to half the men—eventually fall down, at which point their souls are believed likely to leave their bodies. Other men, often in trance themselves, rub their colleagues’ unconscious, prostrate bodies to revive them into a more active altered state. Standing, they then stop in succession at each person sitting (whether part of the inner circle of singing women or a spectator in an outer one), lay on hands, tremble while moaning in a low vibrating voice, and then shriek at the top of their lungs, saying the ritual phrase
kow-hi-didi—
at which point particles causing or likely to cause illness are drawn out of the person’s body and pass painfully up through the healer’s to be shot out from the nape of his neck, back up into the spirit world they came from.

These two admired roles for men became entwined when the excitement of a significant kill being brought back into camp led women to sing and dance, a spontaneous outpouring of enthusiasm that could lead to a formal all-night trance dance. In our time in a !Kung village, we saw that men were obligated to be very modest, silent, or self-deprecating about their hunting success, insisting that an antelope was small and thin when all could see it was large and fat. Credit (and the chance to distribute meat) went to the owner of the arrows, who could be a woman. Yet despite all this, everyone knew what man or men were responsible for a given kill and, over time, which men were more and less successful. The plant foods collected by women—nuts, tubers, berries, and greens—were the reliable staple majority of the diet, but the very unpredictability of major game hunting was exciting.

For women, there was often something faintly sexual about their enthusiasm, and that appeared to be true of trance dancing as well. While muted and mostly concealed, there was a kind of harmless
flirtation at times between some of the women and some of the men in a trance. As an apprentice who on two or three occasions succeeded in altering my state of consciousness somewhat during a dance, I felt the admiration (as well as amusement) of some women as they acknowledged me the next morning. However, nothing would cause an apprentice to be dropped from training as fast as being perceived to be taking advantage of this situation or doing anything faintly suggestive while in a trance. So the balance was a delicate one.

Women had their own, separate trance ritual, the drum dance, also healing. Some women had strong reputations as healers and were sought after by women and men alike. Also, women hunted small game—birds, tortoises, lizards, and more—that they came upon during gathering expeditions. In childhood, these successes were a source of great pride. I have a photo of a seven-year-old with a broad smile on her face holding her arm straight up in the air, a bird she has killed dangling from her fingers. And in Marjorie’s book, Nisa describes coming upon a kudu foal with a group of children. She grabbed at it but it slipped away, and they chased it. “I ran so fast that they all dropped behind and then I was alone, chasing it, running as fast as I could. Then I picked it up by the legs and carried it back on my shoulders. I was breathing very hard, ‘Whew . . . whew . . . whew!’ . . . When I came to where the rest of them were, my older cousin said, ‘My cousin, my little cousin . . . she killed a kudu!’”

Like boys, girls had dramatic initiation rites around puberty. Wherever the girl might be, on noticing a trace of blood she had to sit silently on the ground and wait. If she was alone, this could be dangerous, since lions, hyenas, or wild dogs could get wind of her. But the women in her village would soon notice her absence, guess its cause, and track her easily. They would carry her to a place near the village, quickly build a small grass hut, and set her inside it. A unique dance would begin, all the women taking part. As day turned into night and the next day, the dance became increasingly
raucous and bawdy. Women wore only a small leather pubic apron, which tossed around as they hopped and swayed. They flipped it up to flash their genitals, provoking hilarity, but meanwhile they sang, danced, and clapped continuously. No men could approach. The menstruating girl was required to sit alone in the seclusion hut, never making a sound but getting the message: an uninhibited celebration of womanhood.

As shown by Lorna Marshall, Polly Wiessner, and other anthropologists over many years, !Kung equality was due to the leveling effect of giving. There were formal rules for meat distribution, as well as rules for gifting ornaments, clothing, weapons, and other possessions, which made their way across social networks. What went around came around. It was not that people were selfless but that cultural rules and the open intimacy of social life made possessiveness difficult. Gossip and ostracism are strong deterrents. Differences in “wealth” could exist, with some people having twice as much as others, but the kind of wealth differentials we routinely accept could not have been attained in this culture, even in the most selfish person’s fondest dreams. And the general egalitarian way supported gender equality.

Women, as in any culture, bore the burdens of motherhood, but not alone. They held the ideal, quite unusual across cultures, that women should give birth alone—a tribute to their independence and courage—but this ideal was not attained until later births for most mothers, and first births were almost always assisted by other, more experienced women. Demographer Nancy Howell, whose work laid the foundation for many of our studies, published a book with a new analysis of original data in 2010. She showed that families with two or more children could not supply their own caloric needs, but other members of the band closed the deficit by sharing. Families with children were never left to their own devices. Later in life, women, especially, could reverse the flow of food.