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Title: Anthropology: Reclaiming the dragon Author: Lionel Sims Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: anthropology, anarcho-primitivism, Libertarian Communism, gatherer-hunters, women, marxism Source: http://libcom.org/history/anthropology-reclaiming-dragon-what-was-primitive-communism
According to Genesis, chapter 2, god âcreated Heaven, host and Earth and
all plants of the fieldâ. He âcreated man from the dust of the Earth and
breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and Man became a living
soulâ. God placed man in Eden and commanded him to âtend the garden that
he had madeâ, and directed that âhe may eat of all except the tree of
knowledge of good and evilâ. God provided âevery good beast of the land
and fowl of the airâ and âfrom his rib made womanâ.
But amongst the creatures was a serpent that was âmore subtle than all
the beasts of the fieldâ and the serpent persuaded the woman, Eve, that
the fruit of all the trees could be eaten. She ate from the tree of
knowledge of good and evil and persuaded the man, Adam, to do the same.
âThen the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were
naked.â They sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. God asked
how they knew that they were naked: âHave you eaten from the tree whose
fruit I commanded you not to eat?â And god condemned the serpent to
crawl on its belly forever.
To Adam he said, âCursed is the ground because of you.â It will now
produce âthorns and thistlesâ and you will be forced to eat âby the
sweat of your browâ.
In certain quarters Marxism is reduced to a base/superstructure model,
in which the economic base generates everything above it: the
superstructure, ideology, social relations - everything derives from
economics. According to this method, we would expect to find very
different superstructures in line with the different modes of production
that have existed.
But, as an anthropologist, I know that every culture in the world has a
dragon (or serpent) as part of its origin myth: the Mesoamerican
quetzalcoatl, the rainbow serpent of African hunter-gatherers, the
dragon of Pharaonic Egypt or Chinese or Welsh culture ... All these
belonged to societies with different modes of production, yet they all
have dragons.
The story of Eden is an origin myth, and it is important to ask what
Marxism allows us to say about origin myths. Can we have a science of
myth? Well, we in the Radical Anthropology Group, because we promote
anthropology as a science, champion in particular the work of Claude
LĂ©vi-Strauss, which gives us a method - structuralism - with which to
interpret and understand myths.
LĂ©vi-Strauss has been massively misunderstood, especially by the left,
because he identifies two dimensions within myth. There are a set of
âgrammatical rulesâ, of syntax, which are invariant. They never change.
Irrespective of the historical era, the mode of production, the syntax
will always be the same. However, the political meaning within the
myth - how it is appropriated at any one time and place - can vary
enormously. Even though the same rules are being used, the political
message will change. These syntactical rules are the formal structure -
the external form, around which the myth is woven. This was
So if every culture has a dragon in its origin myth, and it is an
invariant rule that these dragons wield enormous magical power, we must
ask what is in that myth that is common to every society? In my opinion,
LĂ©vi-Strauss was unable to explain the origins of the system of
invariant rules of which dragons are one part. He seemed to prefer the
argument that the human brain was structured to deal with syntactical
oppositions and that when a myth is being told it is the human brain
communing with itself.
However, in the fourth volume of his Mythologiques on the analysis of a
thousand Amerindian myths, he mentions in a footnote another possible
reason for these origin myths. According to the Soviet formalist,
Vladimir Propp, behind all the magical tales of the worldâs cultures
lies the original culture, which generated the origin myths that we find
all round the world today. We find them in Papua New Guinea, North
America, South America, even in Europe in the Greek myths. They are in
fact male matriarchy myths, because they all blame the loss of heaven,
or Eden, on women.
Within Marxism, of course, we always argue that content determines form.
For example, capitalism grew and penetrated the social forms around it
and changed them to conform with their new, capitalist, content.
Therefore, if a dragon is an example of an invariant form, if we are to
be consistent with Marxism, and link Marxism and anthropology and
LĂ©vi-Straussâs structuralism, we can only come to one conclusion: there
must have been in the past a society whose content drove a form to
generate male matriarchy myths, which for some reason feature dragons;
the form which came from that original society has been carried on in
all later modes of production.
So how can we make this argument work? First, there must be something in
our society which still makes us engage with a creature, the dragon,
that has never existed. There must be something within capitalism that
provides a basis for this form to continue.
In his Structural anthropology, LĂ©vi-Strauss took on the racists who
argued that, because peoples in traditional societies have no abstract
concepts or words for them, their minds were not as evolved as ours.
LĂ©vi-Strauss said that the âsavage mindâ does not work like that. It
takes two dissimilar things - say, a human and a lion - and it puts them
together to make a lion-headed human. In the combination of these two
aspects, the power of the lion is invested in the man: âHe has the power
of a lionâ or âHe hunts like a lionâ. An abstract idea is created by
combining two things that do not normally go together.
Bearing this in mind, let us ask ourselves again, what is a dragon? A
dragon lives in a cave, in a hole, under water, in the underworld or on
a mountain top. It can climb trees or swim. It is wet and slimy and
breathes fire. It has noxious breath and a poisonous sting, but it
guards a beautiful maiden, a treasure or secret. It is a snake, the
lowest of creatures, and it has wings and can also be the highest. It
can shape-shift, it is species-ambiguous - the sphinx is an example. It
can switch gender. It has multiple heads and is all-powerful. It can
only be killed by a magical weapon (usually conferred by a maiden or
crone), fire or, in the north-western
Notice that these properties are a unity of oppositions - the most
abstract creature of all the origin myths of the world combines the
highest number of oppositions. As the traditional peoples would say,
this end result, the dragon, is something like all of these properties;
it can metamorphose across different dimensions of being.
LĂ©vi-Strauss gives us another rule: there is no such thing as one true
myth. No one myth is more true than another. That, he says, is not the
right way to consider myths. A myth includes all its variants - each
adds to the myth, following the same syntax within a changing political
narrative. By bringing the variants together, one finds the meta-myth
behind them all.
If we use these techniques and go back to the Eden myth, we should be
able to disentangle the invariant rules and discover the political
narrative that is embedded within it. So what can we identify in
Genesis, chapter 2?
First, in Eden there is abundance - that comes through very strongly.
The first animals that god makes are cattle: not lions, snakes or
elephants, but cattle. Another thing: males monopolise reproduction; as
Eve came from Adamâs rib, then men make women. Also, there is monogamy,
and when in Eden there is no sexual shame. There is a serpent which
talks and is highly persuasive. âSerpentâ is interchangeable with
âdragonâ here - it means the same thing. The woman is close to the
serpent: she listens to it and is persuaded. They are bracketed together
in the myth.
The womanâs act of unity with the serpent brings shame. Prior to this
the serpent lived in Eden and was above cattle; it could walk and enjoy
friendship with the woman - there is the implication it may have even
have had sex with her. When god gets angry because the woman has
listened to the serpent - and the man has listened to the woman, who
listened to the serpent - then sex is now sorrowful, children are born
in pain, there is enslavement to the husband and there is compulsive
marriage. Adam listened to Eve in Eden, where there had been not only
abundance, but men who listened to their womenfolk. Eden signified
abundance and women respecting men in the company of the serpent, and a
vengeful, patriarchal god changed everything.
There are two components to this myth. First, there is the invariant
syntax - the serpent (dragon), shared by all origin myths. These myths
are about the making of the cosmos - they feature some hero who always
names the parts of the cosmos, and they feature a dragon, which is
always connected to women. In every origin myth around the world these
are invariant.
Second we have a variant political component. For example, cattle are
not the original beasts. They indicate an origin myth from a particular
moment in history: the beginning of agro-pastoral society, the
Neolithic. This is a story for the origin of the Neolithic, and you know
this as soon as cattle are named as the primary beast.
The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden represents a political and
economic reversal: women are enslaved in monogamy - which begins with
this agro-pastoral myth. On the other hand, men are enslaved through
agricultural labour under a patriarchal god. Eden had been a place of
abundance for hunter-gatherers, before agro-pastoralism. It was a place
of equality - in particular of gender equality - in which women were
equal to men.
But did primitive communism exist in the sense it does in the Eden and
other origin myths? Was there abundance?
To be frank, Marx and Engels were ambiguous about abundance in primitive
communism. Engels wobbles badly in The origin of the family, private
property and the state. That is fair enough - it is the 1880s and
anthropology has only just got off the ground as a discipline; there is
no palaeoanthropology, no molecular biology. A revolution has occurred
over the last 30 years in the life sciences that has seen massive
advances in the science of our pre-history. So now we can start
overcoming these ambiguities.
It is true that modern social anthropology, particularly in Britain, has
dumped the study of origins. Nevertheless, much good work has been done
in the study of extant hunter-gatherer societies. And the evidence that
we have from those hunter-gatherers that have survived into modern times
is available to us.
The problem is that we are ill-equipped to understand what we encounter
with a modern hunter-gatherer. We think in terms of material
well-being - technology, machines, consumer goods. Yet when a
traditional Aboriginal Australian, who to our eyes has nothing, looks at
you he will regard you as a savage. He will think, this western person
has no discipline, knows nothing, is ignorant. The Aboriginal Australian
has a completely different mindset from ours.
In anthropology we have to try and enter the mind of the other in order
to understand ourselves, through their perspective. That might be
difficult, but when people become friends with the Aboriginals and start
to learn from them, what they find is really interesting. They do not
find any possessiveness, accumulation or storage. When they get food,
they eat it immediately with their friends. Now, we would be thinking,
what about tomorrow? What about next week? But they immediately consume
the food they find and to us it appears that these people cannot plan,
are not prepared for the future. They act in a way that we would find
alarming. And that is because we are part of the post-Neolithic
revolution. We are a part of a system that believes in amassing property
and we look at this world completely differently.
Hunter-gatherers survive from the local landscape and they are mobile.
This allows them to live in permanent abundance. The idea of storage
based in a particular locality is ridiculous to a hunter-gatherer. If
they exhaust a localityâs food, and try to live by whatever they have
stored, then they will quickly starve. So they just move on. British
anthropologist Colin Turnbull wrote a beautiful book, The Forest People,
about how the Mbuti people of the Ituri forest of the Congo went about
their business. They would say, âWeâre going to break camp and move
offâ, and he would pack his bags and go along with them. But they would
quickly come across bushes of fruiting berries and they would stop for
hours to eat them. Turnbull would say, âCome on, weâve got to get
movingâ, but they would reply, âWhy? Here is food.â
So the attitude of hunter-gatherers is entirely different from the idea
that we must store up food and other possessions or else we will be
heading for a crisis. They live in abundance that keeps them together,
and that is what they want to protect. There is a pride in not owning
things - a sign of confidence that they know how to negotiate their
environment. In order to live in abundance, these hunter-gatherers work
one, two, maybe three days a week - in terms of labour-time they are way
more advanced than we are.
So even in the present, hunter-gatherers lead a life that must be
considered affluent by the measure of the necessary labour-time required
to secure subsistence. Yet, while hunter-gatherers live in abundance, in
the modern world 25,000 people die of hunger every day - despite the
massive technological advance we see around us. So why is it that we use
technology as a measure of civilisation? In the hunter-gatherer world
no-one dies of hunger - âA poor man shames us all,â they say.
There is no lack of ingenuity, intelligence or intellectualism amongst
hunter-gatherers. For example, there are animal traps made by the Kung
people in the basement of the British Museum that no-one can reassemble
because they are so complicated. A low level of technology does not mean
simple technology. Tools used by hunter-gatherers are an extension of
their power, whereas ours are anti-human: they undermine, invade and
dominate us - they are under the control of the capitalists, who own the
means of production.
If you ask a Kung man, âWhat do you fantasise about?â, he will say,
âSitting in a vat of fatty meatâ. The Kung had been dislocated from
their traditional hunting grounds, displaced by Iron Age tribesmen from
west Africa and forced into the Kalahari desert, which was not their
natural, preferred environment. Yet even in the middle of the Kalahari
we still find them living in abundance.
But the fantasy about fatty meat betrays an obsession. Marshall Sahlins,
who wrote The original affluent society, calls this a âdecapitated
cultureâ. There appears to be something missing in such a culture.
Contrarily anthropology has recorded other traditional societies still
living in abundance which undermine all our ideas about âprimitiveâ
culture and âsavageryâ. These were societies with an elaborated
superstructure, intense ritual and a full ceremonial life. We could call
their way of living âprimitive communismâ, but there is nothing
primitive about it - the richness of their ritual life is an example.
The Kung have lost most of this because of all the disruption they have
gone through. They exhibit an exhausted, undernourished ritual life -
like many hunter-gatherer societies still remaining, the superstructure
has been eroded.
All of humanity were hunter-gatherers in the Palaeolithic, which came to
an end 10,000 years ago. We now know that anatomically modern humans had
evolved in Africa by around 200,000 years ago. Those ancestors spread
from Africa for the first time around 80,000 years ago, reaching
Australia 60,000 years ago and Europe 40,000 years ago.
Can we reconstruct the culture of the hunter-gatherers of the
Palaeolithic? Can we go right back to our origins? Notice that there is
a problem in Marxism for this. If you roll back the wheel of history
right to our point of origin, then where is the base? Where is the
superstructure? We can see why some Marxists have become singularly
ill-equipped to deal with the question of human and cultural origins.
But Engels gives us a clue in The origins of the family, private
property and the state, where he did something that we struggle to do
today on the left: he discussed animal social systems and those of apes
in particular. Because, of course, we follow Darwin in accepting our
evolution from common ancestry with the apes. Engels argues that our
ancestors in some way overthrew the dynamics of the primate social
system - male jealousy and the attempt to monopolise females.
Christopher Boehmâs Hierarchy in the forest is a study of chimpanzee and
ape social systems, where he points out that chimpanzees in particular
combine a desire to dominate with an ability to submit and defer to a
dominator. But chimpanzees alternate between these two extremes in an
ambiguous way. At certain times they will try to be dominant, while at
others they will submit to an alpha male.
Boehm points out that there is an ambiguous aspect to the structure of
ape society. He argues that climatic and ecological changes that took
place at the point of our origins, in the early Palaeolithic, would have
made certain groups of apes vulnerable. If domination by alpha males is
not going to ensure the groupâs survival, then he says subordinates can
establish a system of âreverse dominationâ, in which the collective can
dominate the single or few dominators and establish a system of
egalitarianism - a form of cooperation.
The main thing missing in Boehmâs book is any discussion of gender or
sex. And this is inexcusable, because sex is the main division in the
primate social system - âeconomicsâ as well as politics are at work
here. It is not just males competing to monopolise females: it is the
females who do the economics - they forage. The males just follow the
females, because they know that they can get two things if they do so:
food and sex. They can forage for themselves where the females have
found the food, or steal it from the females, and they can compete to
have sex with them.
Basically that is the primate social system: the economic base is
characterised by female work, while the political superstructure is
male. Robin Dunbar described all this in Primate social systems. So if
we argue, as Boehm does, that there is reverse domination and that the
group can get together to undermine the previous political system, then
that means that the group must also be undermining the sexual economics
underpinning these relations.
And this is where the Radical Anthropology Group comes in, thanks to the
work of Chris Knight on the sex-strike theory. According to this
argument, the alpha male will not innovate, because he wishes to retain
his position as king. The subordinate males will not innovate, because
they wish to become the alpha male. Therefore innovation within a
primate social system must come from the females, because it is they who
will pay the highest cost for a failure to innovate when climatic and
ecological conditions change (during the Ice Age the forests were
disappearing from central Africa). This abstract model of cultural
origins suggests that the females collectivised themselves, secluding
themselves from sexual availability to males.
This would have motivated the males to become economically useful - or
rather those males who were willing to do that. The subordinate males
would be drawn into a sexual system, whereas before they were excluded
by the alpha male. The female coalition organises, through seclusion
rituals, a system whereby males are motivated to hunt and provide food.
The best time to hunt as a vulnerable hominid is during the full moon:
its light permits hunting at a time when the larger carnivores, who only
hunt during the dark, are not posing a danger.
According to this argument, female seclusion begins at dark moon. The
females separate from their one-time husbands and can call on support
from their brothers when necessary. That way there is a blood unity in a
matrilineal clan between brothers and sisters. When, at full moon, the
males return with meat there is a period of temporary marriage
characterised by meat-rich feasting and heterosexual party time - until
dark moon comes round and the cycle starts again.
This is sex-strike theory - an abstract model based on a lunar template,
through which human culture comes into being. This human revolution was
female-led, drawing in all their sisters and brothers in order to
domesticate the males and make them economically useful. Marriage is all
about the economics which is a precondition for sexual rights.
The Marxist argument is that everything else evolved out of that
revolutionary act of female seclusion. Not just the hunting-gathering
mode of production, but all human culture evolved out of it. That act
had to happen for human culture to begin.
Let us remind ourselves that this is not about technology. We are not
saying that it was the invention of the bow and arrow that triggered
hunter-gathering. But we have to ask what the conditions were in the
Palaeolithic. What were the game animals? There are clues from
palaeoanthropology and archaeology.
In the Americas there were giant ground sloths. When humans first
arrived about 13,000 years ago, these slow-moving animals would have
been roaming the Americas and our ancestors just needed fire-and-flint
technology and solidarity to kill them. They were wiped out in the
thousand years following the arrival of the humans. When the Aboriginals
arrived in Australia 60,000 years ago, there were marsupial
rhinoceroses, but within a short span they too disappeared.
We are all familiar with the fate of the woolly mammoth. Russian
anthropologists have reconstructed the huts used by our ancestors on the
Russian steppe during the Palaeolithic. Now, it is not too warm in those
parts of Russia in winter today, so you can imagine the conditions
during the Palaeolithic, when there was an ice sheet a mile thick over
Moscow. But our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived in the areas south of
these glaciers. Their huts were constructed from mammoth bones, hides
and clay, with five tons of material used in the construction of each
hut.
All of these mega-fauna had died out by 10,000 years ago at the hands of
our ancestors and their extremely effective game drives using fire,
flint and solidarity. The solidarity element is key, so let us examine
this further.
When people on the left hear of the sex-strike theory many do not like
it, as it sounds like a model for the âlittle woman at homeâ. But that
is an incorrect interpretation based on the bourgeois conditioning of
our patriarchal society.
Lewis Henry Morgan studied the long-house system amongst the Iroquois
and Seneca. The women - sisters, mothers and daughters - stay together.
The mothers have sons and these sons are brothers to all the women. This
is a matrilineal system, in which there are just two family groups: the
women in one group have husbands in the other group, and these menâs
sisters are in turn another group of women. A woman will therefore
always have brothers and they will always support her in her dealings
with other men from the other clan. They will never let her down, since
this is the basis for the clanâs existence.
In our culture you lose your brother when he gets married. Our system of
families divides us all up. But in a matrilineal clan that never
happens. Your first identity is with your brothers and your sisters, and
your common line of mothers, who all live in a group. Men as husbands
move between the two groups, visiting the women of the other group
before returning to their own long house when the seclusion ritual
starts and temporary marriage is dissolved.
Imagine the man visiting his wife in the other clan and standing
alongside her are all her sisters, all her mothers and all her brothers.
You will be under pressure from all of them. So the matrilineal clan is
a non-sexual union of economically and politically participating blood
kin, and it works through enormously high levels of solidarity. It is a
form of communist solidarity.
It was cattle that finally spelled the end of all that. Once cattle are
domesticated, there is no need for hunter-gathering, whereby hunted meat
earned sexual rights. A hunter-gatherer worked all his life under a
system of bride service, but a cattle-owner could buy a woman. By
conservatively continuing the practice of handing over meat to another
clan - not now serially, as hunted game, but as domesticated cattle - a
man now gained a woman in âwedlockâ. Her own blood kin, the mothers and
brothers who once always stood in solidarity with her, now had an
interest in disowning her to keep the cattle.
As soon as there is cattle domestication, there is a reversal in sexual
politics - the Neolithic counterrevolution. This was, as Engels called
it, the âworld-historic defeat of the female sexâ, with cattle used to
barter women from their blood kin and institute compulsive marriage.
Modern anthropology can prove all of that.
This is exactly where the Eden myth begins - with cattle and monogamy.
It is the political expression of the Neolithic counterrevolution, for
which the Old testament provides a script. In Eden there was abundance -
a society without monogamy or shame. But what about the serpent, the
dragon with which I began? The dragon, which could walk, talk and
shape-shift?
A myth consists of all its variants. Eve was not Adamâs first wife -
that was Lilith. Lilith thought Adam was a bore. She would not listen to
Adam when he spoke. She insisted on being on top when she lay with Adam.
And Lilith left and flew away over the Red Sea. This myth is recounted
in many variants, but Lilith is only mentioned once in the Bible because
her presence is an inconvenience. She is the opposite of Eve, who is
compliant. Lilith is dangerous: she refuses to be oppressed.
In depictions of Lilith we find that she is often shown with an owlâs
talons on her feet, with serpents for hair, with two owls and two lions
at her feet. She has wings on her back and is holding what look like
symbols of office - a sort of circle on a straight rod. Lilith is a
dragon.
And in mediaeval pictures, including in the Sistine Chapel, the story of
Adam and Eve from Genesis depicts the serpent as a woman with a
serpentâs or dragonâs tail. This serpent who could talk so persuasively
was another woman - it was Lilith, Adamâs first wife. She said, âEat the
fruit. Donât listen to god: you shall become a god yourself, by eating
the fruit of the tree of life in the garden of Eden.â
To understand this biblical myth, Lilith should be looked at from the
point of view of a jealous husband - how will he feel when she starts
secluding herself at dark moon and tells him to become economically
useful? The wife who was once compliant and is now in rebellion is
characterised by the patriarchal man as a dragon, covered in blood. She
is seen by him as all-powerful because she is surrounded by her kin, all
her brothers and sisters.
So sex-strike theory argues that womanhood has two aspects, just like
culture itself. The powerful, secluding, menstrually synchronous woman
began culture. Archaeologists have found evidence for dragons all over
the world, in every culture, but it is not seen as respectable to talk
about them. Sex-strike theory allows us to understand how âprimitiveâ
communism worked through the dragon - the fighting collective of women
and their brothers. Today, however, womenâs oppression continues across
all modes of production. It takes the form of monogamous family
relationships, and this organisation of the family underpins the idea of
enmity between men and women.
At Stonehenge there was a mace. The mace has no known function except a
ceremonial one and, amusingly enough, archaeologists say they have found
the biggest stash of large-sized axes from the Neolithic on the Shetland
Islands. The problem is that there were no trees on the Shetlands! These
âaxesâ, these maces, exist for no other purpose than to kill the dragon
by intimidating women. Such symbols remain in the elite institutions of
society today - parliament cannot sit unless this traditional
anti-dragon weapon is present.
But for us the dragon represents the power of primitive communism to
bring us all together. The Eden myth, I would argue, is a distorted
memory of a communist society, which has been taken over by
cattle-owning elites. They introduced womenâs oppression and wealth
inequality, and they were at war with the dragon. They continually had
to kill the dragon symbolically at their monuments, because the dragon
represented the power of the matrilineal clan, which would have shared
the cattle.
So the question is, whose dragon do you want? Theirs or ours?