are Australian Aboriginal societies egalitarian?
In years gone by I’ve heard talk of hunter-gatherer societies in terms of the males out in the field competing with each other in bringing down the biggest game, and increasing their status thereby, while the women gathered their nuts and berries collectively while gossiping about the menfolk. Or something along those lines. I’ve also heard talk that ‘hunter-gatherer’ is an obsolete term – this from fellow Australians, who point out that fish and seafood, for example, both from rivers and the sea, was an essential part of Aboriginal diets, and that generally their ways of obtaining food were too diverse and complex to be so categorised.
Of course, what interests me about the term is whether there was a more or less clear division of labour in Aboriginal society, along gender lines. And for that matter, was Aboriginal society ever One Thing, bearing in mind that, according to AI (never lies), there were over 250 Aboriginal languages and 800 dialects at the time of white colonisation.
All this is really about patriarchy, matriarchy, or whether there can be (or has been) a general ‘equal but different’ social structure in human society. I’ve noted that of all the social primates, leaving aside H sapiens, none are egalitarian. They’re hierarchical, and mostly male dominant. AI tells me that only bonobos, ring-tail lemurs, mouse lemurs and some macaques swing the other way. That’s why I prefer to promote matriarchy rather than egalitarianism, or even ‘feminism’. But of course referring to other primates gets me nowhere in my quest, because we humans believe that we’re so far, far above and beyond other primates that comparisons really are odorous.
Unfortunately, between chimps/bonobos and H sapiens – the gap in time being filled by extinct species – H neanderthalensis, the Denisovans (scientific designation still under dispute), H rudolfensis, H floresiensis, H erectus, H habilis, H heidelbergensis, H naledi, H antecessor, and then Australopithecus africanus, A anamensis, A afarensis, A garhi, A sediba, and then Paranthropus boisei, P aethiopicus, P robustus, to name a few, and who knows how many more will be identified, mis-identified, merged or split in the future – that gap in time is somewhere between 8 and 6 million years, plenty of time for us to mysteriously develop our super-smart superiority. And of course, in respect of every one of these aforementioned species, and the more to be discovered, this question of matriarchy, patriarchy or ‘equal but different’ is currently without answer, and probably always will be. It’s exhausting just to think about.
So getting back to pre-colonial Australia and its Aboriginal societies, which is a complicated enough subject in itself, it seems that ‘separate but equal’ seems mostly true, though it doesn’t mean entirely separate, obviously, nor entirely equal. I’m far from being particularly knowledgeable in this field, but I know that many groups have separate ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’, not just in terms of activity but in terms of group knowledge and history of country.
It just occurred to me to check for patrilocality in Aboriginal societies, because I visited the Tiwi Islands a few years ago and was told, in a public talk given there by an Islander, that this was their practice. It seems that most Aboriginal societies practised patrilocality, and they made the most of that practice, with men’s knowledge focussing on ‘country’ and history, while women brought kinship and trade connections between groups, but the variations to this practice were complex and multifactorial. When I think of the many female Aboriginal activists that I’ve been made aware of over the past fifty years, I can’t help but feel that Aboriginal women in general haven’t been backward in coming forward regarding their rights and their treatment, both within white society and their own. So I would conclude, more or less hesitantly, that women were generally treated as equal but different in Aboriginal societies.
The reference is to a work I’ve only just discovered, which gives more than a few glimpses of the complexities involved.
Reference
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