Almudena Hernando

Fractalidad, materialidad y cultura: Un estudio etnoarqueológico de los Awá-Guajá de Maranhao (Brasil), con comentarios de Félix Acuto, Benjamín Alberti, André Menard y Axel Nielsen

In this article we argue that there is a relationship of scale (i.e. fractal) and not of determination between the features that characterize a particular culture and those of the people belonging to that culture. We will argue that what we call “cultural change” is in fact a transformation of the way in which people are related to the world. This includes changes in the manifold relations between people and things. We argue that ethnoarchaeology, as a discipline that joins the concerns of anthropology and archaeology (the discipline of things), can significantly contribute to the study of culture and to recent debates in the social sciences. We will use an ethnoarchaeological study among the Awa-Guaja, a group of hunter-gatherers livin in NW Maranhao State, to prove our points.

Cuerpo, cultura material y género entre los Gumuz y Dats’in (Etiopía)

This text attempts to analyze some of the mechanisms through which women are constructed in a “doubly subaltern” position (with respect to the men in their own group and also within the group’s subaltern position with respect to other neighboring groups) in two oral societies living in the Northeast Ethiopian Metema region, next to the border with Sudan: the Gumuz and the Dars’in societies. I state that women’s subaltern character is associated to relational forms of identity, which is constructed through the body and material culture, so we can reasonably expect to find: 1) the existence of material culture and body marking elements that can be identified as “technologies of the self”, and 2) that such bodily and material elements appear both on men and on women’s bodies, but that their presence doubles, or multiplies itself in the latter’s case. After briefly developing the concept of “relational identity” and placing the Gumuz and Dats’in in their respective historical contexts, this text analyses the role of color beads in the inscription of the group on women’s bodies.

Sex and Gender

This chapter seeks to critically review prevalent accounts of gender asymmetry and to reexamine the concepts of sex and gender. As no preexisting theoretical formulation seems really satisfactory, a new hypothesis that will serve as a starting point for the book’s arguments is put forward here: gender asymmetry is a function of the different processes that underlie the construction of male and female self-identity.When we speak of gender differences, we are referring to differences in the individuation levels of men and women throughout history.

Sex and Gender All over Again

This chapter goes back to the concept of gender in the light of all the arguments developed in previous chapters. While they may be useful for understanding the past and, to a certain extent, also the present, our notions of gender can be described as harmful and misleading for any prospect focused on the future. A society of equals must be a genderless society, where all subjects develop their own independent individuality. As regards sex, human sexuality is basically as open and polymorphic as bonobo sexuality.

Relational Identity/Individuated Identity: The Appearance of Things

This chapter analyzes the construction of self-identity at the conscious, surface level. It can be observed that males became increasingly individualized as functional divisions, and work specialization developed in the course of history. This explains that in the seventeenth century, individual and (male) person became almost conceptually coterminous. Present-day Western society glorifies individuality, which is associated with power, and denigrates relationality, which is associated with powerlessness; yet without the latter, the former is just an illusion, a fantasy. If we look at what men did throughout history, we can see that masculine relationality never vanished; it simply went unrecognized. However, it was performed through a twofold mechanism combining (1) asymmetrical gender relations between men and women (through a normative heterosexuality) and (2) all-male peer groups (homosociability). The book puts forward the concept of dependent individuality to name this kind of individuality, embodied by men throughout history, as it demands external emotional support to be sustainable.

Dependent Individuality and Independent Individuality

So far the book has been exploring the divergent constructions of male and female identities before modern times. The advent of modernity, however, signals a turning point. Women gradually gain access to literacy, education, and specialized training and become individuated subjects as a result. Yet for them disavowing or outsourcing the care of relationality is not an option, since there is no third party that could play for them the same role they had played for the men. They must therefore develop a type of individuality that is fully aware and capable of accommodating the demands of relationality, balancing both forms of personhood. This is what we might call a truly independent individuality, one that combines reason and emotion, the demands of the self and the bonds with others, and the contradictory desires and affects that bind them all together. This form of independent individuality, in the author’s view, is arguably the mode of personhood that ought to become dominant in the future for both men and women. Dependent individuality of the hegemonic masculine type, which is usually posited as the goal of a politics of gender equality, is fundamentally untenable, as it always requires subaltern subjects caring for the relational sphere.

The Fantasy of Individuality II: Men’s (Unconscious) Performance of Relational Identity

Outsourcing relationality through gender relations was not enough to fully satisfy the masculine need for meaningful bonds, however. This chapter contends that men also needed to perform this unacknowledged side of their identity through other means. Throughout history, males have joined all kinds of peer groups, from craftsmen’s guilds and bands of warriors to professional associations or sports supporter clubs. In this chapter, archaeological and historical evidence will be used to demonstrate that when men separated themselves from the collective (in their individuation process), they always joined another group (acting relational identity), as it is impossible to remain completely alone.

Individuality (or Identity When One Has Power over the World)

Modern sociologists agree in that individuality is the structure of personhood typical of modern subjects. It is characterized by a sense of autonomous agency based on an independent, self-awareness which forms the core of personal identity. Individuality fosters a certain emotional detachment from outside reality—which is processed through rational control—and a concomitant sense of power over the world, materialized through technology and work specialization. Enlightenment thought saw Western history as a trajectory culminating in the triumph of the individual, who had outgrown all emotional (mythical) bonds with external reality, embracing rationality and science instead. The hypothesis of this book, however, is that emotional bonds and communal belonging are unavoidable, as they constitute the indispensable foundation of ontological security; without them, truly isolated subjects would feel all the weight of their powerlessness in the face of incommensurable natural forces. What gradual male individuality involved was not a progressive emotional detachment from the world but a progressive unrecognition of their emotional bonds instead, which continued to be acted in an unconscious level. Understanding this process may be the key to unlocking how the patriarchal order works. But first we must turn to the mechanism of identity operating at surface level, where, in fact, individualized traits were gradually superseding relational ones in masculine identity.

Relational Identity (or Identity When One Has No Power over the World)

Modern sociologists agree in that individuality is the structure of personhood typical of modern subjects. It is characterized by a sense of autonomous agency based on an independent, self-awareness which forms the core of personal identity. Individuality fosters a certain emotional detachment from outside reality—which is processed through rational control—and a concomitant sense of power over the world, materialized through technology and work specialization. Enlightenment thought saw Western history as a trajectory culminating in the triumph of the individual, who had outgrown all emotional (mythical) bonds with external reality, embracing rationality and science instead. The hypothesis of this book, however, is that emotional bonds and communal belonging are unavoidable, as they constitute the indispensable foundation of ontological security; without them, truly isolated subjects would feel all the weight of their powerlessness in the face of incommensurable natural forces. What gradual male individuality involved was not a progressive emotional detachment from the world but a progressive unrecognition of their emotional bonds instead, which continued to be acted in an unconscious level. Understanding this process may be the key to unlocking how the patriarchal order works. But first we must turn to the mechanism of identity operating at surface level, where, in fact, individualized traits were gradually superseding relational ones in masculine identity.

The Fantasy of Individuality I: Women and Gender Identity

In this chapter it is argued that the key factor that allowed the illusion of male individuality to be constructed in the first place was preventing women from becoming individualized subjects themselves. If women preserved the relational identity (what we now call gender identity) that initially characterized all members of the social group, they would provide males with emotional bonds and a sense of belonging through heterosexual relations. This explains the barriers to female mobility (in oral societies) or education (in literate societies), as abundant historical evidence shows. The devaluation of relational identity (by male-dominated discourses that only valued individuality) ran parallel to the mens increasing need for the bonds that women provided through gender relations. Paradoxically enough, the more crucial women’s role became (as men became increasingly individuated), the less it could be valued (since the need for relationality was negated).