Chris Knight's Ideas

Martinh, I thought that the idea of synchronising cycles had been largely debunked.

Chris Knight's ideas on 'the world's first picket line' have had a quiet currency in anthropological/archaeological circles, prior to his walking on the credit crisis/G20 stage - (any quotes here don't signify approval for anarcho-stuntism and banker-scapegoating, any more than we should take any pleasure in any public 'breakdown').

I've dug out some stuff elaborating on Engels' characterisation of the contemporary family, in which the husband 'is the bourgeois' and the wife 'the proletariat', drawing on some of Chris Knight's material:

The Alawa Aborigines of western-central Arnhem Land say that certain 'Mungamunga girls', when they go into the water, become merged in the corporate identity of their 'Mother', the 'Kadjari'. This mother-figure emerges from the water 'as one person, but...manifested as a Kadjari with a group of Mungamunga girls'. Chris Knight finds an elaborate connection, in Aboriginal women's rituals and narratives, between synchronous menstruation, the immersion in waterholes as being 'swallowed by a snake' personifying the mother's uterus, and the making of cat's cradles with string, the latter representing...'menstrual blood of three women' (Knight 1986: 1)

...Recognisable are the elements that make up the 'Swan Maiden' narrative as a form of counterpower to masculine authority, evident in the two ways the Mungamunga girls avoid sex with a man: diving into the water, and menstruating (Knight 1986: 8). A Yolngu myth describes how two sisters 'decided to go into the waterhole and become a rainbow', as they 'wanted to be a snake like the rainbow, when she is standing up in the waterhole and makes lightning (ibid.)...in the women's submergence in the larger whole of the snake there is nothing to suggest that they would have welcomed the arrival of a monster-slayer to 'rescue' them from this fate (ibid.). Cue the seizure of a young woman by a would-be suitor, her escape back to the water, and his subsequent drowning by the Rainbow Snake when he tries to fetch her back[b]

[i]Knight, C. 1986. 'Menstruation and the Australian Rainbow-Snake', in [i][i]World Archaeological Congress, [i]Cultural [i][i]to Animals, including Birds, Fish and Invertebrates[i] Vol 2. London and Southampton: Allen and Unwin, 1-26[/i][/i][/i][/i][/i]][/i][/b] [/i]

Apologies for the dodgy layout - I don't seem to have mastered the italics option.

Knight's anthropological views are as wild as recent his political announcements. They are all based on unverifiable speculation. Or as a review of a similar theory in the Skeptic No 2, 2004 put it on "soaring assumptions based on a paucity of evidence". See Tim Callahan's review of Sex, Time and Power : How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain here.
I have to say (reluctant as I am to agree with anything from the SWP) that Chris Harman's 1994 refutation of Kinght's views is good.

At the meeting I was at he opened with a good analysis of the economic crisis within a marxist framework. From this I was quite surprised at the turn he took and the conclusion he drew from it. If he's having a breakdown (or it may be that the position he wants to put forward is gibberish) then I don't think that's amusing. He came across as a sincere anti-capitalist and maybe his lack of framework has driven him too far.

Thanks for the outline Martin, I must read his book first, it certainly looks interesting.
My position is that of the defence of Engel's "The part played by labour....". Knight said he supported this text but I can't see how from his dismissal of the means of production. I also had the impression that he was something of a feminist.
Martin you ask why there is no evidence of symbolic culture before 100,000 years ago. Firstly steel will decay to nothing in 20,000 years. Secondly, from my point of view there is. The first hearth, the first deliberate use of fire is to found at a Neaderthal site, Terra Amata, near Nice. It's been dated to 300Kya. Also at this side red ochre has been prepared, burnt and rounded possibly for body adornment. The use of red ochre is something that Knight, at the meeting, restricted to Homo sapiens. There is also evidence, if not of clear symbolic culture, of organisation and sophisticated tools at Boxgrove, 500Kya, and even earlier on the European continent.

Reminds me of Levi Strauss, the categorisation is so vague that it really doesn't mean very much.

Or, you could look at it this way: it is very likely that the ones responsible for enforcing the rules on what women should do during their "sacred" period were often the males themselves. Many hunter-gatherer societies are relatively patriarchal (and polygamous), and just because women can freely associate and have their own rituals and stuff, that does not mean that there is any evidence for a "sex strike."
There are of course examples of societies where a menstruating woman has absolute matriarchal powers, but these are largely symbolic and last only for the period of her menstruation. Such powers are more relatable to cults of fertility, as a mystical force of nature, or with the magical properties of blood in general, than with actual woman-empowerment.
Several prehistoric cultures (Indic, Mesoamerican) had in fact relatively negative views of menstruation (cultures that unlike Christianity were not at all squeamish about bloodletting), which in my mind supports the view that perceptions of menstruation in prehistoric settings are not necessarily dictated or imposed by a united women's front.
As you go back in time, into really early prehistory, there is even less evidence, imo. Sure you have the Venus of Dusseldorf and whatnot, and even explicit depictions of vulvas, but to infer from this an ideology based on menstruation cycles is spurious. You can't even say that these are evidence for a matriarchal society (unless you're willing to accept that softcore pornography is always evidence for women's empowerment).
That said, the possibility of menstruation having been used by females in early prehistory as a way to condition males is not necessarily implausible, but to say that it is responsible for all symbolic thought, is kind of far-fetched, at the least.
I will have to read this book just to see what specific examples he brings in to support his theory, but right now it looks like one of those "origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind"-type theories (i.e. sensational but not very scientific).

I think that it's clear that menstruation and the moon, the "symbolism" of which lasted well into the Neolithic, played some role in society and ritual. I wouldn't say that Knight "knows fuck all about prehistory" - that's clearly not the case.

I disagree with posi about cave paintings, ochre and layouts being "the icing on the cake". This is good, well-dated archeology. There's nothing the matter with speculation in the right framework, but archeology is evidence. The record left by the European cave paintings (and portable, carved art, which came first) is amazing. In the main, certainly, litteraly in their depths, these are clear expressions of a belief system(s) that appears to be universal. The use of red ochre possibly goes back to the Oldavi Flats in Africa over a million years ago but as pointed out above it's use was widespread among Neanderthal and before. It's use is significant in the cave paintings (along with manganese, black ochre and charcoal) as is where it is put, in relation to what, and the signs surrounding them. There's another world being contacted - one in the mind.

There's no doubt that we have evidence of some sort of "cultural explosion" some time after the final development of Anatomically Modern Humans. But this should in no way underestimate the developments towards this point (and this was only a point). This speculation of Knight is interesting but for me to understand prehistory the basis has to be the development of the means of production and I think, though the evidence gets scantier and scantier the further back we go, there is confirmation of "society", "symbolism" and "culture" (all these terms need to be clarified) at a very early date.

We (our ancestors) wouldn't have survived if we hadn't been social and then organised. Martin above, emphasises the lack of "finds" prior to a 100kya. But in addition to the finds of red ochre (generally agreed to imply some form of society) there are the Acheulean "axes". The Acheulean dates from 1.65 to half a million years ago and these axes were refined around 700kya. The core is modified and shaped into a "tear drop" and many were unused (like the greenstone "axes" of the Neolithic). Many of these axes are too big for use, the blades too thin. They are symmetrical to a fault and some with a centre piece that adds to its aesthetic quality. They would have needed to have been struck with "soft" hammers, wood, bone or antler. These tools for me represent some form of society already. I would further propose that stone tools were both a part of, and symbolic of the transition of Homo from Australopithicus.

Posi wrote:

Did a google search on red ochre and ruddle/reddle (as red ochre was known in English rural culture) a few weeks back, knowing that a 'Reddleman' is a central character in Hardy's The Return of the Native, and that there's a place somewhere in the Fareham area on a 1970s ordnance map (probably obliterated by an executive housing estate now) called Ruddler's Dell (ie possibly a place where ruddle was extracted). The Reddleman in Hardy was permanently covered head to foot in the red dye (I haven't reddit, so I might be wrong), which he extracted and sold to farmers. To this day, surprisingly, there are agricultural wholesalers who supply tubs of multicoloured powder - red, green, yellow,etc. - to farmers. They use it to daub on ewes to show that they've been 'tupped' (ie 'serviced' by the ram). Hope this helps...

Again - talking about the thing with the Duke - though this isn't an example Knight uses, it fits his theory - and I'd like to see another explanation for htis trope. The fact that it is a serpent's or fish's tail, specificaly, is particularly significant, and would be predicted by his theory (and why else would anyone connect fishes and snakes - why wouldn't these legends specify eagles or lizards?). This is because menstrual power is identified with snakes, and with the sea (or to a lesser extent water more generally), and often the idea therefore of a waterborn snake even in areas where there are no real 'sea snakes'. He goes into great detail about this in relation to depictions of snakes in early African and Aboriginal culture. The bloody laundry is suggestive as well.

Another example which fits but he doesn't mention is the village rituals described in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

The Mermaid Ritual of the Bakweri of Mount Cameroon may somehow fit into this, though the menstrual motif isn't evident. All women are 'outside', but the mermaids (liengu) are more outside than all the others. If an ordinary woman is possessed by such a spirit being, and this may happen not only to a young girl, but also to an older woman, then she needs to leave the world of culture, within the fence. A signal of this possession, her initial protest against female domesticity, is recognised when she symbolically kicks over a hearthstone. The possessed woman is given a liengu name and learns the language of the mermaids. She enjoys with her fellow mermaids a life from which all male interests are excluded. After some months, at dusk, she is finally thrown into a deep waterhole by a medicine man or medicine woman. The woman has now turned into a mermaid; she lets her hair grow long and matted, and rubs her entire body with a mixture of charcoal and palm oil. However, hers is 'a ritually defused wildness' in which the man hopes to reclaim his mortal wife from the otherworld, tolerating her visit there and her pretence that it is her true realm because 'allowing her to enact such a fantasy may be the only way to get her back'. Duly 'rescued from the wild', the world beyond the confines of village life, she is now 'fitted for marriage with men'.

Info from:
Peter Hans Duerr (1985) Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilisation, Oxford: Blackwell
BF Leavy (1994) In Search of the Swan Maiden, New York: NY Uni Press

Sacred because it involves blood (the loss of), which already embodies all the (super)natural properties of a person, and because it involves the female genitalia, the perceived place of origin for all of humanity. Why would it benefit men to use women's sexuality? I think there are many possible answers for the type of society we're talking about, from notions of marrigeability (a girl's first period is usually loudly proclaimed) to religious notions about purity etc.

I don't get this. Why must there be a sensational explanation for that? The average length of the human menstruation cycle is not in itself meaningful. Just because it is apparently syncronized with the lunar month, that doesn't mean its length is anymore than a coincidence. Humans are not the only primates who experience overt menstruation; chimps do too for example, and in their case the cycle lasts slightly more than a lunar month; other primates' cycle is roughly similar to the human one (orangutans I think).
As for cycles synchronizing with each other, that is hardly a fact. Here's one very recent study that argues, using hard data not popular superstition, that women's cycles do not in fact synchronize with each other:
http://www.springerlink.com/content/6v72apa1y5955ya7/

Patriarchal structures are not maintained just through "oppression." The women might not even regard themselves as "oppressed" (and certainly some of the rituals surrounding menstruation seem to suggest that they enjoy a high degree of power, if only largely symbolic). Also, in (relatively) mobile societies, these structures are not really defined, first because the nature of the society does not require it, but also because there is the real possibility that if you really piss all the women off, they will run off to another group.
In any case, I'm not saying that women have not historically been able to assert their own interests, but there is hardly any evidence for this occurring in prehistoric times. There is hardly any evidence throughout history even, given that historical accounts have for the greatest part been dominated by males and male activity, so how can anyone postulate that 100,000 years ago women got together to assert their group interests by redefining menstruation?
Again, I'll have to read the book to see what material evidence Knight brings in.

Yes, that would be one of the questions.

Yes only both the Mesoamerican and the Indic calendars were not exclusively solar. But that is a minor fact; what strikes me as surprising is the claim that the agricultural "revolution" of later periods (Neolithic) occurred in response to the women's liberation? So basically farming technology was a device arrived at consciously by men (all men?) in an attempt to reassert their patriarchal interests? I find that impossible to believe.

That's what I said earlier; blood itself is magical; the fact that it comes out of a woman's vagina only adds to its importance. I don't wish to dispute that. But what is debatable is inferring from that a singular event where women consciously decided it would be like that. Most likely these attitudes gradually developed through a long interaction with the natural world, which led early human beings to speculate about certain forces "magic, and dark."

I would really like to; I hope my uni library has it.

Thanks for the clarification on red ochre posi - I think it could have well been associated with both birth and death. The latter confirmed from buried human remains.
I know it's got little to do with Knight's theory, but I want to underline the importance of cave art. It's a record from 30 to ten thousand years ago and it's the next best thing to writing.

On the question of the domination of males in prehistory - just like evidence for any form of prehistoric hierarchy - there is no evidence. A division of labour certainly, but barbarian society well into agriculture, showed a definite egalitarianism
The big change in the relationship between man and woman came in the first Home species to establish itself following australopithicus. Over that period, and this period is defined by the development of stone tools, the sexual diamorphism (the relative man/woman size) of women increased massively (including the brain) at an even greater rate than man (it would seem to me looking at the figures). It's been around the same ever since.

Finally, I don't think that "Neolithic agriculture" was in response to women's liberation. There might have been a conspiracy somewhere but the development of agriculture took many thousands of years and was predicated on a world wide development of sendentism. Agriculture itself, the result of sedentism, appeared in about 8 different regions of the globe at different times, but independently. To me that implies a deeper sense of consciousness that should have resulted in stronger ties and the development of the means of production.

yes but it's not just hunting and gathering as it existed in other places, because the richness of resources on the coast allowed for early sedentism and pre-adaptation for complex culture and later agriculture. What was I trying to emphasize is that where it happened, agriculture did not follow the same unilinear pattern that a theory of universal "agricultural revolution" implies.

This may be besides the point, but I don't agree that humans were in any way the principal reason for most of these Pleistocene extinctions (although there is certainly a case to be made for the largely human-driven extinction of Holocene species); they were just one reason, and as recent scholarship points out, had it now been for the dramatic climatic and environmental changes, said species would probably not be extinct.

edit:

well there were several species of African mammals that went extinct during this time, although obviously not as many as in the Americas; the reason for this is perhaps because the climatic changes were not as intense.