Anneke van Baalen, HIDDEN MASCULINITY, Max Weber's historical sociology of bureaucracy.
Amsterdam 1994. Chapter 4 Relations between men: from routinization of charisma to patriarchal
domination over men.
77
The men's house is thus a fraternization which practices a kind of symbolic violence against
women and other not-warriors, a violence which is unsupported by any belief in legitimacy.
According to Weber the warriors themselves do not believe in it, and he presents no facts
from which it may be deduced that the women do.
56
Weber therefore presents the military barracks culture as a halfway-house on the road to a
legitimation of violence and therefore as halfway on the road to patriarchy. His
argumentation, however, provides no argument for this view. Women feed men, but the men
do not force them to do so through acts of legitimate violence: men have no rights to the
fruits of the work of women. Proven manhood gives men only a claim to membership of the
warrior fraternity with its fun and games, but no claims vis-a-vis the women; all the pomp and
circumstance of the warrior fraternity, with its drums, its flutes and its hummers illustrates
this.
This is consistent with Weber's statement that the men's house organization is older than the
patriarchal household. Men can enter 'households' when they have reached a certain age;
Weber however keeps repeating that these 'households' are matrilinear.
57
And indeed, the
origins of the men's house itself cannot be explained without hypothesizing some kind of a
matrilineal kinship organization, the warrior consociation being a 'fraternity': a formal kinship
between men, created by magical means.
58
56
See Fokke Sierksma 1962 and 1979, who states that in the cultures of the equatorial belt the invention of
horticulture by women robbed the men of the necessity and the possibility to hunt, and so of their economic and
social function. Hunting fraternities therefore developed new masculine activities, among which war and enemy-
cannibalism were prominent. When, however, the fraternities no longer participate in everyday economic life,
'tradition', which consists of the common social ties which define the sharing of food and work, is broken. They
saved their manhood vis-a-vis the women by creating the rituals of the 'robbery of the women's secret', that is the
secret of the kind of horticulture the women practiced, in which plants are multiplied by cutting them up. This
robbery is symbolized by the rape and cutting up of a female ancestor, whose bloody raffia skirt is shown during
rituals. According to Sierksma the women act as if they are frightened, giggling among themselves; they tell
outsiders that of course they know the secret. About plunder of food Sierksma tells us nothing; but of course in
horticultural societies the women feed the men.
It has to be noted that Sierksma has found this myth and the corresponding men's house rituals only in the
tropical regions of the equatorial belt; for this reason it would be better to use the concept 'men's league' instead
of that of 'men's house', like Schurtz proposed.
In Geschiedenis van de Vrouwentoekomst Marijke Ekelschot and I, to explain the reported difference between for
instance prehistoric Balkan and historic Pueblo cultures, concluded that magical productive activities - to secure
the return of spring, to make rain, to make plants grow and animals prosper - could be defined as 'work', and that
in cultures were groups of men, from a necessity caused by a harsh or variable climate, performed such
activities, they were better integrated in matrilineal society than in circumstances were plants grew also without
such interference, as in the equatorial belt where, after the invention of horticulture by the women, 'the men's
house seems to have developed. See below, n. 89.
57
'The men's absence frequently establishes the household as a "maternal grouping" in which children and
property are attributed to the maternal household, or the woman achieves at least a relative domestic
independence, as is reported for Sparta,' ES p. 371, WG p. 223.
58
If one chooses the matrilinear kinship organization as a starting point, though, the problems in conceptualizing
the development of these fraternities are comparable to those Weber tried to solve with 'the routinization of
charisma'.
 |
 |
 |