Chapter 4
In: Brill's Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology
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Abstract
When anthropology was first forming itself as a discipline in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, the primary haunt of the anthropologist was the library, and his or her central task was to reconstruct the history of the human race by looking to “primitive” peoples: those who had escaped the evolutionary progress of the human race in remote locations on the globe, fossilized in an earlier state of human social, economic, religious, and cognitive development. It was during this iteration of anthropology, practised primarily in Great Britain between 1865 and 1900, that the belief that the earliest human societies reckoned kinship matrilineally took root. I have called this theory “the myth of matriarchal prehistory”: a story told by many narrators, especially over the past century and a half, that argues that early human societies were either woman-centred or woman-ruled until a patriarchal revolution occurred, somewhere between 8000–3000 BCE, that left men and male gods in charge. The British anthropologists were preceded in the matriarchal theory by Swiss philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose 1861 book, Das Mutterrecht, largely ignored “primitive” peoples, preferring evidence for prehistoric matriarchies in classical texts and especially in archaic Mediterranean religion (insofar as it could be reconstructed from classical sources). Religion, and in particular goddess worship, played an important role in Bachofen’s narrative. The British anthropologists occasionally mentioned evidence for prehistoric matriarchy in classical texts, but did not incorporate these sources into their theory, and tended to deemphasize the importance of goddesses to matriarchal societies. It was only as anthropologists began to disassociate themselves from the matriarchal myth that evidence from classical sources began to be reintroduced, mainly by Sir James George Frazer, an anthropologist and mythographer. With Frazer came a renewed emphasis on religion and goddesses as the preeminent symbols of matriarchal society. Classicists such as Jane Ellen Harrison then adopted Frazer’s work and expanded on the significance of surviving matriarchal social customs in classical society and religion.