IV. Vernacular Culture

IV. Vernacular Culture

id="iv-vernacular-culture">IV. Vernacular Culture#

Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. Each person relates to society through actions and the tools effectively mastered to carry out those actions. To the degree that one actively masters one’s tools, their shape determines his/her self-image. In all pre-industrial societies, a set of gender-specific tasks is reflected in a set of gender-specific tools. Even tools that are there for common use can be touched by only half the people. By grasping and using a tool, one relates primarily to the appropriate gender. As a result, intercourse between genders is primarily social. Separate tool kits determine the material complementarity of life.

The separateness of tool kits can lead to an extreme division of domains. In a moving chapter, Pierre Clastres, who has lived among the Guayaki, reports on such a split world in the Amazon jungle. Women’s domain is here organized around the basket each one has woven for herself at the time of her first menses, and the men’s world turns around the bow. No personal authority stands above the two domains.69 The division, which is constantly experienced, engenders the tension that holds this society together. If ever a woman touches the bow of a hunter, he loses his manhood and becomes “pané”. His arrows become useless, his sexual powers are lost, he is excluded from the hunt, and, if he does not just shrivel and die, he lives out his life behind women’s huts, gathering food in a discarded basket.

Gender and Tools#

There is, however, no need to look into the exotic for cultural knots that tie gender to tool. It is both more convincing and less distracting to look into our own recent past. On close inspection, many of our grandparents’ tools still smell of gender. While working on a draft of this chapter, I was the guest of a Quebec baker, a nationalist and artist working with her traditional kitchen tools. She runs a shop near Sherbrooke, and along with her cakes offers patrons a milieu that is a modern version of a medieval studium, a place of reflection and discussion. She invited me to read these pages to an interested audience in the dining room. The walls were decorated with a dozen rusty farm tools. They had been collected because they were beautifully shaped and locally made. Together, we inspected these remains from households and farms, none older than the century. Originally, they must have had their proper names, but most were forgotten by now. No one could even guess the use or purpose of some of the tools. Others were obviously made for digging or sawing, but nobody knew the crop or wood for which they had been crafted. And, with the exception of one old woman, no one in this group of French-Americans knew anything about the gender to which the different tools had been bounded, whether they had been destined for the hands of woman or man.

While in North America, even in Quebec, gender has been laundered from tools, it still survives in the tools of many pockets of rural Europe, and in some places more than in others. Here, men use the scythe and women the sickle. There, both use a sickle, but there are two sickles, each of a different design; the handle and blade betray the gender. In Styria, for example, men’s sickles are clean-edged for cutting, and women’s are indented, curved, made for the gathering of stalks. Wiegelmann’s great inventory of peasant work70 reports hundreds of such stories for a confusing variety of places. In one valley in the Alps, both genders use the scythe, but she only to cut the fodder, and he for the rye. Here, only she touches the knives in the kitchen; there, both cut the bread, but one cuts down and away, and the other draws the blade toward the chest.

Almost everywhere, men plant grain. But in one area on the upper Danube, women harrow and sow, and that is the one place where men do not handle the seed stock. Animals are tied to gender, even more than plants. In one place, women feed cows but never the draught animals. Farther east, women milk cows that belong to the homestead, while the herd on the manor grounds is milked by men. Only a few hours’ walk away, the same job is done only by maids. Tenaciously, the ties between gender and tool have survived, while wars have destroyed cities as they swept over Europe, and economic growth has transformed rural life. In the midst of synthetic pesticides, combines, and TV, certain old tools have anachronistically preserved the trappings of gender.

When the tie between tool and gender has been broken, it has happened more frequently and more purposefully in Eastern Europe than in the West. At best, it survives in the memories of the old. A decade ago, I listened to a Serbian peasant telling how haying had been done a generation back. He described gathering, loading, and storing the hay as if the work had been a ballet in which men and women each danced their appropriate parts. While he spoke, we were watching how things are done now. Haymaking has turned into a unisex job under workers’ control, which any hired hand can do. With a mixture of sadness and pride, the old man looked at the young woman who was driving the tractor of the village commune. The gender that disappears on a tractor had adapted to ever new conditions over millennia. The tie between gender and ox in some well-documented cases has survived from prehistoric times. No woman ancestor of this young driver would have yoked or fed an ox. This gender trait can be traced back in her people to a time when they neither spoke a Slavonic language nor lived in the same part of Europe.

Gender, Rent, Trade, and Crafts#

“Primitive” life is always built on a split set of tools. The life of the hunter and gatherer is so divided, but so is the life of planter and shepherd, as it has been from neolithic to modern times. With few exceptions, the gender divide is neat and obvious in non-urban society. Subsistence economy coincides with gendered existence. Thus, there is a strong temptation to consider gender as a distinctive sign of tribal and peasant life. If social gender is studied at all, it has remained a subject for anthropologists. Historians have overlooked the fact that gender is equally dominant in all historical periods, is constitutive of all urban civilizations, and basic to simple commodity production. If its rule was relaxed, this happened only among decadent elites, and then for only short periods. Only the rise of commodity-intensive industrial society led to the loss of gender. As a result, the history of gender’s demise in the nineteenth and twentieth century still remains to be written. Only when gender is recognized as a key historical subject will its breakdown in industrial society become visible. To give some examples of historical gender, I shall briefly refer to gender in rent, trade, and crafts.71

Medieval tenants and freeholders owed rent to a lord.72 Since they ordinarily lived outside the money economy, their rent constituted the only significant surplus, the only exchangeable good they produced. Designating their other activities as “production” would be a mistake, since today this term implies some form of value transfer and consumption that, for the medieval peasant, applied only to rent. This lack of distinction between production and consumption functions is the clearest characteristic of the difference between subsistence and an economic existence.

Hundreds of contracts between peasants and their lords from the ninth to the twelfth centuries tell us what rents were: partly produce and partly servitude. And traditional rent was frequently paid in a gender-specific way. A large number of contracts carefully determined not only the amount of rent due for the land but also the gender from whom it was due. For instance, Ingmar paid the abbey fifteen days’ labor, presenting himself each day with two draught animals, and also owed one sheep every second year; his wife – and in the case of her death, a maid – delivered five chickens each fall. The language makes it obvious that two irreconcilable competencies are involved in the payment of the rent and that there is no common denominator uniting them. “Women’s products” and “men’s products” are clearly distinct. Church law did not forbid any and all general “servile work” on feast days. Rather, it clearly specified that men were to abstain from the hunt, from tree-felling, from the building of stockades; and women, from hoeing, shearing lambs, and pruning trees. The two could not produce the surplus to pay the rent interchangeably. Both the product and the exacted service were gender-bound.73

As with rent, so trade can have gender. And the trader is not always the man. Nor is there much substance to the belief that women trade in the village square and men roam afar. In Malaysia, the western Sahel, and the non-Hispanic Caribbean, it is the women who conduct the household’s activities, and the pattern is deeply ingrained. The trade is based on the women’s contacts with kin, and men have no chance to break into their circuits. Whether the trade is in pottery or jewelry, the woman is the one who deals with distant villages, while the man takes care of the house. To keep the husband in the home, a woman trader might force a second wife on him under the threat that otherwise she would leave him – a threat that even today holds good in Senegal. The man knows that what she trades no one would buy from him, and that her income is needed for the house. Like rent, trade goods also have gender. In northern Burma, no one in his right mind would buy jewelry in the market from a man; it would undoubtedly be fake for the tourist.74

Crafts also have gender, often an intricately developed one. Not only the crafts of subsistence – potting and cooking in one’s own hut, or spinning and weaving to outfit one’s camel – but also arts and crafts organized for sale and trade possess gender. A tailor in the North African bazaar cannot be replaced with a seamstress; or, where would one find a shoe repair woman? When the eye is sharpened for the perception of gender, an everyday dish or an ordinary piece of cloth can reveal a pattern as subtle but as real as fine filigree. Fulling, dyeing, weaving, cutting, finishing – each stage requires several distinct contributions, some made only by women, some only by men, until a four-handed opus has been completed.

A couple of recent studies on medieval trades have made much of the fact that many guilds allowed women to become masters. The silk-spinning and -weaving guild in fourteenth-century Cologne was made up solely of women. But, more surprisingly, we find women in guilds that were decidedly men’s domain: In one case, a woman headed a fourteenth-century smithy, which had two dozen workers and a heavy investment in water-mill-driven hammers. But such women were widows of guild members, and by being in the guild, they could keep the shop in the family. They were appointed the shops’ guardians, as their men had been before them. But to jump from evidence of this guardianship of town or family interests to a conclusion that women worked iron ore side by side with the apprentices, in competition with them, would be ludricrous.75 Rent, trade, and craft are only examples of areas that must be studied to evolve a history of gender in advanced or high civilization.

Gender is not a concept that can be viewed as merely a quaint aspect of primitive life-style, something that town life, simple commodity production, or complex marketing can wash from society’s texture. Gender thrives in high civilizations. In the urban life of the Middle Ages it combined with the division of labor into crafts and arts to bring about new and complex configurations that are far more difficult to disentangle than the primitive divide on which anthropologists have fastened.

Gender is not confined to the present, to the actions and tools that sustain life in the present of any historical period. Each culture also assigns some tasks to men and others to women when it celebrates its own past. In Minot, in central France, the same woman who washes the newborn of the village also washes and lays out the dead. Ceremonial custom preserves gender from a distant past. Memory, too, is as dual. To this very day in Thrace, men speak about the dead and their deeds, but only women can address them. Only the women can shriek, lamenting those who have passed away and invoking their protection. Gendered action stretches into the past, into the beyond.

Gender and Kinship#

Historians avoid discussing gender by consigning its reign to prehistory alone. And prehistory they leave to anthropology. But anthropologists possess their own avoidance mechanisms. Like physicians who lose sight of the sick by concentrating on the disease, they overlook gender by focusing on kinship. Henry Morgan himself, the man who launched kinship studies in the middle of the last century, described kinship systems as complex relationships among individuals sexually polarized into men and women. Morgan and later anthropologists tend to de-emphasize the clear truth that kinship primarily structures gender domains in their complementarity. Kin are those who in precisely defined terms can reach one another across the gender divide. Kinship essentially organizes the rules of who is who to whom, which is much more significant than the establishment of a regime that gives some men power over some women. Kinship presupposes the two genders, which it relates to one another. Gender not only tells who is who, but it also defines who is when, where, and with which tools and words; it divides space, time, and technique. It would appear that the fascination the incest taboo exercises over scientists born into decent families distracts their vision from the gender divide that underlies kinship. To explain gender by using kinship as one’s point of departure is an undertaking not unlike the reconstruction of a body from its own X-rays. Gender can neither be elicited from kinship nor, in a structuralist fashion, reduced to one aspect of a cosmic duality.76

I cannot avoid, however, thinking that this urge to rank gender with other dualities has as its principal purpose the preclusion of the search for sources. Robert Graves talks about the poet’s necessary search for his sources “in the nests of the White Goddess, the Night Mare’s nest lined with the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jawbones and entrails of poets.” A fright-filled and risky task awaits both the poet and the genderless modern. The former must cross the trackless expanse of thickets and moors; the latter, the wastelands and ruins that lie beyond highway and conventional key words.

Gender and Wedlock#

Anthropologists uncritically place the conjugal couple at the center of “the new science,” albeit often in disguises that are hard to see through. Behind every ego they postulate procreators joined in wedlock, like their own mothers and fathers. They patently fail to realize that the sexed perception of their own origins, an ethnocentric bias, distorts what they study. This prejudice disables both the historians and the anthropologist, preventing them from seeing what makes the modern couple unique. Therefore, the recognition that “marriage” is as much a genderless key word as “role” or “exchange” is a necessary first step toward the study of gender and genital activity.

Starting with the twelfth century, Western societies developed economies based on the surplus product that could be expropriated from households comprised of conjugal couples. We know that surplus can be collected and exchanged in many ways; Karl Polanyi and his students have proposed typologies to distinguish the forms. But the wedded couple as the unit for surplus production creates a singular type. The important and essential new factor was neither the size of the family living under one roof nor the ability to organize king, servants, guests, or slaves in this unit but the economic function of the couple. Ethnology knows no parallel for this kind of household, which became the anthropological condition sine qua non for the unique productivity of the Westernized world. Anthropologically, Westernization can be understood as the convergence of many different kinship patterns toward the model of the conjugal household.

In the process of this merging, the two meanings of the word “marriage” gradually coalesced. Marriage designates, on the one hand, the festive wedding and ritual nuptials that can be recognized in one form or another in almost every known society and, on the other, the state of matrimony, a situation difficult to find in many societies. In medieval Europe, the state of matrimony began to assume ever greater importance. What had been principally a ceremony to tie together two families related by complex lines of kinship became the event by which two individuals were joined for life in the new economic unit of the couple, an entity that could be taxed. This shift from a tie creating knots between two webs of genders toward the welding of two individuals into a taxable unit was masked by the fact that “marriage” became a term meaning indistinctly the feast and the ongoing jointly productive lifespan of a conjugal couple.

In retrospect, it is important to note that in this early period of conjugal production the daily activities that created surplus remained strictly gendered. In fact, Church law sometimes interpreted and reinforced the divide. But as the conjugal couple gradually became the fundamental unit of taxation, most of the created surplus lost its traditional gender. The woman was no longer responsible for delivering her eggs to the lord; the man of the house became the household’s representative for the payment of rent. It is true that, even into the nineteenth century, work on the lord’s manor or on public roads was levied by gender. But rent was increasingly monetized, local currencies were replaced by the modern state’s money, and the conjugal couple proved itself as a flexible productive unit, superior to any previous form of household. Its continued reliance on gender kept it to a large extent subsistent, while the growing ability of state and Church to assign new gendered functions beyond and against traditional gendered proprieties made the couple adaptable to rapid technological change. Tasks remained gendered, but first the Church and much later secular powers presumed to define gender domains: For half a millennium the economy rested on the household of broken gender. The emergence of conjugal household production was the anthropological condition for the formation of early European peasantry and urban life – which distinguishes the European from farmers, merchants, and craftsmen elsewhere in the world.

The spread of gendered but conjugal production was only the first stage in the process that set Europe apart from all other cultures. The couple provided a fundamental homogeneity for Christian Europe, although the social step into this state was not taken without hesitation. There were variations in time and place, and many communities remained out of step until after World War II. This economically productive wedlock was a first stage in the evolution of the couple; it did not immediately imply any loss of gender. Thus, for five hundred years, from the thirteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, a kind of wedlock spread in which men and women yoked in matrimonial production were kept to their respective gendered tasks. Both feudal and mercantilist organization of state power is predicted on the surplus that was produced by the conjugally wedded but still gendered couple.77

Then, quite abruptly during the nineteenth century, the gendered assignment of household tasks was replaced by the economic division of wage and shadow work, discriminatingly assigned according to the newly discovered sexual characteristics of the consorts. The age of broken gender had served in Europe as a transition from vernacular subsistence to economic sex. Only in this curious second stage did economically distinct and genderless sex partners become the foundation of industrial production. And such couples provided the norm for the “libidinal structure and perception” of anthropologists born to them. For such people, gender must at least be meaningless, if not deeply frightening. They cannot but prefer to study theories of kinship rules rather than the local habits of gender.