Patrilocal Residence as the Historical Origin of Patriarchy
Discussion
Daniel Bitton:
"Another example of people making conscious choices in reaction to conditions is when people come under frequent attack, they’ll usually organize themselves around closely related men who grow up together and stay together forming a tight team, while their sisters will marry outside the group, and unrelated women will marry in to the group from the outside.
And this choice, called Patrilocal Residence, which we see all the over world among people faced with frequent attacks – for example every single nomadic pastoralist society known to exist or to have ever existed organizes this way because it’s easy to steal animals from herds – when people organize this way for self defense, it means that all the women end up coming from separate families and are socially isolated from eachother while all the men are close allies and form a close coalition.
And so, the unintended consequence of this is that it gives men political advantages that women don’t have, which leads to varying degrees of patriarchy. And this is why every single nomadic pastoralist society ever known to exist from northern scandinavia to the deserts of arabia to the mongolian steppe, have all been male dominated.
This is one of the best known and easiest to explain paths to male domination – but it’s totally absent from The Dawn of Everything, because they don’t want us to think about conditions, it’s all just freedom and choices!"