Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies, they are based on *maternal values:* care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike. Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a *cultural model.* This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves. The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking. This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths. * At the social level,* matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”. But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children. This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of *matrilineality*. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called *matrilocality. *Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling. In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as *non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.* This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the *economical level: *Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally. Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members. In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents. Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as *societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.* The patterns of* the political level* follow the principle of consensus, which means *unanimity* regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point. The basis of each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded. The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together in the village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached. The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is that matriarchies are *egalitarian societies of consensus.* This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice. But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. *At the spiritual and cultural level, *matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent*,* for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature. In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones. The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude. Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are *sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.* Read more in: Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): *Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future* Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009 Heide Goettner-Abendroth: *Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe* Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012 -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/
Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance. It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders. Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy. The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life. Just, "Thank you!" Warmly, June June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster ________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies, they are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike. Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves. The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking. This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths. At the social level, matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”. But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children. This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of matrilineality. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called matrilocality. Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling. In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship. This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the economical level: Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally. Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members. In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents. Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts. The patterns ofthe political level follow the principle of consensus, which means unanimity regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point. The basisof each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded. The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together inthe village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached. The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is thatmatriarchies are egalitarian societies of consensus. This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice. But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. Atthe spiritual and cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature. In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones. The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude. Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess. Read more in: Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009 Heide Goettner-Abendroth: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012 -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/ _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
Thanks June for reacting. I personally find it very challenging, in societies in which I lived and grew up in, ruled by increasing monetization ( top down hierachical debt ), to live an approach based on sharing and contributing to a commons which includes matriarchal / nurturing patterns. My own experience, is that monetization is so strongly imposed ( maintaining control ) for the access to any resource, including water ( and soon perhaps air ? ) , and the fear of lack of money so strong, that me, and other friends who want to live in such way, seem to most often end up rather marginalized from society, when intentionally deciding to reduce involvement in the priorities of such ideological system empowered through servicing of debt / the debt peonage. I personally look forward to reduce such debt peonage. Mere survival, in western europe ( that is, access to a one room flat, and not particularly high quality food ), easily costs 1000 euros a month. Most of this money goes straight as a tax to service debt , profits and interests. Strategies can be developed to reduce such costs, while increasing autonomy. I believe a number of us revolving around p2pfoundation may be interested in such strategies , and the opening up and sharing of knowledge that can empower it. /// Various other concepts may be overlapping : certain forms of nomadism , festivalism ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism ) , ... Finding ways to use the overproduction of our society, "hack" monetized speculation ... Nomadic forms of matriarchy ( and by this I do not mean controled by women ) can be a strategy for survival, once we can find others to share with, and create with, progressively reaching thresholds for critical diversity. ( http://sharewiki.org/en/Emergent_Synthesis ) /// Yet, we are not completely there yet. I notice there is alienation all around. I seem to have learned to feel confident about the internal referencing I developed, and suffer mostly from the loneliness it can produce ( combined with brief periods of more intense socialization ), I realize other friends seem to still be struggling with sociocultural pressures from their environments ( likely as they did not give up on mainstream environments ) To be able to live by such intrinsically motivated approach, void of concerns regarding the debt peonage that threatens anyone to a ( silent and lonely ) death sentence, still seems to be an upper class privilege, or at the very least a middle class privilege, based on what I see around me. /// Interestingly, in what I see around me, such monetization seems to lead to further deconstruction, and from such deconstruction to the extreme, I see poor but educated artists ( coming from middle class families ? ) , with post-material focus in their needs, after experimenting some aspects of stress poverty and post-modern deconstruction can bring to the remaining expectations regarding a nuclear family, "produces" a lot of single mothers, and single fathers ( although my impression is that a lot of young men are lost in translation / do not yet know how to position themselves ? May end up even more isolated then women who may still be able to culturally find recognition as mothers ) , and from there I see a potential for regeneration, new ( albeit ancestral ? ) forms of social contracts (re)creating themselves. To listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and to be able to distinguish the different impacts of different parts of our brains, as to be forced into reptilian brain instincts only. I find the following talk very interesting in this regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh0afEgZziI At the same time, I personally sense that , as to not be controlled by a potentially more complex system of debt reification , it can make use of information systems that enable synthesis , enabling greater complexity, in greater simplicity, translating and aggregating intentions in such a way that they do not end up being controlled by hierarchical debt - scarcity - accumulation, but rather reverse such hierarchies towards intentional communal shareholding. In other words, matriarchal patterns that can include and build on top of deconstructed pieces of information, to regenerate forms of synthesis. In this, I see great potential in nomadic strategies, in modular strategies, in tribes. ( http://nomadology.com/tribes.html , https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3... ) By making available, through a commons, a technological basis, I sense we are giving ourselves the means to reinventing and experimenting with modular forms of social contracts, surviving in the interstices of the conditionality of the debt peonage , making use of nomadic strategies, moving to spaces abandoned by capital ( after their depletion ) as to regenerate social and ecological systems. /// Some old brainstorming, suggesting approaches for reversing the current concept of ( imposed ) debt http://cashwiki.org/en/Debt_to_Intention https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156YzIeH-eoYFl9nMzFxofQ55KVoksqusS0pY... /// Potentials to use distributed approaches to linked data, and explored by a variety of individuals and groups / projects : https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/ https://github.com/open-app ( relating to enspiral / loomio ) https://github.com/automenta/netjs ( netention ) https://github.com/valnet/ ( NRP ? ) https://github.com/tav/ampify ( Espians ? ) https://github.com/willzeng/WikiNets ( Rhizi ) https://github.com/d-cent ( D-cent ) https://docs.openmustardseed.org/next-steps/source-code/ ( open mustardseed ) /// Further recent brainstorming : https://groups.google.com/d/msg/econowmix/buMYyTfcSCk/TP7stSUX4OQJ On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:22 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance.
It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.
Just, "Thank you!"
Warmly, June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html
Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies, they are based on *maternal values:* care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike. Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a *cultural model.* This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves.
The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking.
This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths.
* At the social level,* matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”.
But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children.
This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of *matrilineality*. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called *matrilocality. *Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling.
In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as *non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.*
This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the *economical level: *Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally.
Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members.
In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents.
Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as *societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.*
The patterns of* the political level* follow the principle of consensus, which means *unanimity* regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point.
The basis of each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded.
The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together in the village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached.
The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is that matriarchies are *egalitarian societies of consensus.* This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice.
But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. *At the spiritual and cultural level, *matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent*,* for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature.
In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones.
The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude.
Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are *sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.*
Read more in:
Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): *Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future* Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009
Heide Goettner-Abendroth: *Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe* Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012
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Dante - Forgive the pun, but on this economic point I believe you are right on the money! For in this the patriarchal mindset has trumped, and the definition of all worthwhile "value" reduced completely down to that which makes certain people -- all of which, not coincidentally, tend to be the most "patriarchal" in their beliefs and emotional modus operandi -- the "leaders" of this increasingly unfair, unequal and unsustainable, breaking-apart world. Yet, we call them "wealthy", often "intelligent" and treat them like "kings" and accept their system, even when spiritual, moral and even environmental bankruptcy are the obvious and only predictable ends. It is, after the physical aggression and violence used more historically and currently in still less "developed" places, the most sophisticated of all their control mechanisms as so many, (as you explain in your resultant alienation from this economic system), have "bought" into it, telling themselves there is no other way. At least the physical control and subsequent felt resistance was more honest and did not create our own participation in our own subjugation: this subsequent emotional as well as physical "slavery". I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. This, I have found, is the most important and most difficult work to do -- on ourselves first, and then on our societal systems. But much, much easier to do when done together, accepting and admitting to the hard work of that emotional re-learning and what level of vulnerability and care it demands in order to do well. Especially as it is completely deemed "foreign" and denigrated by all that is most "valued" as "strength" and dominance of the patriarchal models so deeply enforced. That is where "community" is most essential, and lived interactive presence in community the true test of these excavated truths. Emotional honesty and emotional intelligence then become critical pre-requisites to do this work. So I deeply support your trying to do it, Dante-Gabryell and helping all of us too, over this still rather cold distance of internet "words" that miss the deepest, most important heart-to-heart communication that is its true countervailing form to heal that very taught cold distance and created alienation. In this I have found, the cognitive words mean very little compared to the actions in our lives and our greater world and with each other. So I do truly appreciate that and what you are trying to do here, June And do you ever get to London? I still believe the most powerful conversations of learning this very thing are indeed inter-personal. By very definition, that have to be done that way to be "heard" truly and coherently. :-) ________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: leonard ferrari <[email protected]>; Tom Henfrey <[email protected]>; Lisa Maroski <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 8:08 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies Thanks June for reacting. I personally find it very challenging, in societies in which I lived and grew up in, ruled by increasing monetization ( top down hierachical debt ), to live an approach based on sharing and contributing to a commons which includes matriarchal / nurturing patterns. My own experience, is that monetization is so strongly imposed ( maintaining control ) for the access to any resource, including water ( and soon perhaps air ? ) , and the fear of lack of money so strong, that me, and other friends who want to live in such way, seem to most often end up rather marginalized from society, when intentionally deciding to reduce involvement in the priorities of such ideological system empowered through servicing of debt / the debt peonage. I personally look forward to reduce such debt peonage. Mere survival, in western europe ( that is, access to a one room flat, and not particularly high quality food ), easily costs 1000 euros a month. Most of this money goes straight as a tax to service debt , profits and interests. Strategies can be developed to reduce such costs, while increasing autonomy. I believe a number of us revolving around p2pfoundation may be interested in such strategies , and the opening up and sharing of knowledge that can empower it. /// Various other concepts may be overlapping : certain forms of nomadism , festivalism ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism ) , ... Finding ways to use the overproduction of our society, "hack" monetized speculation ... Nomadic forms of matriarchy ( and by this I do not mean controled by women ) can be a strategy for survival, once we can find others to share with, and create with, progressively reaching thresholds for critical diversity. ( http://sharewiki.org/en/Emergent_Synthesis ) /// Yet, we are not completely there yet. I notice there is alienation all around. I seem to have learned to feel confident about the internal referencing I developed, and suffer mostly from the loneliness it can produce ( combined with brief periods of more intense socialization ), I realize other friends seem to still be struggling with sociocultural pressures from their environments ( likely as they did not give up on mainstream environments ) To be able to live by such intrinsically motivated approach, void of concerns regarding the debt peonage that threatens anyone to a ( silent and lonely ) death sentence, still seems to be an upper class privilege, or at the very least a middle class privilege, based on what I see around me. /// Interestingly, in what I see around me, such monetization seems to lead to further deconstruction, and from such deconstruction to the extreme, I see poor but educated artists ( coming from middle class families ? ) , with post-material focus in their needs, after experimenting some aspects of stress poverty and post-modern deconstruction can bring to the remaining expectations regarding a nuclear family, "produces" a lot of single mothers, and single fathers ( although my impression is that a lot of young men are lost in translation / do not yet know how to position themselves ? May end up even more isolated then women who may still be able to culturally find recognition as mothers ) , and from there I see a potential for regeneration, new ( albeit ancestral ? ) forms of social contracts (re)creating themselves. To listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and to be able to distinguish the different impacts of different parts of our brains, as to be forced into reptilian brain instincts only. I find the following talk very interesting in this regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh0afEgZziI At the same time, I personally sense that , as to not be controlled by a potentially more complex system of debt reification , it can make use of information systems that enable synthesis , enabling greater complexity, in greater simplicity, translating and aggregating intentions in such a way that they do not end up being controlled by hierarchical debt - scarcity - accumulation, but rather reverse such hierarchies towards intentional communal shareholding. In other words, matriarchal patterns that can include and build on top of deconstructed pieces of information, to regenerate forms of synthesis. In this, I see great potential in nomadic strategies, in modular strategies, in tribes. ( http://nomadology.com/tribes.html , https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3... ) By making available, through a commons, a technological basis, I sense we are giving ourselves the means to reinventing and experimenting with modular forms of social contracts, surviving in the interstices of the conditionality of the debt peonage , making use of nomadic strategies, moving to spaces abandoned by capital ( after their depletion ) as to regenerate social and ecological systems. /// Some old brainstorming, suggesting approaches for reversing the current concept of ( imposed ) debt http://cashwiki.org/en/Debt_to_Intention https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156YzIeH-eoYFl9nMzFxofQ55KVoksqusS0pY... /// Potentials to use distributed approaches to linked data, and explored by a variety of individuals and groups / projects : https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/ https://github.com/open-app( relating to enspiral / loomio ) https://github.com/automenta/netjs( netention ) https://github.com/valnet/( NRP ? ) https://github.com/tav/ampify( Espians ? ) https://github.com/willzeng/WikiNets( Rhizi ) https://github.com/d-cent( D-cent ) https://docs.openmustardseed.org/next-steps/source-code/( open mustardseed ) /// Further recent brainstorming : https://groups.google.com/d/msg/econowmix/buMYyTfcSCk/TP7stSUX4OQJ On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:22 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote: Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance.
It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.
Just, "Thank you!"
Warmly, June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html
Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies
are mother-centered societies, they are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike.
Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves. The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking. This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths. At the social level, matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”. But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children. This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of matrilineality. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called matrilocality. Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling. In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship. This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the economical level: Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally. Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members. In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents. Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.
The patterns ofthe political level follow the principle of consensus, which means unanimity regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point. The basisof each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded. The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together inthe village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached. The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is thatmatriarchies are egalitarian societies of consensus. This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice. But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. Atthe spiritual and cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature. In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones. The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude. Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess. Read more in: Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009 Heide Goettner-Abendroth: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012
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I find it interesting to observe ( and study ? ) how ( certain parts of ) established academia itself might be adapting to maintain certain ideologies ? Here is an article in french, related to a business school in Brussels, who has been offering courses to managers who , in my own interpretation, start to doubt about what they have been thought and have been applying ( chicago school economics ), after the unfolding of the crisis, as to overcome the internal ( moral ? ) conflict such managers may have ? http://www.rtbf.be/info/economie/detail_metez-moi-une-bonne-dose-de-philo-da... http://www.solvay.edu/executive-programme-management-philosophies Perhaps there are similar courses for top executives in the UK, US, ... ? Possibly we could bring forward our own, but instead of encouraging them to continue managing a certain ideology, put forward strategies in which they can use their position to enable de-monetization, eventually by investing into infrastructures that facilitate the emergence of economic networks that become *less* dependent on corporate fiat credit / debt money ? // As for meeting face to face, it could be nice to have a ( nordic ) folkhighschool like environment, where one can meet, learn together, and live for a while. *Visiting* people, especially in big cities, may imho not be ideal. I'll detail this, applied to for example a city such as London : As for London,my experience as a hitch hiker is ... to avoid such big cities / black holes :) Although I do understand such places offer a great diversity of activity, My experience is also that such cities tend to be even more segregated. It feels very lonely, in my own mode of experience, to be in such environments, unless one has the *keys* / legitimacy to access certain networks. Professional networks, academic networks, diaspora migrant or expat networks, activist networks, ... and preferably at the time of a specific event, when attention is more available and shared, as otherwise attention limits itself to the time of a cup of tea, with most people in bigger cities being very busy, and passer-by people being disconnected from the realities experienced by those who live there. Hence I am careful not to fall into bigger cities, as it is often a trap ;) I sense that big busy cities are not particularly a place to genuinly connect to the general population, imho, and mere transportation costs a fortune, and so does train connection to and from London. Although in theory, Brussels and London are connected within a 1hour55 minutes train ride, in practice it is in my view accessible mostly to professionals with paid expenses and/or people with salaries going on a city trip. It is cheaper ( and sometimes faster ) to go / hitch hike to central europe ... Hence, I have very little incentive to go to London, and prefer meeting friends that live in London, outside of London, for example on the continent. I still look forward for us to generate spaces for convergence. There was the Matera Edgeryders initiative. There is the current banana space in Berlin. I hoped to set up a space in Belgium ( draft : http://sharewiki.org/en/Antwerp_Collective ) On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 9:57 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Dante -
Forgive the pun, but on this economic point I believe you are right on the money! For in this the patriarchal mindset has trumped, and the definition of all worthwhile "value" reduced completely down to that which makes certain people -- all of which, not coincidentally, tend to be the most "patriarchal" in their beliefs and emotional modus operandi -- the "leaders" of this increasingly unfair, unequal and unsustainable, breaking-apart world. Yet, we call them "wealthy", often "intelligent" and treat them like "kings" and accept their system, even when spiritual, moral and even environmental bankruptcy are the obvious and only predictable ends.
It is, after the physical aggression and violence used more historically and currently in still less "developed" places, the most sophisticated of all their control mechanisms as so many, (as you explain in your resultant alienation from this economic system), have "bought" into it, telling themselves there is no other way. At least the physical control and subsequent felt resistance was more honest and did not create our own participation in our own subjugation: this subsequent emotional as well as physical "slavery".
I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. This, I have found, is the most important and most difficult work to do -- on ourselves first, and then on our societal systems. But much, much easier to do when done together, accepting and admitting to the hard work of that emotional re-learning and what level of vulnerability and care it demands in order to do well. Especially as it is completely deemed "foreign" and denigrated by all that is most "valued" as "strength" and dominance of the patriarchal models so deeply enforced.
That is where "community" is most essential, and lived interactive presence in community the true test of these excavated truths. Emotional honesty and emotional intelligence then become critical pre-requisites to do this work.
So I deeply support your trying to do it, Dante-Gabryell and helping all of us too, over this still rather cold distance of internet "words" that miss the deepest, most important heart-to-heart communication that is its true countervailing form to heal that very taught cold distance and created alienation.
In this I have found, the cognitive words mean very little compared to the actions in our lives and our greater world and with each other.
So I do truly appreciate that and what you are trying to do here, June And do you ever get to London? I still believe the most powerful conversations of learning this very thing are indeed inter-personal. By very definition, that have to be done that way to be "heard" truly and coherently. :-)
------------------------------ *From:* Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> *To:* June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" < [email protected]>; "[email protected]" < [email protected]> *Cc:* leonard ferrari <[email protected]>; Tom Henfrey < [email protected]>; Lisa Maroski <[email protected]>
*Sent:* Saturday, August 16, 2014 8:08 PM *Subject:* Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
Thanks June for reacting.
I personally find it very challenging, in societies in which I lived and grew up in, ruled by increasing monetization ( top down hierachical debt ), to live an approach based on sharing and contributing to a commons which includes matriarchal / nurturing patterns.
My own experience, is that monetization is so strongly imposed ( maintaining control ) for the access to any resource, including water ( and soon perhaps air ? ) , and the fear of lack of money so strong, that me, and other friends who want to live in such way, seem to most often end up rather marginalized from society, when intentionally deciding to reduce involvement in the priorities of such ideological system empowered through servicing of debt / the debt peonage.
I personally look forward to reduce such debt peonage.
Mere survival, in western europe ( that is, access to a one room flat, and not particularly high quality food ), easily costs 1000 euros a month. Most of this money goes straight as a tax to service debt , profits and interests.
Strategies can be developed to reduce such costs, while increasing autonomy. I believe a number of us revolving around p2pfoundation may be interested in such strategies , and the opening up and sharing of knowledge that can empower it.
///
Various other concepts may be overlapping : certain forms of nomadism , festivalism ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism ) , ...
Finding ways to use the overproduction of our society, "hack" monetized speculation ...
Nomadic forms of matriarchy ( and by this I do not mean controled by women ) can be a strategy for survival, once we can find others to share with, and create with, progressively reaching thresholds for critical diversity. ( http://sharewiki.org/en/Emergent_Synthesis )
///
Yet, we are not completely there yet.
I notice there is alienation all around.
I seem to have learned to feel confident about the internal referencing I developed, and suffer mostly from the loneliness it can produce ( combined with brief periods of more intense socialization ), I realize other friends seem to still be struggling with sociocultural pressures from their environments ( likely as they did not give up on mainstream environments )
To be able to live by such intrinsically motivated approach, void of concerns regarding the debt peonage that threatens anyone to a ( silent and lonely ) death sentence,
still seems to be an upper class privilege, or at the very least a middle class privilege, based on what I see around me.
///
Interestingly, in what I see around me, such monetization seems to lead to further deconstruction, and from such deconstruction to the extreme, I see poor but educated artists ( coming from middle class families ? ) , with post-material focus in their needs, after experimenting some aspects of stress poverty and post-modern deconstruction can bring to the remaining expectations regarding a nuclear family,
"produces" a lot of single mothers, and single fathers ( although my impression is that a lot of young men are lost in translation / do not yet know how to position themselves ? May end up even more isolated then women who may still be able to culturally find recognition as mothers ) , and from there I see a potential for regeneration,
new ( albeit ancestral ? ) forms of social contracts (re)creating themselves.
To listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and to be able to distinguish the different impacts of different parts of our brains, as to be forced into reptilian brain instincts only.
I find the following talk very interesting in this regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh0afEgZziI
At the same time, I personally sense that , as to not be controlled by a potentially more complex system of debt reification , it can make use of information systems that enable synthesis , enabling greater complexity, in greater simplicity, translating and aggregating intentions in such a way that they do not end up being controlled by hierarchical debt - scarcity - accumulation, but rather reverse such hierarchies towards intentional communal shareholding.
In other words, matriarchal patterns that can include and build on top of deconstructed pieces of information, to regenerate forms of synthesis.
In this, I see great potential in nomadic strategies, in modular strategies, in tribes. ( http://nomadology.com/tribes.html ,
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3... )
By making available, through a commons, a technological basis, I sense we are giving ourselves the means to reinventing and experimenting with modular forms of social contracts, surviving in the interstices of the conditionality of the debt peonage ,
making use of nomadic strategies, moving to spaces abandoned by capital ( after their depletion ) as to regenerate social and ecological systems.
///
Some old brainstorming, suggesting approaches for reversing the current concept of ( imposed ) debt
http://cashwiki.org/en/Debt_to_Intention
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156YzIeH-eoYFl9nMzFxofQ55KVoksqusS0pY...
///
Potentials to use distributed approaches to linked data, and explored by a variety of individuals and groups / projects :
https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/
https://github.com/open-app ( relating to enspiral / loomio )
https://github.com/automenta/netjs ( netention )
https://github.com/valnet/ ( NRP ? )
https://github.com/tav/ampify ( Espians ? )
https://github.com/willzeng/WikiNets ( Rhizi )
https://github.com/d-cent ( D-cent )
https://docs.openmustardseed.org/next-steps/source-code/ ( open mustardseed )
///
Further recent brainstorming :
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/econowmix/buMYyTfcSCk/TP7stSUX4OQJ
On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:22 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance.
It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.
Just, "Thank you!"
Warmly, June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
------------------------------ *From:* Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> *To:* p2p-foundation <[email protected]> *Sent:* Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM *Subject:* [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Dante-Gabryell Monson* <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html
Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies are mother-centered societies, they are based on *maternal values:* care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike. Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a *cultural model.* This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves.
The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking.
This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths.
* At the social level,* matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”.
But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children.
This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of *matrilineality*. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called *matrilocality. *Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling.
In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as *non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.*
This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the *economical level: *Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally.
Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members.
In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents.
Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as *societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.*
The patterns of* the political level* follow the principle of consensus, which means *unanimity* regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point.
The basis of each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded.
The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together in the village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached.
The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is that matriarchies are *egalitarian societies of consensus.* This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice.
But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. *At the spiritual and cultural level, *matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent*,* for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature.
In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones.
The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude.
Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are *sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.*
Read more in:
Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): *Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future* Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009
Heide Goettner-Abendroth: *Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe* Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012
-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
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Dear June, i follow the texts from dante and you. In your answer you wrote: "I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. ..." But without the independence in the local economy, no one can escape from slavery. Only dream worlds can then arise. I know, for the people in europe this is beyond their imagination. But there is no way around. many greetings, willi now: Popayan, Colombia Am 16/08/2014 um 14:57 schrieb June Gorman:
Dante -
Forgive the pun, but on this economic point I believe you are right on the money! For in this the patriarchal mindset has trumped, and the definition of all worthwhile "value" reduced completely down to that which makes certain people -- all of which, not coincidentally, tend to be the most "patriarchal" in their beliefs and emotional modus operandi -- the "leaders" of this increasingly unfair, unequal and unsustainable, breaking-apart world. Yet, we call them "wealthy", often "intelligent" and treat them like "kings" and accept their system, even when spiritual, moral and even environmental bankruptcy are the obvious and only predictable ends.
It is, after the physical aggression and violence used more historically and currently in still less "developed" places, the most sophisticated of all their control mechanisms as so many, (as you explain in your resultant alienation from this economic system), have "bought" into it, telling themselves there is no other way. At least the physical control and subsequent felt resistance was more honest and did not create our own participation in our own subjugation: this subsequent emotional as well as physical "slavery".
I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. This, I have found, is the most important and most difficult work to do -- on ourselves first, and then on our societal systems. But much, much easier to do when done together, accepting and admitting to the hard work of that emotional re-learning and what level of vulnerability and care it demands in order to do well. Especially as it is completely deemed "foreign" and denigrated by all that is most "valued" as "strength" and dominance of the patriarchal models so deeply enforced.
That is where "community" is most essential, and lived interactive presence in community the true test of these excavated truths. Emotional honesty and emotional intelligence then become critical pre-requisites to do this work.
So I deeply support your trying to do it, Dante-Gabryell and helping all of us too, over this still rather cold distance of internet "words" that miss the deepest, most important heart-to-heart communication that is its true countervailing form to heal that very taught cold distance and created alienation.
In this I have found, the cognitive words mean very little compared to the actions in our lives and our greater world and with each other.
So I do truly appreciate that and what you are trying to do here, June And do you ever get to London? I still believe the most powerful conversations of learning this very thing are indeed inter-personal. By very definition, that have to be done that way to be "heard" truly and coherently. :-)
________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: leonard ferrari <[email protected]>; Tom Henfrey <[email protected]>; Lisa Maroski <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 8:08 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
Thanks June for reacting.
I personally find it very challenging, in societies in which I lived and grew up in, ruled by increasing monetization ( top down hierachical debt ), to live an approach based on sharing and contributing to a commons which includes matriarchal / nurturing patterns.
My own experience, is that monetization is so strongly imposed ( maintaining control ) for the access to any resource, including water ( and soon perhaps air ? ) , and the fear of lack of money so strong, that me, and other friends who want to live in such way, seem to most often end up rather marginalized from society, when intentionally deciding to reduce involvement in the priorities of such ideological system empowered through servicing of debt / the debt peonage.
I personally look forward to reduce such debt peonage.
Mere survival, in western europe ( that is, access to a one room flat, and not particularly high quality food ), easily costs 1000 euros a month.
Most of this money goes straight as a tax to service debt , profits and interests.
Strategies can be developed to reduce such costs, while increasing autonomy. I believe a number of us revolving around p2pfoundation may be interested in such strategies , and the opening up and sharing of knowledge that can empower it.
///
Various other concepts may be overlapping : certain forms of nomadism , festivalism ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism ) , ...
Finding ways to use the overproduction of our society, "hack" monetized speculation ...
Nomadic forms of matriarchy ( and by this I do not mean controled by women ) can be a strategy for survival, once we can find others to share with, and create with, progressively reaching thresholds for critical diversity. ( http://sharewiki.org/en/Emergent_Synthesis )
///
Yet, we are not completely there yet.
I notice there is alienation all around.
I seem to have learned to feel confident about the internal referencing I developed, and suffer mostly from the loneliness it can produce ( combined with brief periods of more intense socialization ), I realize other friends seem to still be struggling with sociocultural pressures from their environments ( likely as they did not give up on mainstream environments )
To be able to live by such intrinsically motivated approach, void of concerns regarding the debt peonage that threatens anyone to a ( silent and lonely ) death sentence,
still seems to be an upper class privilege, or at the very least a middle class privilege, based on what I see around me.
///
Interestingly, in what I see around me, such monetization seems to lead to further deconstruction, and from such deconstruction to the extreme, I see poor but educated artists ( coming from middle class families ? ) , with post-material focus in their needs, after experimenting some aspects of stress poverty and post-modern deconstruction can bring to the remaining expectations regarding a nuclear family,
"produces" a lot of single mothers, and single fathers ( although my impression is that a lot of young men are lost in translation / do not yet know how to position themselves ? May end up even more isolated then women who may still be able to culturally find recognition as mothers ) ,
and from there I see a potential for regeneration,
new ( albeit ancestral ? ) forms of social contracts (re)creating themselves.
To listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and to be able to distinguish the different impacts of different parts of our brains, as to be forced into reptilian brain instincts only.
I find the following talk very interesting in this regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh0afEgZziI
At the same time, I personally sense that , as to not be controlled by a potentially more complex system of debt reification , it can make use of information systems that enable synthesis , enabling greater complexity, in greater simplicity, translating and aggregating intentions in such a way that they do not end up being controlled by hierarchical debt - scarcity - accumulation, but rather reverse such hierarchies towards intentional communal shareholding.
In other words, matriarchal patterns that can include and build on top of deconstructed pieces of information, to regenerate forms of synthesis.
In this, I see great potential in nomadic strategies, in modular strategies, in tribes. ( http://nomadology.com/tribes.html , https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3... )
By making available, through a commons, a technological basis,
I sense we are giving ourselves the means to reinventing and experimenting with modular forms of social contracts, surviving in the interstices of the conditionality of the debt peonage ,
making use of nomadic strategies, moving to spaces abandoned by capital ( after their depletion )
as to regenerate social and ecological systems.
///
Some old brainstorming, suggesting approaches for reversing the current concept of ( imposed ) debt
http://cashwiki.org/en/Debt_to_Intention
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156YzIeH-eoYFl9nMzFxofQ55KVoksqusS0pY...
///
Potentials to use distributed approaches to linked data, and explored by a variety of individuals and groups / projects :
https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/
https://github.com/open-app( relating to enspiral / loomio )
https://github.com/automenta/netjs( netention )
https://github.com/valnet/( NRP ? )
https://github.com/tav/ampify( Espians ? )
https://github.com/willzeng/WikiNets( Rhizi )
https://github.com/d-cent( D-cent )
https://docs.openmustardseed.org/next-steps/source-code/( open mustardseed )
///
Further recent brainstorming :
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/econowmix/buMYyTfcSCk/TP7stSUX4OQJ
On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:22 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance.
It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.
Just, "Thank you!"
Warmly, June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html
Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies
are mother-centered societies, they are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike.
Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves.
The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking.
This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths.
At the social level, matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”.
But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children.
This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of matrilineality. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called matrilocality. Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling.
In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.
This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the economical level: Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally.
Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members.
In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents.
Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.
The patterns ofthe political level follow the principle of consensus, which means unanimity regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point.
The basisof each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded.
The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together inthe village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached.
The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is thatmatriarchies are egalitarian societies of consensus. This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice.
But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. Atthe spiritual and cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature.
In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones.
The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude.
Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.
Read more in:
Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009
Heide Goettner-Abendroth: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012
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I understand your point Willi, and I agree that without material independence, we will not be able to free ourselves completely from capitalist values. I see this as a gradual process in which the desire to be free invites us to find ways to create material conditions for ourselves which are independent of the capitalist system. Then that independence to whatever degree feeds a consciousness which enables us to see other opportunities to become more independent, and so on. It is not a once for all event. We will all inevitably bring with us values we have internalised, consciously and unconsciously, which will need the excavation June talks about. The 'dreaming' is important, not because we can't imagine another way, but because we need to be clear about what we want. Anna
On 16 Aug 2014, at 22:38, willi uebelherr <[email protected]> wrote:
Dear June,
i follow the texts from dante and you. In your answer you wrote:
"I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. ..."
But without the independence in the local economy, no one can escape from slavery. Only dream worlds can then arise. I know, for the people in europe this is beyond their imagination. But there is no way around.
many greetings, willi now: Popayan, Colombia
Am 16/08/2014 um 14:57 schrieb June Gorman: Dante -
Forgive the pun, but on this economic point I believe you are right on the money! For in this the patriarchal mindset has trumped, and the definition of all worthwhile "value" reduced completely down to that which makes certain people -- all of which, not coincidentally, tend to be the most "patriarchal" in their beliefs and emotional modus operandi -- the "leaders" of this increasingly unfair, unequal and unsustainable, breaking-apart world. Yet, we call them "wealthy", often "intelligent" and treat them like "kings" and accept their system, even when spiritual, moral and even environmental bankruptcy are the obvious and only predictable ends.
It is, after the physical aggression and violence used more historically and currently in still less "developed" places, the most sophisticated of all their control mechanisms as so many, (as you explain in your resultant alienation from this economic system), have "bought" into it, telling themselves there is no other way. At least the physical control and subsequent felt resistance was more honest and did not create our own participation in our own subjugation: this subsequent emotional as well as physical "slavery".
I still believe there is another way to fight these dominating pathologies by learning the language to expose them -- intellectually and philosophically, yes -- but more importantly, excavate them emotionally where this "learning" (like all social "learning") is most deeply imprinted on our own sense of self. This, I have found, is the most important and most difficult work to do -- on ourselves first, and then on our societal systems. But much, much easier to do when done together, accepting and admitting to the hard work of that emotional re-learning and what level of vulnerability and care it demands in order to do well. Especially as it is completely deemed "foreign" and denigrated by all that is most "valued" as "strength" and dominance of the patriarchal models so deeply enforced.
That is where "community" is most essential, and lived interactive presence in community the true test of these excavated truths. Emotional honesty and emotional intelligence then become critical pre-requisites to do this work.
So I deeply support your trying to do it, Dante-Gabryell and helping all of us too, over this still rather cold distance of internet "words" that miss the deepest, most important heart-to-heart communication that is its true countervailing form to heal that very taught cold distance and created alienation.
In this I have found, the cognitive words mean very little compared to the actions in our lives and our greater world and with each other.
So I do truly appreciate that and what you are trying to do here, June And do you ever get to London? I still believe the most powerful conversations of learning this very thing are indeed inter-personal. By very definition, that have to be done that way to be "heard" truly and coherently. :-)
________________________________ From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> To: June Gorman <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Cc: leonard ferrari <[email protected]>; Tom Henfrey <[email protected]>; Lisa Maroski <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 8:08 PM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
Thanks June for reacting.
I personally find it very challenging, in societies in which I lived and grew up in, ruled by increasing monetization ( top down hierachical debt ), to live an approach based on sharing and contributing to a commons which includes matriarchal / nurturing patterns.
My own experience, is that monetization is so strongly imposed ( maintaining control ) for the access to any resource, including water ( and soon perhaps air ? ) , and the fear of lack of money so strong, that me, and other friends who want to live in such way, seem to most often end up rather marginalized from society, when intentionally deciding to reduce involvement in the priorities of such ideological system empowered through servicing of debt / the debt peonage.
I personally look forward to reduce such debt peonage.
Mere survival, in western europe ( that is, access to a one room flat, and not particularly high quality food ), easily costs 1000 euros a month.
Most of this money goes straight as a tax to service debt , profits and interests.
Strategies can be developed to reduce such costs, while increasing autonomy. I believe a number of us revolving around p2pfoundation may be interested in such strategies , and the opening up and sharing of knowledge that can empower it.
///
Various other concepts may be overlapping : certain forms of nomadism , festivalism ( http://p2pfoundation.net/Festivalism ) , ...
Finding ways to use the overproduction of our society, "hack" monetized speculation ...
Nomadic forms of matriarchy ( and by this I do not mean controled by women ) can be a strategy for survival, once we can find others to share with, and create with, progressively reaching thresholds for critical diversity. ( http://sharewiki.org/en/Emergent_Synthesis )
///
Yet, we are not completely there yet.
I notice there is alienation all around.
I seem to have learned to feel confident about the internal referencing I developed, and suffer mostly from the loneliness it can produce ( combined with brief periods of more intense socialization ), I realize other friends seem to still be struggling with sociocultural pressures from their environments ( likely as they did not give up on mainstream environments )
To be able to live by such intrinsically motivated approach, void of concerns regarding the debt peonage that threatens anyone to a ( silent and lonely ) death sentence,
still seems to be an upper class privilege, or at the very least a middle class privilege, based on what I see around me.
///
Interestingly, in what I see around me, such monetization seems to lead to further deconstruction, and from such deconstruction to the extreme, I see poor but educated artists ( coming from middle class families ? ) , with post-material focus in their needs, after experimenting some aspects of stress poverty and post-modern deconstruction can bring to the remaining expectations regarding a nuclear family,
"produces" a lot of single mothers, and single fathers ( although my impression is that a lot of young men are lost in translation / do not yet know how to position themselves ? May end up even more isolated then women who may still be able to culturally find recognition as mothers ) ,
and from there I see a potential for regeneration,
new ( albeit ancestral ? ) forms of social contracts (re)creating themselves.
To listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and to be able to distinguish the different impacts of different parts of our brains, as to be forced into reptilian brain instincts only.
I find the following talk very interesting in this regard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh0afEgZziI
At the same time, I personally sense that , as to not be controlled by a potentially more complex system of debt reification , it can make use of information systems that enable synthesis , enabling greater complexity, in greater simplicity, translating and aggregating intentions in such a way that they do not end up being controlled by hierarchical debt - scarcity - accumulation, but rather reverse such hierarchies towards intentional communal shareholding.
In other words, matriarchal patterns that can include and build on top of deconstructed pieces of information, to regenerate forms of synthesis.
In this, I see great potential in nomadic strategies, in modular strategies, in tribes. ( http://nomadology.com/tribes.html , https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19g_XYezo_jHEZINUqZNZUswZaLsuNHpvbsT3... )
By making available, through a commons, a technological basis,
I sense we are giving ourselves the means to reinventing and experimenting with modular forms of social contracts, surviving in the interstices of the conditionality of the debt peonage ,
making use of nomadic strategies, moving to spaces abandoned by capital ( after their depletion )
as to regenerate social and ecological systems.
///
Some old brainstorming, suggesting approaches for reversing the current concept of ( imposed ) debt
http://cashwiki.org/en/Debt_to_Intention
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156YzIeH-eoYFl9nMzFxofQ55KVoksqusS0pY...
///
Potentials to use distributed approaches to linked data, and explored by a variety of individuals and groups / projects :
https://github.com/assemblee-virtuelle/
https://github.com/open-app( relating to enspiral / loomio )
https://github.com/automenta/netjs( netention )
https://github.com/valnet/( NRP ? )
https://github.com/tav/ampify( Espians ? )
https://github.com/willzeng/WikiNets( Rhizi )
https://github.com/d-cent( D-cent )
https://docs.openmustardseed.org/next-steps/source-code/( open mustardseed )
///
Further recent brainstorming :
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/econowmix/buMYyTfcSCk/TP7stSUX4OQJ
On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 7:22 PM, June Gorman <[email protected]> wrote:
Thank you SO much for this Michel and especially Dante, who found this and shared this piece! As I truly believe this is an essential and critical discussion for any true transformation of a so deeply and aggressively imbalanced patriarchal society and world, and that the necessary emotional intelligence critical to getting back to any true "balance" or human and planet sustainability, has been broken and deeply damaged by that very left-brain, overly rationalized focus that obscures these issues. And is so deeply reinforced by our educational system, which deepens this very imbalance.
It's just a great piece, Dante but the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.
Just, "Thank you!"
Warmly, June
June Gorman, Educator and Educational Theorist Co-founder, Transformative Education Forum<http://www.tef-global.org/> Education Advisor, UN SafePlanet Campaign <http://www.safepla.net/> Board Project Director for Outreach, International Model United Nations Association<http://imuna.org/> Steering Committee, (UNESCO/Global Compact) K-12 Sector for Sustainability Education <http://www.uspartnership.org/main/view_archive/1> ) Member, UN Education Caucus for Sustainable Development Member, UN Commons Cluster
________________________________ From: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> To: p2p-foundation <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:49 PM Subject: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 5:54 PM Subject: Matriarchal Studies To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy.html
http://www.hagia.de/en/matriarchy/matriarchal-studies.html
Matriarchy Matriarchies are not just a reversal of patriarchy, with women ruling over men – as the usual misinterpretation would have it. Matriarchies
are mother-centered societies, they are based on maternal values: care-taking, nurturing, motherliness, which holds for everybody: for mothers and those who are not mothers, for women and men alike.
Matriarchal societies are consciously built upon these maternal values and motherly work, and this is why they are much more realistic than patriarchies. They are, on principle, need-oriented. Their precepts aim to meet everyone’s needs with the greatest benefit. So, in matriarchies, mothering – which originates as a biological fact – is transformed into a cultural model. This model is much more appropriate to the human condition than the way patriarchies conceptualise motherhood and use it to make women, and especially mothers, into slaves.
The deep structure of “matriarchal society” (a structural definition): With matriarchal cultures, equality means more than just a levelling of differences. Natural differences between the genders and the generations are respected and honoured, but they never serve to create hierarchies, as is common in patriarchy. The different genders and generations have their own dignity, and through complementary areas of activity, they function in concert one other. More precisely, matriarchies are societies with complementary equality, where great care is taken to provide a balance. This applies to the balance between genders, among generations, and between humans and nature. Maternal values as ethical principles pervade all areas of a matriarchal society. It creates an attitude of care-taking, nurturing, and peacemaking.
This can be observed on all levels of society: the economic level, the social level, the political level and the areas of their worldviews and faiths.
At the social level, matriarchal societies are based on the clan, and on the “symbolic order of the mother”. This also means maternal values as spiritual principles, one that humans take from nature. Mother Nature cares for all beings, however different they may be. The same applies to motherliness: a good mother cares for all her children, embracing their diversity. This holds true for men as well. If a man in a matriarchal society desires to acquire status among his peers, or even become a representative of the clan to the outside word, then he must be like a “good mother”.
But in matriarchies, you don’t have to be a biological mother in order to be acknowledged as a woman, because matriarchies practice the common motherhood of a group of sisters. Each individual sister does not necessarily have to have children, but together they are all “mothers” of any children that any of them have. This motherhood is founded on the freedom of women to decide on their own about whether or not to have biological children.
This is possible because matriarchal people live together in large kinship groups, formed according to the principle of matrilineality. The clan’s name, and all social status and political titles, are passed on through the mother’s line. Such a matri-clan consists of at least three generations of women, along with their brothers, nephews and maternal uncles. In classic cases, the matri-clan lives in one big clan-house. This is called matrilocality. Their spouses or lovers stay only over-night, in a pattern called “visiting-marriage”. These principles of matrilineality and matrilocality put mothers at the center; in this way women guide their clans without ruling.
In order to achieve social cohesion among the clans of a village or city, complex marriage conventions have been developed that link them in mutually beneficial ways. The intended effect is that all inhabitants of a village or city are related to each other by birth or by marriage. This shapes a society that sees itself as a big clan, where everybody is “mother” or “sister” or “brother” to everybody else. Thus matriarchies can be defined at the social level as non-hierarchical, horizontal societies of matrilineal kinship.
This social order based on motherhood includes far reaching consequences for the economical level: Matriarchal economy is a subsistence economy. There is no such thing as private property, and there are no territorial claims. The people simply have usage rights on the soil they till, or the pastures their animals graze, for Mother Earth can not be owned or cut up in pieces. She gives the fruits of the fields and the young animals to all people. Parcels of land and a certain number of animals are given to each matri-clan, and are worked on communally.
Most importantly, women have the power of disposition over goods and clan houses, and especially over the sources of nourishment: fields, flocks and food. All the goods are put in the hands of the clan mother, the matriarch, and she, mother of all the clan members, distributes them equally among her children and grand-children. She is responsible for the sustenance and protection of all clan members.
In a matriarchal community, the clans enjoy perfect mutuality: every relative advantage, or disadvantage, in terms of acquiring goods is mediated by social guidelines. For example, at the seasonal festivals of the agricultural year, clans that are comparatively better off will invite all the inhabitants to be their guests. The members of such a clan organize the banquet, the rituals, and the music and dances of one of the annual festivals – and then give away their goods as a gift to all their neighbours. By doing this, they gain nothing except honor. At the next festival in the cycle, another lucky clan will step up, outdoing itself by inviting everybody in the village or neighbourhood, entertaining them all, and dispensing presents.
Since this is the general attitude, matriarchal economy can be called a “gift economy”. It is the economic manifestation of maternal values, which prevents development of an exchange economy and instead fully achieves a gift economy. Due to these features, matriarchies can be defined at the economical level as societies of balanced economic reciprocity, based on the circulation of gifts.
The patterns ofthe political level follow the principle of consensus, which means unanimity regarding each decision. To manifest a principle like this in practice, a society must be specifically organized to do so, and matrilinear kinship lines are, once again, the starting point.
The basisof each decision-making is the individual clan house. Matters that concern the clan house are decided upon by the women and men in a consensus process, of which the matriarch is the facilitator. Each person has only one vote – even the matriarch – and no member of the household is excluded.
The same applies to decisions concerning the whole village. The clan delegates meet together inthe village council, but do not make decisions themselves; they simply communicate the decisions that have been made in their clan houses, and move back and forth, until a consensus decision is reached by the whole village. The same applies at the regional level. The delegates move between the local council and the regional council until consensus of all the villages is reached.
The origin of all politics is in the clan houses, where the people live, and in this way, a true “grass roots democracy” is put into practice. The result of these practices is thatmatriarchies are egalitarian societies of consensus. This clearly shows how maternal values also permeate political practice.
But such a societal system as matriarchy could not function as a whole without a deep, supporting and all-permeating spiritual attitude. Atthe spiritual and cultural level, matriarchal societies do not have hierarchic religions based on an omnipotent male God. In matriarchies, divinity is immanent, for the whole world is regarded as divine: as feminine divine. This is evident in the widely held concept of the universe as the Great Goddess who brought forth everything by birth, and of the earth as the Great Mother who created everything living. And everyone, and everything, is endowed with divinity by virtue of being a child of the Great Mother Nature.
In such a culture, everything is spiritual. In their festivals, which follow the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, everything is celebrated. There is no separation between sacred and secular, so the everyday tasks also have ritual significance. In this sense matriarchal societies are sacred ones.
The entire societies are constructed in the image of the creative Mother Nature. This divine mother is reflected in every woman’s being, and in her abilities to create. Every social, economic and political action is informed by the principle of the world’s – and the universe’s – all-encompassing maternal attitude.
Therefore, on the spiritual level, matriarchies are sacred societies and cultures of the Divine Feminine or Goddess.
Read more in:
Heide Goettner-Abendroth (ed.): Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future Inanna Press, York University, Toronto/Canada 2009
Heide Goettner-Abendroth: Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe Peter Lang, New York/USA, March 2012
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On 16/08/2014 18:22, June Gorman wrote:
the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life. Hi June, this is a very welcome statement for the list.
If I was to coin a bit of a provocation based on it - the extent to which the cognitive and action aspects of our lives are driven/shaped by our imaginal and embodied emotional agendas do seem to me to generally remain out of reach in the conversations here. But then as I well understand, this is partly due to the professional capture and sequestration of psychological knowledge by pharma and medicine. We embrace physical fitness but psy fitness still seems trapped behind the 'mental illness' fiction and off the activist and academic life agendas. For some constructive examples of how this stranglehold on psy fitness can be contradicted, listers might like to see my FREE ebook library <http://www.mindgymnasium.com/ebooks/pages/LTHSWebSpace05.htm>, especially*John Heron: Psyche and Personhood*<http://www.mindgymnasium.com/ebooks/PDFs/PDFs/HeronPsychePersonhood.pdf> and the two videos about the psyCommons on http://[email protected]. Greetings Denis --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com
I am in agreement with you, Denis, that there is a "deep silence" that shrouds this critical discussion of how people seem to act in consort with their proclaimed cognitively-argued values but often in clear, at least to others, discordant ways that suggest unearthed and unself-examined emotional confusion about earlier learned ways of seeing and being? This is the "tough stuff" for each of us and I wish that in all my experience it didn't end up being the most critical part of the communication breakdowns that consistently derail great commons thinking with potential great ideas and projects, but in actual practice is what often happens most. I'm amazed and disheartened by the clear "integrity" breaks that manifest from this discordance, often resulting in the communication breakdowns that derail our getting through these issues to the other side, in any healthy and sustaining way. In reference to Anna's response to Willi's claim that the necessary "independence in the local economy" trumps these discussions, I am much more aligned with Anna that without this work of imagining all of the underlying obstructions to this more equitable and even more loving world, you probably as a commons, will likely never get there. We have seen this countless times in countless revolutions, where the bullies still triumphed by being bullies, even if under differently envisioned cognitive ideals. The ideals didn't ultimately matter, the emotional "coherence" with those ideals and dealing with others with that coherence, did. That's an emotional reality. It is taught by societies' inequities and cruelties while young I would argue, in order to counter the more innate drive for "fairness" and equality that I have found unerringly in all the thousands of very young children I have met and taught. It services the rationalisation of our own privilege, to allow it to continue in one form or another, without deep examination about that rationalisation. I understand that internal need created by the initial "innocence" fracture, taught in sexist, racist. classist societies that want to maintain that inequitable status quo, but I don't think we can continue to suggest we can truly get anywhere different if we don't start acknowledging and addressing it, in all of us who came from those kinds of societies. It is therefore, and unfortunately because truly difficult work, not at all peripheral to these essential questions of sustainability and healthiness of humanity and the planet, but the core issues to address in truly getting to anywhere socially, economically and emotionally different. But admittedly, some of the hardest work to do....:-) Denis, you are apparently in "West London"? Let's meet sometime and talk more about this and your psycommons work? June ________________________________ From: Denis Postle <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2014 5:38 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies On 16/08/2014 18:22, June Gorman wrote: the key -- and I have found this to be the hardest for those trained well in cognitive displacement of inner heart "knowing" -- is to actually understand this emotionally, not just cognitively. That's when actual human relationships are transformed, when we forge the paths of learning from each other that do not deny our different ways of understanding, but actually balances them so we can hear the gifts offered by that very "difference". Over cultures and histories, as well as genders.
Anyway, critical to deconstruct as it so often is the underlying root of much of the dissension and "will to power over others" that is taught at the root of patriarchy but not, as this piece suggests and all my historical work has found as well, at the "power with one another" model at the ground of matriarchy.
The key is to teach that at the level it is most understood, the level of the emotional heart, critical to any successful parenting of any human life and ultimately the planet that supports that and all life.Hi June, this is a very welcome statement for the list.
If I was to coin a bit of a provocation based on it - the extent to which the cognitive and action aspects of our lives are driven/shaped by our imaginal and embodied emotional agendas do seem to me to generally remain out of reach in the conversations here. But then as I well understand, this is partly due to the professional capture and sequestration of psychological knowledge by pharma and medicine. We embrace physical fitness but psy fitness still seems trapped behind the 'mental illness' fiction and off the activist and academic life agendas. For some constructive examples of how this stranglehold on psy fitness can be contradicted, listers might like to see my FREE ebook library, especiallyJohn Heron: Psyche and Personhood and the two videos about the psyCommons on http://[email protected]. Greetings Denis ________________________________ This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. _______________________________________________ P2P Foundation - Mailing list http://www.p2pfoundation.net https://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation
On 19/08/2014 17:09, June Gorman wrote:
I understand that internal need created by the initial "innocence" fracture, taught in sexist, racist. classist societies that want to maintain that inequitable status quo, but I don't think we can continue to suggest we can truly get anywhere different if we don't start acknowledging and addressing it, in all of us who came from those kinds of societies.
It is therefore, and unfortunately because truly difficult work, not at all peripheral to these essential questions of sustainability and healthiness of humanity and the planet, but the core issues to address in truly getting to anywhere socially, economically and emotionally different. Yes indeed.
I have been baffled for some time about how to introduce these concerns and what has been learned, however as you say this is 'tough stuff'. Maybe some kind of face to face inquiry node on these topics alongside the list would be valuable. And if we are both in London (and anyone else, I am also based in Brussels) we could perhaps see if that idea had legs. I'll send my contact details off-line. A last thought that might nourish anyone looking in, or draw acute scepticism! Few people seem in touch with the long term research of the psychohistorians. A key element of their study of the evolution of childhood and its relation to political realities suggests that the possible politics to some degree tracks changes in child, especially infant, child care. ie that political relationships elvolve in the direction of mirroring how power is experienced via childcare. It could be that the extent to which men are much more involved in childcare and that it seems increasingly more child-centered, might result in a contradiction of patriarchal politics. This has been my personal or local experience. Your thoughts? Denis --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com
Hi June and Denis, Unfortunately I am in West Yorkshire, not in London, but I would be interested to join your discussion. By Skype? I also believe that child rearing practices form a foundation of later values. Many political radicals ignore this aspect of their own behaviour with regard to their own families, perhaps as a result of their own experience as a child. Anna
On 20 Aug 2014, at 07:16, Denis Postle <[email protected]> wrote:
On 19/08/2014 17:09, June Gorman wrote: I understand that internal need created by the initial "innocence" fracture, taught in sexist, racist. classist societies that want to maintain that inequitable status quo, but I don't think we can continue to suggest we can truly get anywhere different if we don't start acknowledging and addressing it, in all of us who came from those kinds of societies.
It is therefore, and unfortunately because truly difficult work, not at all peripheral to these essential questions of sustainability and healthiness of humanity and the planet, but the core issues to address in truly getting to anywhere socially, economically and emotionally different. Yes indeed.
I have been baffled for some time about how to introduce these concerns and what has been learned, however as you say this is 'tough stuff'.
Maybe some kind of face to face inquiry node on these topics alongside the list would be valuable. And if we are both in London (and anyone else, I am also based in Brussels) we could perhaps see if that idea had legs. I'll send my contact details off-line.
A last thought that might nourish anyone looking in, or draw acute scepticism! Few people seem in touch with the long term research of the psychohistorians. A key element of their study of the evolution of childhood and its relation to political realities suggests that the possible politics to some degree tracks changes in child, especially infant, child care. ie that political relationships elvolve in the direction of mirroring how power is experienced via childcare. It could be that the extent to which men are much more involved in childcare and that it seems increasingly more child-centered, might result in a contradiction of patriarchal politics. This has been my personal or local experience. Your thoughts? Denis
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Dear Anna and Denis (and anyone else interested) - I would really enjoy further discussion on these "essential" issues I think, at the root of any vision for a more commons based, healthy humanity focused world. I do think that these issues from childhood and learned structures of social vs. autonomous structures or as Denis suggests, "that political relationships evolve in the direction of mirroring how power is experienced via childcare" are too critical to remain unexplored or unexamined, as they consistently show up in all our communication and work together, particularly across the needed diversity in communication and understanding essential, imho, to getting to truly viable solutions. This has been the critical focus of my own work in Transformative Education and the organization I started to examine these core issues, at least in educational models -- the Transformative Education Forum (TEF-Global.org - new website) and its recent work on a potential TEF-Bristol, to be held in conjunction with the Bristol European Green Capital 2015 campaign. So would love to follow up with you both, perhaps in September when you are back Denis and with you Anna on skype, as you suggest. And again, with anyone else interested in these issues, nearby or far? What I am personally certain of is that we are not the only ones aware of how critical this "learning" of internalized power structures and sense of personal efficacy or not, is constructed in childhood. I believe that many corporate and deeply patriarchal/hierarchical based ideologies have also seen fit to enter and control earlier childhood educational systems that had before been left more primarily to women as unvalued "women's work" extensions of child rearing. My work has shown me how very consciously and ultimately destructively this started in the US in the mid-1970's and is now being exported to educational systems around the world. It is why even now in the UK, "No Child Left Behind" (even under the same name!), increased standardized testing and the corporate-backed push for more use of "instructional technology" -- a playbook drawn up by the same corporate-patriarchal control now dominant in the US educational system -- have become the newest "innovations" pushed by the current UK administration. And in other places (e.g. Africa), particularly the replacement of indigenous teachers by computers, argued for by "economic expediency". (It is not obviously, that the technology cannot be a helpful tool educationally, but I believe it is critical to understand how that depends upon who controls it and for what ends and what indigenous and more human-oriented learning it is indeed used to replace?) At any rate, would very much enjoy further discussion on these critical issues and will be in touch with you both and anyone else who would like to join us in that discussion. ________________________________ From: Anna <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Cc: June Gorman <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2014 8:42 AM Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Matriarchal Studies Hi June and Denis, Unfortunately I am in West Yorkshire, not in London, but I would be interested to join your discussion. By Skype? I also believe that child rearing practices form a foundation of later values. Many political radicals ignore this aspect of their own behaviour with regard to their own families, perhaps as a result of their own experience as a child. Anna On 20 Aug 2014, at 07:16, Denis Postle <[email protected]> wrote: On 19/08/2014 17:09, June Gorman wrote: I understand that internal need created by the initial "innocence" fracture, taught in sexist, racist. classist societies that want to maintain that inequitable status quo, but I don't think we can continue to suggest we can truly get anywhere different if we don't start acknowledging and addressing it, in all of us who came from those kinds of societies.
It is therefore, and unfortunately because truly difficult work, not at all peripheral to these essential questions of sustainability and healthiness of humanity and the planet, but the core issues to address in truly getting to anywhere socially, economically and emotionally different.
Yes indeed. I have been baffled for some time about how to introduce these concerns and what has been learned, however as you say this is 'tough stuff'. Maybe some kind of face to face inquiry node on these topics alongside the list would be valuable. And if we are both in London (and anyone else, I am also based in Brussels) we could perhaps see if that idea had legs. I'll send my contact details off-line. A last thought that might nourish anyone looking in, or draw acute scepticism! Few people seem in touch with the long term research of the psychohistorians. A key element of their study of the evolution of childhood and its relation to political realities suggests that the possible politics to some degree tracks changes in child, especially infant, child care. ie that political relationships elvolve in the direction of mirroring how power is experienced via childcare. It could be that the extent to which men are much more involved in childcare and that it seems increasingly more child-centered, might result in a contradiction of patriarchal politics. This has been my personal or local experience. Your thoughts? Denis ________________________________ This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. _______________________________________________
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participants (6)
-
Anna -
Dante-Gabryell Monson -
Denis Postle -
June Gorman -
Michel Bauwens -
willi uebelherr