The Gender of Debt:
The Last 50,000 Years – Mariano Pavanello (2019)
When I began this book
review journey, my wife asked me what I hoped to be a good end-result for this
endeavor. I told her that I wished to
create a resource, a website that readers could use to find interesting books
to read, and that it would be awesome if writers thought enough of my
commentary to seek me out so I could provide a review of their work. I specifically considered writers of science
books, science history, and other such work to be ones I would love to
collaborate with and provide reviews of their writing. Through hard work and diligence, this has
indeed come to pass. I am contacted regularly
by book publishers and authors with requests to review their work, which is
extremely satisfying. However, receiving
an email from a renowned anthropologist asking if I would consider reviewing
their book on my site was a tremendous thrill.
Reading the work, and understanding the implications this book could
have on our understanding of human social development, is a privilege.
Mariano Pavanello’s
aim with The Gender of Debt is to shed some light on the erroneous assumptions
that many anthropologists still hold in regards to the role of labor sharing in
early humans, and the motivations that drove the specializations of hunting and
food gathering into a sexual division that we still take for granted today. He seeks to correct the social debt that
human males owe to human females, a debt which is never acknowledged in our
patriarchal society.
It is currently
assumed that what drove humans to develop the society and culture we see around
us today was the increase in meat provided by the male hunters of early
tribes. Meat is highly nutritious and full
of energy. The idea was that, as this
great resource requires a large expenditure of effort and energy, and came fraught
with danger, the risks associated with hunting became more and more a male
dominated pursuit, leaving women to tend the camps, care for children and elderly,
and gather up other food items such as plants, tubers, honey, and other such
food sources as could be collected not too far from their camps. This, they assume, is what drove the push to
patriarchy and male control over women. Mr.
Pavanello goes into great detail explaining why previous researchers and
scientists drew these conclusions, and then adroitly points out why these
assumptions are dead wrong. The
complexities of human social order do not fall so neatly into the categories
our assumptions place them in.
One of the most
interesting chapters in this book delves into the scientific literature to
explore exactly what we know about how tribal people throughout the world
manage to subsist. Various charts are
used to explain the variations between the amount of labor that goes into
hunting and the amount of labor that goes into food gathering. What the data shows, and what is not present
in the modern conversation about early man, is that, for the most part, the
food gathering side is the crucial one.
It is the side that allows for all other functions of humanity to
continue, including long, arduous hunting excursions. Many groups could survive
on just food gathering alone, but no one could survive on just hunting
alone. In fact, without the steady,
constant work of the food gatherers the hunters would have no sustenance to
support their physical work.
Mr. Pavanello posits that,
because the hunters realized how much they depended on the gatherers, they
began to implement cultural methods by which they would control the females,
assuring the hunters of constant food, constant care for their children, and
autonomy in the hunting process. This
was not done by coercion or force necessarily, but by the strict codes of societal
control, such as food sharing, child care, daughter exchange for marriages,
etc. Most tribal cultures share all food
items as a rule. The gatherers will
share their supplies with all in the tribe, while the hunters would divide up
the kill for all people to share. This
reciprocity is integral to understanding early human cultures. It is because of this system that humans
thrived in a manner that our Neanderthal and other relative species could
not. Assuring communal survival through food
sharing allowed humans to develop free time, to eventually come up with higher
social structures such as religion, markets, etc.
What is evident
throughout this book is that humanity indeed owes a huge debt of gratitude to
the females of our species, for without their abilities, knowledge, and wisdom we
humans would have stayed tribal peoples, never developing the complexity and
intricacy of our modern human society. I
hope more people read this book, or at least study its conclusions, so that as
a society we all accept, understand, and appreciate the achievements of the
female of our species, instead of solely focusing on the achievements of male
humans in our history.
This is quite a dense
treatise, and explores far more data and ideas than I could possibly cover in
this review. I hope it is a touchstone
for scientists and social anthropologists to view the human condition through a
new spectrum. The debt humanity owes to
our females is over 50,000 years old, and needs to be addressed sooner than
later. We are all one humanity, with
shared goals and shared credit for our successes.
(This book can be purchased here: Cambridge Scholars Publishing )
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