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Lineages of the Feminine

E-BookEPUB2 - DRM Adobe / EPUBE-Book
336 Seiten
Englisch
Polityerschienen am06.06.20231. Auflage
We are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved? 

In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men. 

In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them - in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women's liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries - and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France - are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.



Emmanuel Todd is a sociologist, demographer and historical anthropologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), Paris.mehr
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Produkt

KlappentextWe are experiencing an anthropological revolution. We see it in the #MeToo movement, in the denunciation of femicide and in an increasingly vociferous critique of patriarchal domination. Why this sudden rise of an antagonistic conception of the relationship between men and women, at the very moment when progress is accelerating and when the goals of first- and second-wave feminism seem on the verge of being achieved? 

In this book, the anthropologist and historian Emmanuel Todd, while not underestimating the importance of crucial inequalities that remain, argues that the emancipation of women has essentially already taken place but that it has given rise to new tensions and contradictions. As women gain more freedom, they also gain access to traditional male social pathologies: economic anxiety, the disorientation of anomie, and individual and class resentment. But because they remain women, with the ability to bear children, their burden as human beings, although richer, is now more difficult to bear than that of men. 

In order to understand our current condition, Todd retraces the evolution of the male/female relationship through the long history of the human species, from the emergence of Homo sapiens a hundred thousand years ago to the present. He also conducts a broad empirical study of the convergence between men and women today and of the differences that still separate them - in education, in employment and in relation to longevity, suicide and homicide, electoral behaviour and racism. He explores the relations between women's liberation and other changes in contemporary societies such as the collapse of religion, the decline of industry, the decline of homophobia, the rise of bisexuality and the transgender phenomenon, and the decline in a sense of the collective life. And he shows how and why Western countries - and especially the Anglo-American world, Scandinavia and France - are, in their new feminist revolution, perhaps less universal than they think.



Emmanuel Todd is a sociologist, demographer and historical anthropologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), Paris.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509555109
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB
FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum06.06.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten336 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse5577 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.11867141
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

PREFACE

If I had been asked to choose a concept to characterize the West, fifty years ago, when I was starting to do research, I would probably have given the banal answer: progress. The physical and human sciences were advancing, the standard of living was rising, decolonization was coming to an end, the emancipation of women was beginning. My first book, La chute finale (The Final Fall), published in 1976,1 expressed this optimism since it predicted (within ten, twenty or thirty years - it actually took fifteen) the collapse of the Soviet system, undermined not simply by the inefficiency of its economy but above all by educational progress and the change in mentality which accompanied it. The declining birth rate in the Muslim world today shows that the latter is modernizing despite the persistence of many despotic regimes within it. But even those who are not enamoured of Islam have to accept that, at present, the birth rate is 2.0 children per woman in Turkey, 2.1 in Iran, 2.4 in Morocco and 2.2 in Saudi Arabia. Even if people cannot vote there, or only in an imperfect way, the term progress therefore still applies to the Muslim world. And to India, too, where the birth rate is 2.2. With a birth rate of 1.3, China is already, in spite of its low standard of living, demonstrating problems of post-modernity which make the use of the term progress problematic for it. The inability to produce enough children to sustain the population prevents us from using the word progress , a word which presupposes the certainty of a future. The number of children per woman is 1.9 in France, 1.7 in Sweden, 1.7 in the United States, 1.65 in the United Kingdom, 1.5 in Germany, 1.5 in Russia, 1.4 in Japan, 1.2 in Taiwan and 0.9 in Korea. The two countries which dominate the production of the semiconductors necessary for current technologies are, demographically, in the process of disappearing.

If I were asked this same question today - what concept can be seen as characteristic of the West? - I would answer without hesitation: false consciousness. And I would place the status and emancipation of women at the centre of our false consciousness.

We have allowed our industries and our working classes to be destroyed. Inequalities are soaring and our standard of living is falling. In the United States, mortality is increasing, life expectancy is decreasing. The power of finance capital and the individualistic pulverization of ideologies have transformed our political systems. The new educational stratification into college-educated and the rest has led to the emergence of separate mental worlds for the former, on the one hand, and for the semi-citizens who leave education after high school, on the other. If economic and cultural transformations have allowed the institutions of democracy to subsist, they have destroyed the mores that animated these institutions. The populace no longer decides. Communities no longer act. A democracy is as much a group as it is a sum of citizens with the right to vote; and without the ability of individuals to feel that they are also a group, democracy dies.

Western democracies have mutated, they have become, without realizing it, something else , different from democracies. A Western nation without a false consciousness should define itself (without value judgement) as a liberal oligarchy rather than as a liberal democracy. But we still believe, for the most part, that we are liberal and democratic, and continue to affirm our superiority and the universality of our values.

The Trump phenomenon, Brexit, the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision on the freedom of abortion and the paralysis of the French political system, however, all suggest that our political false consciousness is crumbling. It is recognized that a crisis of democracy is looming. The successive waves of Covid have, for their part, shaken our false economic consciousness by exposing our industrial deficiencies. The economic sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, added to Covid, and against a background of industrial underproduction, have tipped the West into inflation. This should bring us to a better economic consciousness of ourselves. But the heart of our false consciousness lies elsewhere, and it is intact. It lurks in the anthropological foundations of our societies: family life with, at the very heart of this core factor, the status of women and the dramatic changes it has seen in the last seventy years. I am here defining Western women as our primary false consciousness (this our includes women). We do not realize that the status of Western women has always been specific, and that the emancipatory revolution that we have been experiencing for seventy years is taking us a little further away from the rest of the world (75% of the total) whose anthropological trajectory has been different for millennia, since this trajectory has granted women a lower status, a historical movement associated with the rise (as the anthropological term puts it) of the patrilineal principle. We therefore underestimate the socio-historical importance of the emancipation of these Western women whose status had not been all that low. It is in this anthropological unconscious that the cause of our paralysis, of our inability to think and act collectively, must be sought. Putting women at the centre of recent history is the purpose of this book.

I have spent most of my life as a researcher constructing a model that links the diversity of family structures with the diversity of the historical development of nations. In my Lineages of Modernity, I presented the condensed results of this lifetime of research.2 But it dawned on me during the #MeToo crisis that I had remained blind to one of the most important elements of the story. While I had placed the family structure at the heart of the economic, political, educational and religious life of peoples, I had not been able to fully grasp the specific role of women in the great transformation that we are experiencing. Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women describes this feminine side of history, over the same long-term period (longue durée), ever since the emergence on earth of the species Homo sapiens. We can only understand the extent of the feminist transformation of Western societies if we situate it correctly in history, i.e. as a direct transformation of the system of mores of the first society of Homo sapiens, one that was certainly patridominated but in which women enjoyed a relatively high status. Never in the past have English (and therefore American), French or Swedish societies resembled today s patrilineal Russia, China, India, Arab-Persian world or Africa, within which the status of women is the outcome of ten thousand years of history, ever since the emergence of agriculture. Only a historical study over the long term, and taking in the surface of our entire planet, will allow us to escape our false family and sexual consciousness.

Our family lifestyle is obvious to us, it defines our existence as human beings - it is indisputable, in exactly the same way that our relationship with women (I am a man, but I would write our relationship with men if I were a woman) defines our existence (and I would write the same if I were gay or transgender). All this is even truer and even more significant for us because our system of mores is undergoing a radical change, indeed a revolution. It is even more immediate, close to the centre of our life and, as such, even more difficult to perceive correctly. We cannot see what defines us the most. We have to gaze into a mirror to see what we look like. We need to look at the rest of the world to understand who we are, to escape narcissism. This is an intellectual but also a psychological exercise. It is characteristic that for the first time in my life, in Lineages of the Feminine, certainly the most scholarly of all my books (and this is rather to be expected after half a century of research), I have allowed a few ironic remarks about myself and my own family of origin to find their way into the text. Historical anthropology, however, allows us to move away from ourselves by contemplating the whole of human history in all its geographical scope and by dealing with the French, the English, the Americans and the Swedes in the same way that classical anthropology dealt with the peoples of colonized countries, each one being provided with a system of mores - an irrational, non-universal and indisputable system - invented to give meaning to life. Analytical philosophy helps us to admit that these values are in no way provable . This difficult exercise of distancing ourselves from ourselves requires an enormous work of empirical accumulation of objective data. But it allows us to escape from our false consciousness. Basically, long-term history (the longue durée) and planetary exhaustiveness make it possible for us to develop a kind of psychoanalysis of our own society.

The feminist revolution is a great thing (I m an ordinary Westerner on the point) but we are not yet able to see how much the emancipation of women has radically altered the whole of our social life. Because we always see women as minors, as victims, we do not place them, for better or for worse (i.e., like men) at the centre of our history: they are the protagonists, for example, in the rejection of racism and homophobia, but they are also the unconscious protagonists of our neoliberalism, our deindustrialization and our...
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