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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10920 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years—much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

An article from 2020 about that:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.

“The hunting was purposeful,” Wall-Scheffler tells NPR. “Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”

The researchers also found that women played an active role in teaching hunting, and they used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did. For example, while men tended to hunt alone or in pairs, women hunted alone, with a man or with groups of women, children or dogs. Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.

I mean, Artemis is after all a female goddess: (2nd century statue copied from a Greek original dating to 330 BCE). And as Thomas Carlyle meant to say, the real use of bow & arrow is to make all humans tall.
https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/10157.jpg

Plus the easiest way of hunting animals is trapping. You don't need to be strong or athletic endurance to catch squirrels and rabbits with snares. Look at this boy trapping birds, which is so stupidly easy probably even a girl could do it as long as she isn't vegan and doesn't mind being cruel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapping#/media/File:34-caccia_tortore,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Casanatense_4182..jpg

I don't know how to interpret the statement "Grandmas were the best hunters in the village", but I imagine their hunting looks less like battling a grizzly and more like these Aborigines finding a lizard (from 2:50), Also an example for opportunistically killing animals:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iP7Nn3whUTo&t=160

That said:
I wonder about the math here. If in 46% of foraging societies women hunt small game and in 48% larger game and then 4% all sizes how does that result in 79% of societies with women hunting? And I wonder what the total calories provided are. Was it more a novelty thing women did when they were bored or out of necessity or was hunting their sole profession? I read the book about the Pirahã in the Amazon (who have this strange language without recursion which refutes Noam Chomskys central thesis) and the role of the man was mainly to fish on canoes in the river (protein, every day staple meal) and going into the jungle to hunt was done less often because it was more dangerous and also you could come home empty handed to your disappointed wife and hungry children (but if you brought meat you were the king of the village and shared with everyone) and the women digged for vegetables/tubers (carbohydrates, also everyday staple food).

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

I was taught in school that Indian men would catch up with and shoot the buffaloes on horseback, then the women would follow along behind and pitch camp wherever the buffaloes died(because they’re too heavy to drag back to camp), including butchering them onsite. This idea is sufficiently widespread in American culture that mass media about Indians features masculine hunters refusing to clean their own game even when it’s completely different tribes, eg those in the northeast, hunting different game.

Artemis is after all a female goddess

So is Athena. Yet there are remarkably few women among Greek strategoi.

Sure, but doesn't Aeneas encounter a young Carthaginian huntress (who is actually his mom Aphrodite in disguise)?

His mother met him herself, among the trees, with the face

and appearance of a virgin, and a virgin’s weapons,

a Spartan girl, or such as Harpalyce of Thrace,

who wearies horses, and outdoes winged Hebrus in flight.

For she’d slung her bow from her shoulders, at the ready,

like a huntress, and loosed her hair for the wind to scatter,

her knees bare, and her flowing tunic gathered up in a knot.

And she cried first: ‘Hello, you young men, tell me,

if you’ve seen my sister wandering here by any chance,

wearing a quiver, and the hide of a dappled lynx,

or shouting, hot on the track of a slavering boar?’

And later

Then Venus said: ‘I don’t think myself worthy of such honours:

it’s the custom of Tyrian girls to carry a quiver,

and lace our calves high up, over red hunting boots.

While this could be a fantastical detail imagined by Virgil, I don't find it hard to believe at all that some places around the Mediterranean might have had a tradition of women hunting, and this potentially contributing to Artemis being a huntress.

Hunting wasn’t particularly gendered in medieval Europe, either. But Greco-Roman depictions of hunting invariably show men doing it, and it’s gendered at least a bit in modern cultures.

2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:

Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real: A Comment on Anderson et al. (2023), The Myth of Man the Hunter

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.

Venkataraman also wrote this on his page:

http://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking

we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare.

Most reported prey sizes are small- or medium-sized. Of the cases that do involve large-game hunting by women, some pertain to whale hunting; some involve firearms and/or dogs; some occur in the context of husband-wife pairs in which women contribute to hunting success indirectly; some involve cases of women hunting large game alone out after the death of their husbands; other instances of large-game hunting are explicitly stated by the ethnographer to be very rare. This is not to say that these are not cases of large-game hunting, but the broader context of their occurrence casts suspicion on them as cultural regularities. This provides a starkly different picture of women’s hunting in these societies compared to the analysis of Anderson et al (2023).

Shit like this is why I put 0 value on a very large number of humanities fields. They should be told to either clean up their rooms and get in good shape or else we will defund them completely.

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