The Foundation of a new Social Science: Modern Matriarchal Studies

Heide Goettner-Abendroth

(Lecture at the ZOOM conference of the Maternal Gift Economy Movement, November 2021, published on their website; last part published in: The Gift, A Feminist Analysis, Athanor book, Meltemi editore, Roma 2004) 

Two questions at the beginning

The misinterpretation of the concept “matriarchy” as “rule of mothers or women” has led hundreds of scholars operating within the patriarchal framework to adhere to this fiction in their quotations; some even consider it good style to constantly parade this misconception like a mantra. Other scholars have combed through the historical and anthropological records with smug irony, searching for such societies and of course not finding any. 

This shows that the definition of “matriarchy” as “rule of the mothers” is an empty one, which can neither be used nor quoted. How is it possible to do scholarly work without ever having defined the area under discussion?  

The other fundamental question here is, how can anyone know anything with certainty about matriarchy, and how can one define it at all if this subject is pushed to the margins and buried in prejudices? What are the methods to redefine it based on empirical findings, not on ideology?

Traditional Matriarchal Studies

Traditional matriarchy scholarship has existed for a long time in the German language realm, already beginning in 1861 with Johann Jakob Bachofen’s work Mother Right. Ten years before that, the anthropological field of matriarchal studies was initiated by Henry Lewis Morgan. For more than a century the discussion about “mother right” and “matriarchy” continued in both bourgeois-conservative and Marxist-leftist circles, especially by Friedrich Engels, but exclusively from a male perspective. In the process the topic was used and misused from the most various viewpoints by philosophical schools and political movements. 

Astonishing in these various works on the topic mother right or matriarchy is – despite good collection of material – the lack of a clear definition and a philosophical-scholarly foundation of this research area. The concept “matriarchy” remained so indistinct that nearly everyone could understand it in a different way.  That omission has opened the gates for emotions and ideologies that have burdened this research from the very beginning. All too common are clichés about the “the essence of woman,” which only reveal that in this area self-reflection within the critique of patriarchy has never occurred. As a result, there are massive back projections of patriarchal conditions onto early cultural history, similar to the projections in anthropology onto non-Western indigenous societies – a situation that makes many so-called “research findings” worthless. This is why all of traditional Matriarchal Studies rests on a shifting foundation.

Modern Matriarchal Studies

Modern Matriarchal Studies as a scientifically well-grounded field of research has appeared over the past few decades, and is rapidly undergoing further development. Through my own work (in German language since 1978) a definitional, methodological and theoretical basis was created – without which this research could not achieve its wide-ranging goals.

This task consists in creating an adequate representation of the matriarchal societal form in all its enormous geographical and historical breadth. Providing it with a scientific foundation entails:

• first, formulating an empirically grounded, adequate  definition of “matriarchy” capable of grasping the deep structure of this societal form;

• second, developing an explicit methodology able to discover and analyze all phenomena within this field of research;

• third, developing a theoretical framework that can integrate a huge mass of material consistently – material that only exists in scattered and misunderstood form – thereby grasping the great breadth of matriarchal societal forms systematically and with sensitivity.

The Definition of “Matriarchal Society” 

The first requirement for a scientific foundation was fulfilled when I developed a structural definition for the field of research “matriarchy”. I made comparative studies of as many currently existing societies of this kind as possible in order to find their common denominators on the four societal levels: social, economical, political, and cultural. That is, the new definition of “matriarchy” was not produced in abstraction and thus projected onto the field of study. Instead, it was developed inductively, step by step, through analytical observation of these societies.  

An adequate definition of “matriarchy” must be given for all levels of society: the social level, the economical level, the political level, and the level of worldview and culture. This means a complex definition, which reveals the underlying deep structure of “matriarchal society”. Therefore, I call it a “structural definition”. 

As I have presented this definition very often, I summarize it here in the most extreme brevity. 

This definition asserts that “matriarchy”

• on the social level, is a non-hierarchical society of kinship, whose main features are clan organization based on matrilineality (kinship in the mother’s line) and matrilocality (residence with or near the mother); at the same time the genders are valued equally (gender equality);

• on the economic level, matriarchy is a society of balanced economic mutuality, in which women manage the basic goods such as land, houses, and food. They have no right of ownership, but of distribution, and they pay constant attention to balancing the economy through equal distribution. Such an economy has the qualities of a “gift economy”;

• on the political level, matriarchy represents a society of consensus, with the political basis in the clan houses - where decision making takes place - and with a system of male delegates to the diverse councils outside. This gives the men no power to decide over others, but gives them their own sphere of activity and social status. In most cases, this system results not only in a gender-egalitarian society, but also in a fully egalitarian society; 

• on the cultural level, matriarchy is based on a sacred culture in which there are no aloof male gods, but where the worldview is defined by the feminine divine. 

In this definition, the necessary conditions required in order to speak of a matriarchal society are: matrilineality and, in the economic realm, women’s power over distribution of the goods. At the same time gender equality prevails, expressed in the principle of consensus in decision-making, from which no one is excluded. 

When these features appear in an existing society one can speak of a “matriarchy.”

An explicit methodology 

The second requirement was fulfilled by explicitly specifying a valid methodology for modern Matriarchal Studies. In traditional matriarchal research the methodology was not described anywhere. Very early on I showed that for modern Matriarchal Studies such a methodology must rest on two pillars: a broad interdisciplinarity and a thorough critique of ideology.

Regarding interdisciplinarity, it is obviously necessary in order to understand an entire societal form along with its history. With it we eliminate the fragmentation of knowledge, which arises through breaking it up into the traditional disciplines and thereby obscuring larger connections. Unlike in these disciplines, it is no longer a matter of specialization, but of the recognition and integration of social and historical connections. 

The critique of ideology – what always means patriarchal ideology here - also requires a method, so as not to lose itself once more in obscured ideology.  From the very beginning I sketched out such a method and elaborated it later.  I utilized both a negative and a positive process. The negative process identifies the typical prejudices about matriarchy found everywhere in the scholarly literature – up to the point of self-contradiction. Interdisciplinarity is very advantageous here, because comparisons of expert opinions from various disciplines – or even within a single discipline – reveal incomplete, one-sided, and distorted representations.

The positive process evaluates the factual findings of traditional matriarchal studies after they have been freed of these prejudices. Even though these findings remain unconnected in traditional research, they can be integrated into the theoretical framework of modern Matriarchal Studies, where they find their logically correct place.

A theoretical framework

The third requirement is the development of precisely this theoretical framework for modern Matriarchal Studies. It shows the scope of modern Matriarchal Studies. It began as a research program and was carried out in steps:

In the first step of developing modern Matriarchal Studies I provided an overview of previous studies of matriarchy up to the present. Here, I followed the course the research has taken, using examples of the scientific as well as of the political discussion. And I shed light on the diverse disciplines in which studies on this topic – often not named and masked – have been done.  

In the second step of developing modern Matriarchal Studies I formulated the adequate definition of “matriarchy,” which was urgently needed. It was derived by exploration of a vast amount of anthropological material. Here we see the systematic place of anthropology, since it is not possible to arrive at the full definition of “matriarchy” from cultural history alone. There we have only remnants and fragments of past societies yielding only scattered bits of information and no longer providing a complete picture. 

Those who do not wish to lose themselves in speculation about cultural history should dedicate themselves to the still existing matriarchal societies in order to understand this societal form. Therefore, in the course of my work, I found out and presented the matriarchal societies of today all over the world, which still exist in Asia, Africa and America.

In the third step the complete structural definition of “matriarchy” is used as a scientific tool for a revision of the cultural history of humankind. This history is much longer than the four to five thousand years of patriarchal history. In its longest periods, non-patriarchal societies were developed, in which women created culture and embodied the center of society. Extant matriarchal societies are the last examples.  

For the very first time, we have the opportunity to adequately write the complete history of humankind worldwide, for we can do so without the distortions of patriarchal prejudices. This new interpretation of history is urgently necessary today, because the patriarchal interpretation of history more and more turns out to be wrong and out-dated. 

I started this project with re-writing the matriarchal history of the vast cultural areas of West Asia and Europe, and re-writing the matriarchal history of the other continents will follow. 

The fourth step in developing modern Matriarchal Studies deals with the problem of patriarchy’s origin. Two important questions must be answered here. First, how and where were patriarchal patterns first able to establish themselves? Here, it must be explained how patriarchal patterns arose in different cultural places, on different continents under different conditions, and at different times independently from each other. For there does not exist only one single reason for everywhere in the world, so the answers will be very different for the different regions of the world. 

Second, how were patriarchal societies able thereafter to spread throughout the world? The rise of patriarchy after the appearance of the first patriarchal patterns, scattered somewhere, is not at all self-evident, and it was a long process, lasting throughout the patriarchal millennia up to the present time.

This task has been simultaneously taken up by my new project of re-writing the matriarchal history of the different continents. 

In the fifth step of the development of modern Matriarchal Studies, a deep analysis of the millennia of patriarchal history is necessary. Until now, the history of patriarchy has been written down as a history of domination, as history “from the top”. But there also exists the perspective of history “from the bottom” which shows a completely different picture. It is the history of women, of the lower classes, of the marginalized cultures, and of the sub-cultures. It shows that patriarchy did not succeed in destroying the ancient and long matriarchal traditions on all continents. In the end, it parasitically lives on these traditions.

The task is to show that these traditions (such as oral traditions, customs, myths, rites, folklore, and others) have their roots in the preceding traditions of matriarchy. If we can manage to follow the traces backwards through the history of patriarchy and to connect them, this means nothing less than regaining our heritage.

Modern Matriarchal Studies includes all of this, and so it entails a complete change of perspective on society and history or, in other words: it is a new paradigm. 

As a new paradigm, it does not represent – in spite of its systematic – a closed system, and it does not make – in spite of its far-reaching explanations – any universal statements about content. A paradigm needs to leave gaps in its early stages, because it is not the role of a paradigm to act as a lexicon. Its achievement is to create a farther-reaching explanatory framework from a viewpoint that differs from what was previously known. Then it can be taken up by different researchers for their own studies and developed further, so that generations of scholars can continue to work creatively with the new paradigm of modern Matriarchal Studies. 

At last: why do we use the term “matriarchy”?

In spite of the difficult connotations of this word, I call all non-patriarchal societies “matriarchal” for several reasons: 

1. The term “matriarchy” is well known from the discussion that has gone on since 1861   (Bachofen), and it is by now a popular term. 

2. Philosophical and scientific re-definitions mostly refer to well-known words and redefine them. After that, scholars can work with them, but they do not lose contact with the language of the people. In this process, the word often takes on a new, clearer and broader meaning even in the popular language; this is also influenced by the re-defining activities of scholars. In the case of the term “matriarchy”, this redefinition would be a great advantage, especially for women: reclaiming this term means to reclaim the knowledge about cultures that have been created by women.

3. It is my opinion that it may not always be helpful to create new scientific terms like “matrifocal”, “matricentric”, “matristic”, “gylanic” etc. Some of these terms, such as “matrifocal” and “gylanic”, are very artificial and have no connection to popular language. Others like “matricentric” and “matristic” are too weak, for they suggest that non-patriarchal societies have no more to them than just being centered round the mothers. The result can be a somewhat reduced view of these societies – by the researchers as well as the critics – a view that neglects the intricate network of relationships and the complex social networks that characterize these cultures.

4. We are not obliged to follow the current, male biased notion of the term “matriarchy” as meaning “domination by the mothers”. The only reason to understand it in this way is that it sounds parallel to “patriarchy”. The Greek word “arché” has a double meaning. It means “beginning” as well as “domination”. Therefore, we can translate “matriarchy” accurately as “the mothers from the beginning”. “Patriarchy”, on the other hand, translates correctly as “domination of the fathers”.

5.  To use the term “matriarchy” in its re-defined, clarified meaning is also of political relevance. It doesn’t avoid the discussion with professional colleagues and the interested audience, which is urgently necessary. This might easily happen with the other terms, which have the tendency to conceal and to belittle. Researchers should not shy away from the provocative connotation of the term “matriarchy”, both because research in this field is so important and because only continued political provocation will bring about a change of mind.