Maidens, Males, and Marx: Some Contrasts in the Work of Frederick Rose and Claude Meillassoux

Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia’s Western Desert

“…Polygyny in general, particularly "gerontocratic polygyny" (Hiatt 1985) in Australia, has always seemed at odds with other egalitarian hunter-gatherers, primarily because the dominant explanations for its prevalence have centered on male power and coercion (Chisholm and Burbank 1991;Keen 2006). If men benefit at the expense of their wives, polygyny can only be explained through imbalances in bargaining power; in other words, men have the power to coerce women into entering polygynous marriages when they would rather be married monogamously.…”

Australian Anthropology, Ideology and Political Repression: The Cold War Experience of Frederick G. G. Rose

“…Moreover, the doyen of structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, continued to maintain as late as 1968 that 'ethnology should abandon the analysis of the economic infrastructure [of ''primitive'' societies] for that of kinship relations, as only these [would] lead to an account of the ''profound structure'' of primitive societies' (cited in Terray 1972, 139). Whilst Marxist anthropological theory was tentatively emerging in Britain with the Manchester Group during the 1950s and 1960s (Barth 2005, 50), and in France with the innovative work of Claude Meillassoux in 1960(Hiatt 1985Meillassoux 1960), any sign of communist sympathy in Cold War Australia was frowned upon, as the precarious careers of Donald Thomson and Peter Worsley demonstrated (Wise 1985, 141;Worsley 2008, 83;Gray 1998).…”

Envy and egalitarianism in Aboriginal Australia: An integrative approach

“…Observers of the practice have noted the potential for conflict that it contains as ‘the younger men at the peak of their physical strength and sexual activity’ are left with ‘virtually no women available to them’ (Rose : 208). Hiatt (), seeing this pattern ‘from a sociobiological viewpoint’ arising from ‘a favoured male reproductive strategy’, reiterates Howitt's original supposition that older men were able to ‘maintain their monopoly’ on women ‘by virtue of their religious authority and powers of sorcery’ (35). While Hiatt disputes Rose's (: 207–208) ideas about the causes of gerontocratic polygyny, he attends, as we might, to his idea that prolonged male initiation into the religious life of Groote Eylandt was a means of preventing young men from competing with older ones for wives, and from resenting the fact that they had none.…”

“…While I do not explore this domain to any great extent, there is one aspect to be mentioned here. Gerontocratic polygyny, the monopoly of marriageable women by older men, appears to be characteristic of the traditional Australia social formation, although to varying degrees (Hiatt ; Keen ). Observers of the practice have noted the potential for conflict that it contains as ‘the younger men at the peak of their physical strength and sexual activity’ are left with ‘virtually no women available to them’ (Rose : 208).…”