Our extraordinarily flexible, cumulative culture allows us to make ourselves even as we attribute our successes and failings to our genes. We are, though, neither slaves to our biology nor our social norms — even if it can feel that way. Human cultural conditioning begins at birth, indeed, social norms even have an impact before birth: one study found that when pregnant women were informed of the sex of the baby they were carrying, they described its movements differently. Many of the ideas we consider universally held are simply the social norms in our own culture.
Consider the idea of responsibility. In my culture, if you deliberately hurt a person or their property this is considered a much worse crime than if you did it by accident, but in other cultures, children and adults are punished according to the outcome of their actions — intentionality is considered impossible to grasp and therefore largely irrelevant.
The biological differences between males and females, or indeed between ethnic groups, tell us nothing about how intelligent, empathetic or successful a person is. Modern humans are Although we have expanded far beyond our tropical evolutionary niche over tens of thousands of years, we have not speciated — we have not even diversified into different subspecies.
Our ancestors have not needed to make dramatic biological adaptations to the very different environments we live in, because, instead, we culturally evolved and diversified into a complexity of differently adapted cultures, each with their own social norms. It is our cultural developing bath, not our genes, that profoundly changes the way we think, behave and perceive the world. Studies comparing the neural processing of populations of westerners and East Asians, for example, show that culture shapes how people look at faces westerners triangulate their gaze over eyes and mouth, whereas East Asians centralise their focus.
Language reveals our norms and shapes the way we think. Children who speak Hebrew, a strongly gendered language, know their own gender a year earlier than speakers of non-gendered Finnish. English speakers are better than Japanese speakers at remembering who or what caused an accident, such as breaking a vase. Our brains change and our cognition is rewired according to the cultural input we receive and respond to.
Many of our social norms evolved because they improve survival, through group cohesion, for instance. But social norms can also be harmful. Social norms that classify particular groups to the bottom of a social hierarchy encourage society to collude with that positioning and those people do worse in outcomes from wealth to health, strengthening the norm.
A major study, by researchers at Berkeley, of 30, American shift workers found that black, Hispanic and other minority workers — particularly women — are much more likely to be assigned irregular schedules, and the harmful repercussions of this were felt not just by them but also by their children, who fared worse. The danger of ascribing genetic and biological bases for our actions is that individuals and groups are not given equal opportunities in life, and they suffer.
It is, after all, very convenient to believe that the poor are feckless and undeserving, morally weak or stupid, rather than casualties of a deeply unfair systemic bias. Culture is used to justify gender inequality and violence by evoking traditional cultural beliefs about how women should be treated. The defense of the culture of a place, country, religion, etc. The culture of patriarchy is not static: its manifestation on an army base differs from that in a rural town; just as the culture of patriarchy in Chicago differs from that of Dubai, or Manila.
But, within communities of color, women and non-abusive men who are exposed to similar social histories of oppression, do not resort to battering to cope with racism; just as LGBTQ women and men do not resort to hate crimes or intimate violence because of homophobia. While oppressions based on race, class, gender, heterosexuality, etc. Because the intersection of race and gender are complicated, race is all too often privileged over gender.
Holding this and other intersectionalities together offers a more effective route to accountability and transformation. This report asks and analyzes some critical questions, forcing us to take a hard look at all the factors that have to come together to effect transformation.
By Val Kalei Kanuha This talk explores the connection between colonization and patriarchy, and how this dynamic perpetuates gender violence.
It was the reverse for men, suggesting that agriculture is indeed correlated with patrilocal societies. She studies bonobo societies, which are patrilocal but female-dominated. Females weigh 15 per cent less than males — similarly to humans and chimps — yet Parish says they have the upper hand because they cooperate and form alliances. Restoring and strengthening equality will require effort on multiple fronts, she says.
If patriarchy originated in sedentary social structures that formalised male ownership and inheritance, then laws that give women the right to own property in their own name, for instance, can help. But such laws exist in many 21st century societies — so why does the patriarchy persist? By Anil Ananthaswamy and Kate Douglas Harriet Lee Merrion THE vast majority of cultures are patriarchies, where men are more likely than women to hold positions of social, economic and political power.
Special report: The origins of sexism The imbalance of power between men and women is being hotly debated. But no one benefits from a patriarchal society, so how did we get here, and where should we go next?
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