POSSIBLE COURSE UNIT: High Patriarchy & the History of Underdevelopment
Should I add this “sociobiology” unit to my classes for next semester? I oscillate between thinking “I am really not the person to teach this” & “but this really, really should be taught”…
The first segment of the class would orient the class via Alice Evans’s truly excellent overview. The second would consider the tracks that patriarchy has left in our genes, and at what we can guess about the form and degree of the subjection of women (and of low-status or conquered men). The third would try to draw the bidirectional links between patriarchy and economic development. And the fourth would try to keep things real by considering the real but limited power of a feminist under early-modern patriarchy…
Readings:
Overview:
Evans, Alice. 2022. “Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy”. The Great Gender Divergence Blog. June 3. <https://www.draliceevans.com/post/ten-thousand-years-of-patriarchy-1>.
Tracks in Our Genes:
Karmin, M., Saag, L., Vicente, M., Sayres, M. A. W., Järve, M., Talas, U. G.,… Pagani, L. 2015. “A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture”. Genome Research 25 (4), 459–66 <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381518/>.
Poznik, G. D. & al. 2016. “Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences”. Nature Genetics 48, 593–599 (2016) <https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fng.3559>.
Alesina, Alberto, Paola Giuliano, & Nathan Nunn. 2013. “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 128 (2): 469-530 <https://scholar.harvard.edu/nunn/publications/origins-gender-roles-women-and-plough>.
Zeng, T. C., Aw, A. J., and Feldman, M. W. (2018). “Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck”. Nature Communications 9 (1), 1–12 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6>
Gender, Culture, & Development:
Henrich, Joseph. 2020. The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux <https://archive.org/details/the-weirdest-people-in-the-world-how-the-west-became-psychologically-peculiar>, ch. 5 <https://braddelong.substack.com/api/v1/file/fa76331c-543d-4574-8d1a-bd6c076a6287.pdf>.
Seligson, Daniel, & Anne E. C. McCants. 2021. “Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, and Underdevelopment.” Social Science History 46 (1): 1-34 <https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/46B0CC134576212650F64E167C8451DE/S0145553221000237a.pdf/polygamy-the-commodification-of-women-and-underdevelopment.pdf>
A Feminist Constrained Under Early-Modern Patriarchy:
Adams, Abigail Smith. 1776. “Letter to John Adams 31 Mar-5 Apr 1776” <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/02/live-from-american-history-abigail-adams-31-march-5-april-1776-letter-to-john-adams-httpswwwmasshistorg.html>.