Into the Hearts of the Amazons: In Search of a Modern Matriarchy

The Investigator

h The Investigator That night, I finished reading Ernest Shackelton’s South in my room at the Oasis. South was the last of the three books I brought with me from San Francisco, so I paid Julin a visit, and she lent me Juchitán, la ciudad de las mujeres. It was an odd-looking book. The brick-colored jacket featured a photo of a cocky Istmeña in huipil and enagua, her legs spread open and her hands dangling between them in a way that called attention to her womanhood. As soon as I returned to my room and climbed back in bed, I did what I always do on discovering a book about the Isthmus. I checked for the author’s stance on matriarchy. Twenty-six pages into the book, I found this: “In the course of the investigation we realized that in Juchitán, the attention focused on women in reality revolves around the figure of the mother. For this reason, Beverly Chiñas, the only person who until the present has published an investigation on the women of this region speaks about ‘matrifocality’ in a broad and characteristic sense: ‘the culture is centered around the mother.’ We will also use these concepts. The comparison of our results with those of the investigation of different matriarchies, however, makes us think that it is precise and legitimate, in the case of Juchitán, to speak of a contemporary matriarchy.” This was a milestone, or so it seemed at first. A book with anthropology written all over it—on the cover and the inside flap and the copyright page—made the assertion that Juchitán’s society was indeed matriarchal . This assertion refuted Chiñas’s claim that anthropologists had never encountered any truly matriarchal cultures. Published in Mexico by Consejo Editorial in 1994, Juchitán, la ciudad de las mujeres forms part of the Oaxacan Institute of Culture’s anthropology collection. The 236 authors, who lived over a year in Juchitán, could hardly be called super- ficial observers or any of the other terms concocted by the supposed insiders . On closer examination, however, the authors weren’t exactly anthropologists. Hidden on the inside flap at the back of the book was a single paragraph describing the authors as a team of “German investigators .” Coordinator Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen led the team, consisting of Cornelia Giebeler and Brigitte Holzer, also investigators, and Mexican sociologist Marina Meneses. None were anthropologists. Putting aside the authors’ credentials, I experienced a minor epiphany on reading Bennholdt-Thomsen that night. She addressed a fundamental problem with the conception of matriarchal systems that has clouded the thinking of anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike. In contrast with other Isthmus observers, Bennholdt-Thomsen defined matriarchy before she used the term. This might seem like splitting hairs, when in fact it is crucial. Without knowing beforehand the speci fic criteria that define a social system such as matriarchy or patriarchy, identifying the Isthmus as one or the other is meaningless. And though you might think that everyone has an intuitive idea about the meaning of matriarchy, the variety of definitions found in common desk dictionaries suggests otherwise. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines matriarchy as “A social organization in which the mother is head of the family and descent is through the female line.” MerriamWebster ’s Collegiate Dictionary defines matriarchy as “a system of social organization in which descent and inheritance are traced through the female line.” The Oxford American Dictionary’s definition is brief but muddy: “A society in which women have most of the power.” If popular dictionaries such as these disagree about the definition of matriarchy, blaming outsiders when they use the term loosely makes no sense. The only exception to anthropologists’ failure to define terms might be Chiñas, whose definition is circular at best: “[Matriarchies] are cultures in which women’s roles are the mirror image of men’s roles in patriarchal cultures.” As is obvious, this definition begs the question: What is patriarchy? In addition to calling into question anthropologists’ failure to define matriarchy, Bennholdt-Thomsen’s definition made it clear that I had made the same error as the anthropologists when I asked Istmeños their stance on matriarchy. How could Istmeños say yes or no when neither they nor I had a clear conception of what matriarchy The Investigator 237 h [3.17.28.48] Project...