The Division of Work according to Sex in African Hoe Culture

Abstract

Eduard Hahn, to whom the ethnological study of economics owes a considerable number of important discoveries which have been published repeatedly and in varying forms, seems to have paid scarcely enough attention to the good work of the scholars who preceded him in the fight for the recognition of the outstanding position of women in the lower forms of soil cultivation. Steinmetz and quite recently Koppers, have pointed out that Buckland already attributed to the female sex the invention of the most ancient method of soil cultivation, or hoe culture, as, since Hahn, it has generally been called. He was followed by Roth, Lippert, Mason, Grosse, Schurtz, and finally Eduard Hahn with his very logical and ingenious deductions. The modern student of social history is not so easily satisfied with evidence arbitrarily collected from all over the world and the theories based on it, which are then said to hold good for all mankind; he finds the results of the research of the so-called ‘zones of culture school’ (Kulturkreisschule) much more convincing. Gräbner, the leader of this group of German ethnologists, has now recently made his numerous works, in condensed form, accessible to a wider public. Here we find, in particular, a clearer statement of the arguments of Grosse, Bachofen, and others about the connexion of matriarchal society and lower forms of soil cultivation. Matriarchy and hoe culture are assigned to definite chronologically determined stages of civilization (older forms of the so-called ‘two class culture’, and later ones of ‘bow culture’). Koppers, of the Austrian branch group, associates matriarchy and hoe culture with these two civilizations, which he, as does P. W. Schmidt, designates more aptly as ‘exogamous matriarchal’ and ‘free matriarchal’.