The Meat in the Hunter-Gathering Discussion

I was reading Sear's & Mace's 2008 meta-study of the effect of kinship on offspring. I noticed that they were talking about calories rather than nutrition, in reference to the work by Hawkes. That surprised me, given the role that meat nutrients play in chimpanzees and in the rise of hominids, especially the expansion of the human brain.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 agreed:

What's striking is that the nutritional anthropology literature on hunter-gatherer diets (Cordain, Eaton, etc.) does engage seriously with micronutrients — the argument that animal matter satisfies requirements for protein and many essential micronutrients while freeing gut space for carbohydrate-rich plant foods AJCN is well established in that parallel literature. But this reasoning seems not to have been systematically imported into the behavioral ecology debate about paternal provisioning versus signaling. The two literatures appear to be operating largely independently of each other, which may explain why the Hawkes critique lands so cleanly in the provisioning debate: it's aiming at a caloric target that was never the strongest version of the provisioning argument anyway.

And

Meat, and particularly organ meat and marrow, provides bioavailable iron (heme iron, with absorption rates several times higher than plant-sourced non-heme iron), zinc, vitamin B12, and phospholipids in forms that are simply not substitutable by gathered plant foods in most environments. The question "does big-game hunting feed the family?" gets a very different answer if you're asking about preventing iron-deficiency anemia in reproductive-age women and weaned toddlers than if you're asking about raw caloric adequacy. Gathered tubers and seeds can cover calories; they can't easily substitute for heme iron. 

If the nutritional story is about micronutrients rather than calories, then the grandmother's contribution (gathered carbohydrates, caloric buffer for weaned children) and the male hunter's contribution (intermittent but micronutrient-dense meat) are actually complementary rather than competing explanations for offspring survival. Hawkes sets them up as competing — either dad is provisioning or he's showing off — but if the provisioning is micronutrient-specific and the grandmother covers caloric provisioning, both can be true simultaneously and the "show-off" framing becomes less necessary to explain observed hunting patterns. 

Further investigation with Claude's assistence revealed that Hawkes in 2022 admitted as much, while continuing to look mostly at the calory-sharing aspect.

Moreover, as meat provides important nutrients not easily obtained from other sources (see, Milton, 2003; Tennie, Gilby, & Mundry, 2009; Watts, 2020), small quantities of meat may provide benefits to the procurer even when widely shared.

 After all, the paper is called "A cost for signaling: do Hadza hunter-gatherers forgo calories to show-off in an experimental context?" -- which is probably asking the wrong question.

Alternative Archaeology and Religious Legitimation

[[RCK: Excavating tradition: alternative archaeologies mentions LDS in its abstract at least and points out how people come to archeology, and often with alternative strategies to professional academic archeology, with their religious legitimation needs.]]

Lewis (p.203) points out how Mircea Eliade's in illud tempore has been replaced as the target of the rear projections by a historical time in the twenty-first century.

However, rather than an explicitly mythological past (Eliades illud tempus), modern human beings tend to project their idealizations onto a “real,” historical past. Archaeology enters into this pattern by providing the scientific “facts” that are supposed to legitimate these idealized reconstructions. (p.203)

Lewis in 2011 commented on this fact in his chapter contributed to Religion and the Authority of Science [[RCK: does he mean this 2010 Brill handbook?]]  which captures the need of religions to find their claims substantiated by an independent authority, science, given the market place of conflicting religious ideas (p.204).

Part of Lewis' description is based on his 2003 monograph Legitimating New Religions, where he discusses Max Weber's Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft scheme of charismatic, traditional, legal and rational (which are sometimes lumped together, as Lewis notes, already by Weber, cf. (p.204)) legitimation. [[RCK: Lewis also has written on the invention of sacred traditions in a 2007 monograph coauthored with Olav Hammer (p.207), conceptualized as an extension of Hobsbawm and Ranger's classic 1983 The Invention of Tradition] (kindle edition)]]

Lewis sees this rethinking necessary (p.205) because in practice legitimations mix and match; charismatic leaders appeal to traditions when founding new religion, even though it is at least a reinterpreted and sometimes even a recreated tradition in many cases. Thus, the founders of new religious movements will appeal (p.206) to charismatic, rational and traditional arguments for supporting their claims (p.206f), and Lewis gives a few examples not meant to be exhaustive.

Lewis now addresses a fundamental gap in Weber and his own work, namely understanding that the charisma is at the core of the appeal. In that sense, Lewis can talk about the charisma of science and technology.

It has even been said by some observers that science is viewed quasi-religiously, as the ultimate authority in matters of “Truth.״ Thus any religion claiming that it is in some way scientific draws on the prestige and perceived legitimacy of natural science. (p.208)

Lewis cited biblical archeology as an endeavor where the a priori assumption of the correctness of the Biblical record is to receive further validation for archeological investigation (p.209). This is contrasted from the a posteriori archeology of modern Pagans, who want to know how to perform rituals and turn to science for answers (p.209, p.204).

Lewis then (p.209) turns to a discussion of Carole Cusack's 2011 paper on the use of archeology in the LDS church, for Atlantis believers, and in support of the Goddess.  Lewis points out that a claim to the validity of the BoM entails an interest in archeological validation (pp.211f). As far as the relationship between religious movements and archeology is concerned, Lewis distinguishes (p.212) between full immersion (as in LDS), shallow (as in the case of Atlantis believers not interested in funding Bahamas excavations), and half-full/half-empty strategies such as the worshippers of the Goddess, who can either engage with the Çatalhôyük archeology or let it be. The product of full immersion and half-full is a distinctly partisan archeology, akin to the old Biblical archeology or "creation science" (p.213) [[RCK: that is, an archeology looking for support, not for problematization]].


Lewis points out how this approach to the past has the structure of a "pick 'n' mix" (p.213), where modern druids would accept white robes and golden sickles if archeology documented them, but not human sacrifices, if archeology could document those (p.213).

[N]ew religions often justify their innovations by attributing them to the authority of tradition, though it is often only through a reinterpretation of the past that they are able to portray themselves as embodiments of tradition. (p.217)

Bibliographic Record

Lewis, J. R. (2012). Excavating tradition: alternative archaeologies as legitimation strategies. Numen, 59(2-3), 202-221. doi:10.1163/156852712X630789 (UB Wien)

Salvation History through Blood and Family Ties

It was with quite some shock that I realized that Joseph Smith Jr believed that he was a biological descendant of the Patriarchs through Ephraim. The stance of the LDS Church on this issue is expounded in a complicated article in the Ensign from 1991, written by Daniel H. Ludlow, editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Ludlow does a good job writing up the issue; the complexity hails from the fact that lots and lots of words have to be reworked to mean new things they never meant before, in order to make the theory come out. Of course, it is a modern day interpretation of what Joseph Smith Jr may or may not have meant, so we will have to recontextualize it afterwards.

Ludlow's Argument

Ludlow first tries to sort out the general terminology.

... for the literal seed of Abraham are the natural heirs to the remarkable promises given anciently to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

Terms like literal descendants of Abraham by birth, tribe of Israel, house of Israel, lineage, and Gentiles are sometimes confused, and some terms have a range of meanings, referring to different ideas in different contexts.

Ludow works with the equivalence of Abraham -- Hebrew; Isaac -- Israelite; Juda -- Jew. Ludow argues that via his other wives, Abraham had children other than Isaac: Ishmael, Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Though the Midianites are thus literal seed of Abraham, they are not Israelites, much less Jews---though all Jews are Israelites and thus literal seed of Abraham.

In this context, Ludlow cites the Book of Abraham (3:14), a work whose translation from Egyptian papyri Joseph Smith Jr had begun in Kirtland in 1835 (the papyri have since been identified as funerary texts depicting Isis and Osiris). [On early criticism of the translation see Stenhouse's Rocky Mountain Saints, New York, 1873, who engaged an Egyptologist from the Louvre; and Franklin S. Spalding's Joseph Smith Jr as Translator,  New York, 1912, who received assistance from noted scholars like James H. Breasted or Flinders Petrie. See also Stephen E. Thompson on Egyptology and the Book of Mormon in Dialog 1995, pp.143ff.]

Ludlow emphasizes that lineages, esp. in patriarchical blessing, indicate blood lines, and are important for the privilege they convey, that is, "special promises and blessings attendant thereto". Thus it is important for patriarchical blessings that their lineage identifications "are not simply tribal identifications by assignment."

Ludlow then gives a long list of scriptural passages, OT and NT, which speak of the importance of lineage. Interestingly, of all of St Paul's letter to the Romans, the only passage cited is the one that insists on the preeminence of the Jews with respect to the Gentiles,  but not the elimination of that distinction in Christ.  This approach to inheritance goes counter to much of the arguments that St. Paul makes, whose insistence that neither Greek nor Jew, that is, neither Gentile nor Israelite matters for the story of salvation he is expounding. It is often claimed that Joseph Smith Jr is, like many Protestant reformators, inspired by Paul; but in this familial focus Smith Jr clearly is not. (I owe this point to Rahel Kahlert.)

Oddly, Ludlow lists Galatians (3:14), which clearly says that "That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ", not through the descent of blood. The baptism into Christ makes one partake of Abraham's seed, says Paul (3:26-29): "For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise."

In the Book of Mormon, the following passages are considered relevant by Ludlow:

• 1 Nephi: 1 Ne. 22:1–28.
• 2 Nephi: 2 Ne. 6:5–18; 2 Ne. 9:1–3; 2 Ne. 30:1–8.
• Jacob: Jacob 5:1–77; Jacob 6:1–4.
• Helaman: Hel. 15:1–17.
• Mormon: Morm. 7:10.

A look at Doctrines and Covenants shows that the development of this interest belongs in the Kirtland period, as the topic begins with D&C 45.

• D&C 45:24–25
• D&C 58:45
• D&C 86:8–9*
• D&C 90:8–11*
• D&C 96:7;
• D&C 109:57–67 (D&C 109:57–58, 60, 67*)
• D&C 110:11–12
• D&C 113:7–8
• D&C 132:30

There is also a quote from the Mt-Retranslation that Joseph Smith Jr and Sidney Rigdon pursued in 1831 in Kirtland, Ohio.

• JS Mt Translation (JSTP Mt) of Mt 23:39-24

The problem remains that even passages like the Book of Abraham, 2:9-11, which hails from 1835, have a very non-blood interpretation. It is difficult to suss out the direction that a statement like

in thy seed after thee (that is to say, the literal seed, or the seed of the body) shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel

is supposed to be read in. In a sense, it inverts St Paul in Galatians, where by the acceptance of the Gospel, and baptism into Christ, all are made to Abraham's seed. Clearly it is Abraham's literal seed that makes this possible. 

Ludlow then "interviews" Church presidents and authorities to give more understanding. 

Apparently, President Joseph Smith Fielding felt that those that had joined the Church in the present days had a mix of Gentile and Israelite blood in their lineage. In this way, the Church is gathering the House of Israel.

The great majority of those who become members of the Church are literal descendants of Abraham through Ephraim, son of Joseph. 

President Spencer W. Kimball wrote

The Lamanite is a chosen child of God, but he is not the only chosen one. There are many other good people including the Anglos, the French, the German, and the English, who are also of Ephraim and Manasseh. They, with the Lamanites, are also chosen people, and they are a remnant of Jacob. 

This all could be read in a spiritual vein as well, in the sense of Galatians 3, but Brigham Young's talk of veins makes that impossible.

Will we go to the Gentile nations to preach the Gospel? Yes, and gather out the Israelites, wherever they are mixed among the nations of the earth. … Ephraim has become mixed with all the nations of the earth, and it is Ephraim that is gathering together. …

If there are any of the other tribes of Israel mixed with the Gentiles we are also searching for them. … We want the blood of Jacob, and that of his father Isaac and Abraham, which runs in the veins of the people. …

Crucially, Brigham Young notes in the same discourse,

The Book of Mormon came to Ephraim, for Joseph Smith was a pure Ephraimite, and the Book of Mormon was revealed to him.

Since it is crystal clear that Joseph Smith was from New England stock hailing from Old England, this is a rather surprising statement, and Ludlow turns to this point next.
Again, President Joseph Smith Fielding explains

In this Dispensation of the Fulness of Times, the gospel came first to the Gentiles and then is to go to the Jews. However, the Gentiles who receive the gospel are, in the greater part, Gentiles who have the blood of Israel in their veins. There is a very significant statement in the words of Moroni as recorded on the title page of the Book of Mormon that it was ”[Sealed by the hand of Moroni, and his up unto the Lord, … ‘To come forth … [in due time] by way of the Gentile. …’

But in the title face of the Book of Mormon,  it says

Written to the Lamanites, who are a remnant of the house of Israel; and also to Jew and Gentile.

Thus, the issue of being of the house of Israel while being a Gentile is not really addressed here. This makes it doubtful that in April of 1829, Joseph Smith Jr had already decided that he was a descendant of Joseph.

The main argument for that is the 2 Neph 3, which says, as President Joseph Smith Fielding reminds the reader in the passage quoted by Ludlow, that

“How did the Book of Mormon come forth? By the hand of Joseph Smith. Yet we read in the Book of Mormon [see 2 Ne. 3:7–15; 2 Neph 2, p.67 in BoM 1830] that Joseph Smith is the descendant of Joseph who was sold into Egypt by his brethren, ....

What makes all of this so confusing is that the LDS leadership holds on to the Romans story of the Olive Tree (filtered through Jacob 5, which is expanded to fit in the fall of the Lamnites and the Nephites), and admits of the possibility of joining through faith. As Joseph Smith Fielding said:

Those who are not literal descendants of Abraham and Israel must become such, and when they are baptized and confirmed they are grafted into the tree and are entitled to all the rights and privileges as heirs.

But what then is the necessity of the mixed blood assumptions that are applied to the majority of the Saints?

The great majority of those who become members of the Church are literal descendants of Abraham through Ephraim, son of Joseph.

On top of that, they in some sense deny the "special" nature of the natural descendants, because it is the obedience to the commandments and the faithfulness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that are decisive; whoever lapses here, cannot use their lineage to inherit (1 Neph 17:35; Rom 9:6). The big difference, according to Ludlow, is that Ephraim is responsible for performing the work of the Restoration and for directing it. Again, President Joseph Smith Fielding states

The members of the Church, most of us of the tribe of Ephraim, are of the remnant of Jacob. We know it to be the fact that the Lord called upon the descendants of Ephraim to commence his work in the earth in these last days. We know further that he has said that he set Ephraim, according to the promises of his birthright, at the head. Ephraim receives the ‘richer blessings,’ these blessings being those of presidency or direction. The keys are with Ephraim. It is Ephraim who is to be endowed with power to bless and give to the other tribes, including the Lamanites, their blessings.

(The allusion of the "richer blessing" here is to KJV Gen 48:19f.)

Discussion

Clearly there are all sorts of problems here. 

One issue that was already bothering the Jewish interpreters of the story of Joseph was the fact that Ephraim and Menasseh as sons of Asanet, an Egyptian girl whose father was the priest Potifera, could not have been Jewish. This has to do with the fact that the Jewish interpreters were projecting the laws of Ezra and Nehemia, that Jews have Jewish moms, back into Patriarchical times (cf. Karin Hügel, in her queer readings of Joseph, p.92, makes). Thus Joseph is made to marry an adopted niece of his to bring forth Ephraim and Menasseh.

Die Israelit_in Dina, eine Halbschwester Josefs, wäre die Tocher Jakobs und Leas, hätte also eine andere Mutter als Josef, und Sichem, der Sohn eines Hiwiters, käme aus einem kanaanäischen Stamm. Asenat wäre also Josefs Nichte gewesen.

[The Israelite Dina, a half-sister of Joseph, would be the Daughter of Jacob and Leah, thus had a different Mother than Joseph, and Sichen, the Son of a Hiwite, would come from a canaanite tribe. Asenat would have been Joseph's niece, then. translation RCK]

The biggest issue remains why it was not sufficient to be counted among the seed through the Gospel; perhaps it was not sufficient to be non-Israel in that sense?

 

The notion of matrix in anthropology

While neither "interpretative matrix" nor "conceptual matrix" seem to be common terms of anthropological research, the notion of "cultural matrix" seems to be associated with Clyde Kluckhohn.

Kluckhohn had used it already in 1942, in Myth and Rituals: A General Theory ..., where he wrote

The structure of new cultural forms (whether myths or rituals) will undoubtedly be conditioned by the pre-existent cultural matrix. (p.52)

A more telling use occurs in his 1949 book, Mirror for Man, which uses matrix in the sense of a complete cross-product of relationships between a set of concepts.

The full significance of any single element in the culture design will be seen only when that element is viewed in the total matrix of its relationship to other elements. (p.34) 

Most of these environmental influences act on each other. In the total environmental matrix now one factor, now another bears on the organism with special intensity. (p.83) 

The cultural dislocation of emigrant groups, the rapid and disorderly expansion of cities, and many other factors have all contributed to the disorientation of individuals from a cohesive social matrix. (p.250)

Geertz used Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man as a negative example, criticizing the book for its plurality of definitions of what culture is, in his 1973 article on thick descriptions. 

The conceptual morass into which the Tylorean kind of pot-au-feu theorizing about culture can lead, is evident in what is still one of the better general introductions to anthropology, Clyde Kluckhohn’s Mirror for Man. In some twenty-seven pages of his chapter on the concept, Kluckhohn managed to define culture in turn as: (1) “the total way of life of a people”; (2) “the social legacy the individual acquires from his group”; (3) “a way of thinking, feeling, and believing”; (4) “an abstraction from behavior”; (5) a theory on the part of the anthropologist about the way in which a group of people in fact behave; (6) a “storehouse of pooled learning”; (7) “a set of standardized orientations to re-current problems”; (8) “earned behavior”; (9) a mechanism for the normative regulation of behavior; (10) “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men”; (11) “a precipitate of history”; and turning, perhaps in desperation, to similes, as a map, as a sieve, and as a matrix. In the face of this sort of theoretical diffusion, even a somewhat constricted and not entirely standard concept of culture, which is at least internally coherent and, more important, which has a definable argument to make is (as, to be fair, Kluckhohn himself keenly realized) an improvement. Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose. 

[RCK: Critically, these twelve definitions are not Geertz', but Geertz' paraphrase of Kluckhohn, summarized for the purposes of criticism.]  Thus, to Geertz, the use of matrix is not a proper use, but an analogical use, akin to speaking of cultural maps or sieves.

Kluckhohn continued to uses this notion in later works as well. In his 1961 book, Anthropology and the Classics, he wrote of the "intellectual matrix" of evolution (p.11).

In his Culture and Behavior: Collected Essays (1962), Kluckhohn paraphrased the total matrix definition (it is not an identical quote) and spoke of the "matrix of that [i.e. a specific, RCK] culture" in the context of contrasting cultural from universal values.

The full significance of any single element in a cultural design will be seen only when that element is viewed in the total matrix of its relationship to other elements—and indeed to other designs. (p.61)

… some values are almost purely cultural [i.e. as opposed to universal values, RCK] and draw their significance only from the matrix of that culture. (p.297)

 We then take the preliminary view that Kluckhohn meant something like the pairwise product of constraints of concepts upon each other, and then applied that notion successively to culture, the social, the environmental and the intellectual.

Indian Monument Discussions

In an off-cuff remark, J.B. Turner, Mormonism in All Ages (1842), p.190, jokes that the missing tribes must have been hiding in a Symmes' Hole, referring thereby to one of the 19th century Hollow-Earth proponents.

Captain Symmes had not been the first to suggest this idea in 1818, but he found especial notice, and some of his followers, such as James McBridge, the pioneer, published a book of his theory, Symmes's theory of concentric spheres : demonstrating that the earth is hollow, habitable within, and widely open about the poles (1826), and pushed for explorations to find such a passage.

Uncle Dale Broadhurst, as always, has the scoop on how these musings turn up in early and later Mormon history. Ezra Booth had claimed (in Eber D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed, 1834, p.127) that Joseph Smith Jr felt the Northern tribes were in the polar regions, separated by ice and mountains from the rest of the world; and the revelation that was printed in the Evening and Morning Star (May 1833) soon thereafter, writes:

And the Lord even the Savior shall stand in the midst of his people, and shall reign over all flesh. And they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord, and their prophets shall hear his voice, and shall no longer stay themselves, and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence. [= D&C 133:26]

Which may not be as clear as we would like it to be, but the north and the rocks and the ice are all there, at any rate.

Dale Broadhurst also argues that the fact that the July 1832 edition of the Evening and Morning Star can cite another article that refers to the theory of Capt. Symmes without any explanations indicates that Symmes was considered common knowledge at this point.

That the Symmes theory was well known in all religious circles of the time is best highlighted by the mention that the Rev. McCalla made in his closing arguments on pedobaptism against Alexander Campbell, where McCalla eschewed discussing the issue again "until an opponent would come from the regions discovered by Captain Simmes", as reported in (Richardson 1870, 2:86).

James McBride was involved in questions of Indian Monuments in other ways as well. He had made drawings that found their way into Squier and Davis' landmark 1848 Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, with which the Smithsonian inaugurated their Contributions to Knowledge series. Even though a landmark in its description, that work was still dominated by the assumption that a different race than the then-living Indians had built the monuments.

In addition to relying on other's artwork, Squier and Davis used travel descriptions to identify what to map, for example, Thaddeus Harris' The journal of a tour into the territory northwest of the Alleghany Mountains ; made in the spring of the year 1803 : with a geographical and historical account of the state of Ohio ; illustrated with original maps and views, printed in Boston in 1805. Or the descriptions of H.M. Brackenridge's Views of Louisiana : containing geographical, statistical and historical notices of that vast and important portion of America (1817) printed in Baltimore.

They also relied on Caleb Atwater's 1819 memoire in the Archaeologia Americana (Vol I, 1820), entitled Description of the Antiquities discovered in the State of Ohio and other Western States (Uncle Dale Broadhurst has excerpts of Atwater's memoire, too, of course). [Interestingly enough, in that very volume of the Archaeologia Americana, pp.325ff and then pp.333ff, there are discussions on the Indians coming from Asia, mostly due to similarities of physical features. Of course, as some of the authors point out, some people were trying to have the Indians come from Plato's Atlantis (p.340), e.g. Mathieu of Nantes RCK] They may have used Secretary Joseph Moulton and John Yates' History of the state of New-York : including its aboriginal and colonial annals, 1824, as well.

Harris' account was reprinted in volume 3 of Reuben G. Thwaites twenty-plus volume collection, Early Western Travels 1748-1846, printed in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906. Reuben G. Thwaites was an American historian and friend of Frederick Jackson Turner, who would travel the Ohio River for "color" in the way that 19th century military historians like Delbrück would walk battle fields.

Modern Counters to Bruce Malina

As was recently pointed out to me, even the updated version (3rd edition from 2002) of Bruce Malina's work has its issues and counter-arguments. Specifically, U. Bockmuehl of Cambrdige wrote in a review (in 2002):

Nonetheless, after more than two decades of remarkable popularity, the book's re-release does invite a number of critical reflections. First, for a third edition this book remains surprisingly unpolished in some respects. Typos old and new continue; so does a prose style that borders at times on the trite and repetitive -- even when allowing for undergraduate attention spans. There still is no comprehensive bibliography and no index of modern authors, so that specific references remain difficult to find. Although updated, the chapter bibliographies still suggest inadequate interaction with anthropological approaches critical of the author's own. While this may be understandable in a pioneering work that first brought the insights of cultural anthropology to the table of New Testament studies, in a third edition one might like to see a more nuanced picture. A good deal of recent classical scholarship on honour and shame, some of it rather critical of J.G. Peristiany's and J. Pitt-Rivers' old view that these 'pivotal values' governed every social transaction in the 'Mediterranean' world, is simply not cited here (e.g. B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993); D.L. Cairns, Aidos (1993); M. Herzfeld and M.A. Marcus in D.D. Gilmmore (ed.), Honor and Shame (1987)). It is instructive to look up the recent edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary under the relevant headings. 

As a result, astounding generalizations proliferate, seemingly unsupported by evidence and reminiscent of grand anthropological theories of a bygone day, when Polynesian cargo cults could be thought to shed the same inexhaustible light on the social realities of Steeple Bumpstead as of ancient Xanadu. We hear about what is characteristically, and it appears timelessly, 'Mediterranean' behaviour. But for every valid or at least plausible insight one stumbles over others burdened with rather too many unmentioned exceptions, be they ancient or modern or both. All the while, the cultural stereotypes merrily accumulate to an extent that would be unthinkable if the object were contemporary 'African' or 'native American' people groups. The Index of Ancient Authors is remarkably underpopulated for a book of such tall claims; and readers who, like the present author, come to the study of the New Testament from that of the classical world may well scratch their heads to find all ancient (and modern?) inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin thrown into the one cultural melting pot, as if Parthians, Carthaginians and Iberians all subscribed to exactly the same social dynamics and assumptions. A reader of Tacitus or Juvenal would find that Romans easily recognized major anthropological differences between themselves, the Greeks and the diverse barbarians and Scythians who inhabited the wider orbit of mare nostrum. What is more, they had a particular revulsion for Oriental cultures and customs -- especially Jewish ones. 

And it is Jews, after all, whose role in the 'New Testament world' arguably matters more than most. Both in their own eyes and in those of their pagan critics, they were culturally unique. Little of that distinctness, however, comes into the fore in this book. Malina refers to ancient Jews and their literature in curiously arm-waving and unspecific terms ('Semites', 'Semitic subculture', 'Ben Zakaiists', 'late Israelites'), citing the Mishnah only twice and the Dead Sea Scrolls not at all, and virtually ignoring the first-century role of the Pharisees, who (rather than the priests) were in Josephus's view the real 'bearers of the Great Tradition'. A good many of Malina's cultural generalizations are plainly untrue for the followers of Jesus and for some or indeed most other religious Jews. For example, individual decision rather than family ties did matter for Jesus and at Qumran; Jews did not believe that 'stars were living beings, intelligent and powerful'; they did not wear tassels on their garments primarily to ward off the evil eye; at least the Dead Sea sect did prohibit marriage with nieces and cousins; 'Ben Zakaiists' (i.e. rabbis) did not develop 'a viable Israelite domestic religion... largely through interaction with post-Jesus groups' (i.e. Christians). And so forth. Exaggerated claims for a homogeneous and apparently timeless Mediterranean culture seriously compromise the anthropological and historical applicability of Malina's model to the highly specific and unusual context of religious first-century Palestinian Judaism. The contention that public honour and status mattered supremely to the elites of places like Corinth or Ephesus is at least plausible. The Palestinian Jewish 'New Testament world', however, was in fact a culture in which many, not least in the Jesus movement, prized humility more highly than secular conventions of honour, and saw social status and influence in a frame of reference that prioritised divine revelation and the judgment of the world to come.

Some of the criticism is not specific to Malina, but to his larger camp of co-researchers, the CONTEXT group that he belongs to. Zeba A. Crook of Carleton University, in her review of TODD D. STILL and DAVID G. HORRELL (eds.), After the First Urban Christians: The Social-Scientific Study of Pauline Christianity Twenty-Five Years Later (London/New York: Clark, 2009), points out that the Horrell especially, in the introductory methodological essay, criticizes Malina's hard distinction: 

Arguing against Bruce Malina’s strongly articulated distinction (The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology [Atlanta: John Knox, 1981]), and taking his cue from two recent social-science works—one by a sociologist, Grace Davie (Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000]), the other [p. 441] by an anthropologist, David E. Sutton (Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory [Oxford: Berg, 2001])—H. claims that the distinction between social description and social-scientific criticism is no longer sustainable and is not actually reflected in current work.

Crook disagrees with the assessment, but agrees that a revamping of Malina using newer literature is in order.

Trying to understand the Zion Plat

Trying to understand the ideas behind the Zion Plat description, given what is generally known about farming in the 1815s---see Daniel W. Howe, What hath God Wrought, Cambridge University Press (2007), Chapter I The Continental Setting, Section.2---or the description of Joseph Smith Sr as a farmer, is now always easy.

For the purposes of this discussion, the question of what happened to the various temples is not very interesting, though this was indubitably one of the key issues for the Mormons themselves. The focus extends to the basic infrastructure for the individual lots and houses.

The agricultural society of the times was a single-family unit of the husband and farmer and the wife, plus their children, possibly some old or unmarried relatives, and/or borders.

That unit has its house on the 2000 m² plot that each family receives, with the tree grove in the front, the house 25 feet away from the street, and the garden in the back. Since the garden is the main source of the fruits and if at all vegetables that the family will consume, it make sense to have it close to the house. It is possible that the grove was supposed to include fruit trees as well. The garden would most likely also include a privy and the well, if the lot has one, though the commentary does not make that clear. It is also possible that workshops would be located here, such the grist mills, carding machines or the cooper shop that Joseph Smith Jr worked in when he lived on the Smith family farm on the Manchester/Palmyra line.

What is more puzzling is that the stables and the barns have been moved out and placed into the south (not, as sometimes said, the north and the south, just the south). This effectively means that the main units of transportation and mobility, the horse and the carriage or buggy are away from the house. Not only does this make transportation difficult, as the horses are possibly up to 1.41 miles away from the house (in a square plat, the max distance is the diagonal of the plat). The farmland, on the other hand, is supposed to be up north and tended by the agriculturalists. This means that the farmland is even farther than the house from the animal power that assists in the plowing.

There are some ameliorating factors to the arrangement of living. While in slightly different Indian configurations, such as the Old Southwest, a similar agglomeration of horses would have provided a very enticing target for Apaches and Comanches, the centralization also simplified supervision or even guard duties. The description says nothing about that, but it could have been the intent. Furthermore, thinking back to the anecdote of Joseph Smith Jr and Emma borrowing the wagon from Joseph Knight Sr for retrieving the golden plates of the Book of Mormon in Lucy Mack Smith's history, there was an expectation that the animals would be roaming the forest and that a considerable animal hunt might be required before being able to depart (EMD I.B.5, p.328). In such a context, the long distance could feel acceptable. Furthermore, the requirement that stables and barns are to be outside of the settlement does not prohibit one from leaving a horse in the garden over night, at least not as far as we can tell.

Another puzzlement is the absence of any locale for manufacturing, industry or shops. Admittedly, in the context of a city full of Saints, it might be unnecessary to export anything from elsewhere, and the majority of the workshops at least could fit into the yard, though that would probably not be so for the steel mills and brickyards. But taverns, general stores and specialist shops like pharmacies were well known; the Smiths had operated the one in Palmyra and the other in Kirtland, Ohio, and they were acquainted with Dr Robinson's pharmacy from Palmyra. It is unclear where they were supposed to go.

Finally, there is also no other form of connection to the economy of the larger unit, no postal roads or wharfs on a river or similar. The absence of water in the general case is a bit suspicious, but maybe they were expecting to have no problems with well-digging (as was apparently the case for Palmyra and Macedon).

Rejecting the Ur-Matriarchat

Argument

The base problem of the Ur-Matriarchat, based on the shared religion of the Great Goddess, is the paralogism of a petitio principii; rather than showing that all of the various tribes and locales of the Paleolithic to the demise of the Cretan culture ~1250 bc shared a common notion of the Great Goddess, it presupposes that shared notion.

This is also the main, though not the only way, in which the theory of the Ur-Matriarchat exposes its roots in the 18th and 19th century mode of historical, sociological and anthropological research. Other aspects are:

• Its dependence on patriarchical accounts of the main data points, such as Bachofen and Engels for the idea of the matriarchy, or James Mellaart and Sir Arthur Evans for the excavation and interpretation of Çatalhöyük and Knossos.
• Its dependence on simple process models of historical change, such as the conquest account of the matriarchical tribes through patriarchical Indo-Europeans.
• Its focus on the Western part of Eurasia to the exclusion of all other parts of the world for telling a definitive story of civilization.

Core archaeological components of this story are limited to selected subsets of the evidence of

• paleolithic female statuettes and French cave paintings
• the Cretan palace of Knossos
• the neolithic site of Çatalhöyük 
• the paleolithic and neolithic sites excavated by Marija Gimbutas

which ignore the steadily increasing other forms of evidence--settlement sites for the paleolithic, other statuettes from paleolithic, non-Knossian sites from Crete--for the time period under question that do not readily point toward a Matriarchy of the forms described.

The evidence is especially problematic when looking at the physical anthropology for the interred at Çatalhöyük, which reveals the population to have been on the brink of starvation, severely undernourished and suffering from all forms of nutritional deficiencies--hardly a paradise in any sense of the word.

Ute C. Schmidt has labelled this type of assimilation of the present condition to the past while ignoring the historical evidence as "illusionäre Vergangenheitsaneignung" (illusionary appropriation of the past) [p.142] and warns against it, because it obscures the view for analyzing the actual problems, pinning women down with an immobile conception of a past paradise that is unfortunately lost.

Finally, the lack of reflection of the historiographical setup causes unintended consequences; for example, the Ur-Matriarchat hypothesis is unintentionally racist and anti-semitic: Since the duality is either patriarchy (bad) and matriarchy (good), and there is no argument for matriarchy in the South-East of Çatalhöyük, Israel and the majority of Asia, Africa and the Americas must by necessity be counted on the patriarchical side.

Literature

• Meret Fehlmann, Die Rede vom Matriarchat, 2011.
• Brigitte Röder, Juliane Hummel, Brigitte Kunz: Göttinnendämmerung, 1996 (München : Droemer Knaur), ISBN: 3-426-26887-6.
• Ute C. Schmidt, Vom Rand zur Mitte: Aspekte einer feministischen Perspektive in der Geschichtswissenschaft, Zürich-Dortmund (edition ebersbach), 1994.

The Term Culture in Archaeology

In her book

Röder, Brigitte, Hummel, Juliane, Kunz, Brigitte: Göttinnendämmerung, 1996 (München : Droemer Knaur), ISBN: 3-426-26887-6

Juliane Hummel points out (p.172) that while culture is a concept that for existing societies includes non-material aspects such as belief systems or social conventions, while for archaeology the term is restricted to the material remains and is used in a very circumscribed sense.

Wie diese Beispiele [i.e. Linearbandkeramische Kultur, Horgener Kultur, etc] zeigen, ist der Kulturbegriff in der Archäologie sehr eingeschränkt. Er dient in erster Linie als Arbeitstitel für die fachinterne Verständigung und ist als Sammelbezeichnung für räumlich-zeitlich übereinstimmende archäologische Quellen zu verstehen, wobei der Grund der Übereinstimmung jeweils zu klären ist (Wotzka 1993, 25ff). [p.173]

As these examples show [e.g. Linear band ceramics culture, Horgener Kultur, etc], the term 'culture' is very restricted in archaeology. It serves primarily as a working title for internal communication and is a collective term for spatio-temporally agreeing archaeological sources, where the reason for the agreement requires explanation (Wotzka 1993, 25ff). [p.173]

Since the archaeological sources are restricted to material objects, the notion of culture cannot include "living things" such as conceptualizations.

Eine archäologische Kultur ist strenggenommen eine "tote Kultur" (Eggers 1986, 258). [p.173]

An archaeological culture is essentially a "dead culture" (Eggers 1986, 258). [p.173]

And this means that some of the questions laypeople are most interested in cannot be covered by the archaeological term of culture.

Da die archäologische Kultur ausschließlich über die materiellen Hinterlassenschaften einer Gemeinschaft verfügt, betrachtet sie lediglich einen Ausschnitt der ehemals "lebenden Kultur" .... Die "lebende Kultur" einer Menschengruppe umfaßt alles, was dort erdacht und geschaffen sowie sozial akzeptiert oder geduldet ist. Materielle Gegenstände, z.B. Werkzeuge, gehören ebenso dazu wie nicht-materielle Inhalte, etwa religiöse Vorstellungen, Rechtsnormen oder geschlechtsspezifische Verhaltensregeln (Rudolph 1988, 43). [p.173]

Since archaeological culture only has available the material remains of a society, the term only captures a slice of the then-existing "living culture" .... The "living culture" of a group of people includes everything that was conceived or created there, socially accepted or tolerated. Material remains, for example tools, belong into that as well as non-material contents, such as religious ideas, norms of law or gendered rules of conduct (Rudolph 1988, 43). [p.173]

This subtle distinction between "living culture" and "dead culture" foils some of the interpretative attempts that people make with respect to archaeological knowledge.

Ob die Menschen einer archäologischen Kultur, wie etwa Marija Gimbutas annimmt, sich selbst als Gemeinschaft verstanden, eine gemeinsame Sprache benützten, die gleichen religiösen Vorstellungen hatten -- kurz: ob sich die einzelnen Gruppenmitglieder als ein 'Volk' subjektiv zusammengehörig fühlten, darüber sagt der archäologische Kulturbegriff nichts aus. [p.174]

Whether the people of an archaeological culture, as Marija Gimbutas assumes, saw themselves as a society, used a common Language, shared religious conceptualizations -- in short, whether the individual members of the group felt subjectively as belonging together as a 'people', is a discussion that the archaeological sense of culture cannot contribute to. [p.174]

Analogy in Archaeology

The book

Röder, Brigitte, Hummel, Juliane, Kunz, Brigitte: Göttinnendämmerung, 1996 (München : Droemer Knaur), ISBN: 3-426-26887-6

suggests on p.168 that p.16 in Ian Hodder's 1982 book

Ian Hodder, The present past: An introduction to anthropology for archaeologists, London 1982. 

is helpful in thinking about archaeological analogy.

Analogien sind ganz allgemein eine Form des Informationstransfers von einem Objekt zum anderen, wobei verbindende Vergleichbarkeiten vorhanden sein müssen (Hodder 1982, 16). [p.168]

Analogies are generally speaking a form of information transfer from one object to another, where comparable features are present (Hodder 1982, 16). [p.168] 

Juliane Hummel, who contributed this chapter, continues

Jede analoge Schlußfolgerung ist an die sozialen und historischen Umstände der interpretierenden Person gebunden und spielt sich grundsätzlich vor dem Hintergrund des jeweiligen persönlichen Wissens und der individuellen Überlegungen über die Welt und die Menschen ab, .... [p.168]

Every analogical conclusion is tied to the social and historical circumstances of the interpreting person and essentially plays out in front of the backdrop of personal knowledge and individual musing about the world and humanity, .... [p.168]  

though she points out that the interpreting persons need not be aware of these limitations and cites Sir Arthur Evans of Krete fame as a good example.

All of this is fundamentally hermeneutic in the iterative deepening circle sense of the word.

Es kann nur das gefunden werden, was dem Interpreten oder der Interpretin bekannt ist. [p.168]

As interpreters, we can only find what we are familiar with. [p.168]

As a minor criticism, I would disagree with that conclusion in the limit case, as its truth would eliminate the possibility of ever learning about any new objects. We are quite capable of realizing that we have never seen anything like it and that a new term is in order.

But I am with Brigitte Röder when she observes that any act of identification is an act of interpretation already.

Schon allein die Feststellung, daß es sich bei ... [einem] ... Bronzeobjekt um ein Schwert handelt, ist eine Analogie auf dem Hintergrund heutigen Wissens. Letztendlich kann nämlich nicht mit endgültiger Sicherheit ge- [p.168] sagt werden, ob ein solcher Gegenstand, nur weil er eine Form aufweist, die uns als "Schwert" vertraut ist, wirklich als Waffe benutzt wurde (Sangmeister 1967, 202). Vielleicht diente er ja als Grabstock oder als Webschwert? [p.168f]

Even the mere identification of some bronze object as a sword is an analogy grounded in present day knowledge. In the limit no one can say definitively [p.168] whether such an object, just because it has a shape that is familiar to us as a "sword", was truly used as a weapon (Sangmeister 1967, 202). Maybe it was used to dig or during weaving? [p.168f]

Thus, analogies never amount to proofs, just as providers of plausibility.

Analogien ... sind der einzige Weg, über einen archäologischen Befund und über Funktion von Gerätschaften Hypothesen zu bilden und den Blick auf Aspekte und Strukturen zu lenken, die die Quellen von sich aus nicht verraten. [p.169]

Analogies ... are the only way to form hypotheses about an archaeological finding and about the function of tools and to put into view aspects and structures that the sources do not reveal by themselves. [p.169]