• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 457 0

economist and close associate of Karl Marx, examined our history under the bright lamp of a new paradigm set forth by his contemporary Charles Darwin. Engels also had access to the prodigious work of anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan. Countless modern scholars have addressed the history of private property, but it’s hard to beat the elegance of Engels’s simple outline of human social evolution, laid out in his wonderful classic, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. In the natural progression to a more controlled form of hunting and gathering, he theorized, the community efforts of planting and harvesting remained the female domain, while animals that could “belong” to someone belonged to men. Goats and sheep, being mobile and tradable, became currency. Rather suddenly men got the purse strings. Rather suddenly “purse strings” was a concept. So was “inheritance.” The family tightened its boundaries, the better to serve as conduit for property passed from father to son.

If we can divine religion from relics, it seems pretty clear that up to this point human societies stood most in awe of female power: the pregnant Venus of Willendorf; the Woman with the Horn carved on a cliff in Dordogne, France; the fecund clay figurines that preclassical Mexicans buried with their dead; pregnant torsos carved from the tusks of woolly mammoths in Asia; the pale stone fertility figures strewed along the Mediterranean coast like so many dragons’ teeth. The one that gets my vote for blunt reverence is a mammoth-ivory disk from a gravesite in Moravia, cut with a single, unambiguous vulval slit. So many goddesses, so little time—for they fell, and fell far, from grace. It’s pretty difficult now even to imagine female body parts as sacrament: when the kids spray-painted vulvas on my front steps, their thoughts were oh so far from God.

How fiercely doth the sacred turn profane. Our ancestors in the Fertile Crescent appear to have dropped Goddess Mother like a hot rock, and shifted their allegiance to God the Father, coincident with the rise of Man the Owner of the Flock.

Since then, most of us have come to see human ownership of places and things, even other living creatures, as a natural condition, right as rain. While rights and authority and questions of distribution are fiercely debated, the basic concept is rarely in doubt. I remember arguing tearfully, as a child, that a person couldn’t own a tree, and still in my heart I believe that, but inevitably to come of age is to own. When we stand upon the ground, we first think to ask, Whose ground is this? And NO TRESPASSING doesn’t just mean, “Don’t build your house here.” It means: “All you see before you, the trees, the songbirds, the poison ivy, the water beneath the ground, the air you would breathe if you passed through here, the grass you would tread upon, the very idea of existing in this place—all these are mine.” Nought but a human mind could think of such a thing. And nought but a human believes it. Javelinas, and teenagers, still hark to the earth’s primordial state and the music of the open range.

Now, territoriality is a different matter. Birds do that. Dogs do it. Pupfish in their little corner of a mud puddle do it. They (meaning, usually, the males of territorial species) mark out a little plot and defend it from others of their own kind, for the duration of their breeding season. This is about reproduction: he is making jolly well sure that any eggs that get fertilized, or babies that get raised, within that hallowed territory are, in fact, his own. Often, it’s also a matter of securing an area that contains enough resources—-nuts, berries, caterpillars, flower nectar, whatever—to raise a brood of young. Just enough, usually, and hardly a caterpillar more. The minute the young have flown away, the ephemeral territory vanishes back into the thin air, or the bird brain, whence it came. The male might return to establish a breeding territory in the same place again next year, or he might not. The landscape lives on, fairly untouched by the process.

When