Jessica Wynn

Kind of, but a lot of them are professionals.

That should know better.

They're not really armchair, you know?

But on the other side, you have anthropologists with a very strict checklist on matriarchy.

And this means women must hold formal political power.

So they look at a place like Menankabau, see men in many official political and religious roles, and conclude that it's not a matriarchy.

But that misses how power actually functions in that society.

So we're measuring this with the wrong tools and we get the wrong answers.

Yeah, exactly.

It's applying a Western framework, what power is supposed to look like, and using that to judge a system that may be organized very differently.

And that's why these debates about matriarchy just go in circles.

People arguing from different definitions without realizing they're not talking about the same thing.

Yeah, people really like to think this.

This is actually a claim with a very specific origin.

It was formalized in 1861 by a Swiss scholar, Johann Jacob Bakofen.

Maybe not formalized, maybe invented is a better word for his theory.

Yeah.

So it's just this Victorian guy, Bakofin, argued that early human societies were organized around women and motherhood and that over time they evolved into patriarchy, which he saw as a more advanced stage of civilization.

Yeah, he thought it was more advanced.

Yeah.