Lindaland
  Soul Unions
  Dominator And Partnership Societies

Post New Topic  Post A Reply
profile | register | preferences | faq

UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! next newest topic | next oldest topic
Author Topic:   Dominator And Partnership Societies
Valus
Knowflake

Posts: 632
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted June 07, 2009 05:05 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message

Dominator Culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dominator culture is a term coined by futurist and writer Riane Eisler. This term first appears in her book 'The Chalice and the Blade' (Harper Collins San Francisco, 1987). This book outlines in detail her theory of hierarchical dominator cultures vs. egalitarian "Partnership" cultures.

Terence McKenna, a friend of Eisler, consciously borrowed and credited Eisler's ideas in his notes and the bibliographies of his books. He used the idea of dominator culture in part to illuminate what happened to cultures native to the Americas, and in part to describe the contrasting, antithetical character of what he sees as Western patriarchal culture—indicating, for example, his claims that it perennially lacks of social conscience and lacks of concern for the environment. Furthermore he argues that, "The entire structure of the dominator culture ... is based upon 'our alienation from nature, from ourselves and from each other'".

See also:
Androcracy
Cultural imperialism
Gaia philosophy
Ecofeminism
Egalitarianism

External links:
Center for Partnership Studies
http://www.partnershipway.org/

Riane Eisler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riane_Eisler


Partnership & Domination Models

Eisler proposes that we need new social categories that go beyond conventional ones such as religious vs. secular, right vs. left, capitalist vs. communist, Eastern vs. Western, and industrial vs. pre or post industrial, which she notes do not describe the whole of a society's beliefs and institutions. She coined the term domination culture to describe a system of top-down rankings ultimately backed up by fear or force, noting that one of the core components of this system of authoritarian rule in both the family and the state is the subordination of women--be it in Nazi Germany and Khomeini's Iran today or in earlier cultures where chronic violence and despotic rule were the norm. She analyzes the androcracy (governance of social organization dominated by males) of Indo-European and other societies, versus what she proposes was a partnership model (as distinct from matriarchy) for the social organization of Neolithic Europe and the later Minoan civilization that flourished in prehistoric Neolithic Crete. To support the idea that neither men nor women dominated one another, Eisler cites archeological evidence from southeast Europe, especially Crete, drawing much from the research of Marija Gimbutas, James Mellaart, Nicolas Platon, and Vere Gordon Childe. Her hypothesis about prehistory also relies strongly on sources such as the Gnostic Gospels and on the history portrayed by the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod. To support her thesis for contemporary societies, she draws heavily from cross-cultural studies. She and others using her partnership/domination conceptual framework have applied her analysis to fields ranging from politics and economics to religion, business, and education.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riane_Eisler#Partnership_.26_domination_models

The Archaic Revival

"History is ending, because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley. And as the inevitable chaostrophe approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble, it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa, 15,000 years ago, rocked in the cradle of the great horned mushroom goddess before history. Before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism. Before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us. Because the secret faith of the 20th century is not modernism. The secret faith of the 20th century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the Paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock and roll, and Catastrophe Theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa, where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are... What we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe. And that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology and that when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience, the ego is suppressed. And the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of feeling immediate experience. And nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience. But that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace, what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body-- in the body-- there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience, like going to the grave without having sex. It means that you never figured out what it was all about. The mystery is in the body, and the way the body works itself into nature. What the archaic revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people, and the three enemies of the people are monotheism, monogamy, and monotony. And if you get them on the run, you have the dominators sweating, folks. Because that means that you're getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind... We can make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy, and monotony. All these things are possible. If we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it all together, which is the celebration of mind as play, and the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being, you can't be led into thing fetishism and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values, rather than products. This is terrifying news."

~ Terence McKenna
http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/mckenna/alien.html

IP: Logged

Valus
Knowflake

Posts: 632
From:
Registered: Apr 2009

posted June 07, 2009 07:03 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Valus     Edit/Delete Message
ARCHAIC SEXUALITY

...An open and nonproprietary approach to sexuality is fundamental to the partnership model. But this tendency was synergized and strengthened by the orgiastic behavior that was certainly a part of the African Goddess/mushroom religion. Group sexual activity within a small tribe of hunter-gatherers and group experiences with hallucinogens acted to dissolve boundaries and differences between people and to promote the open and unstructured sexuality that is naturally a part of nomadic tribalism. (This is not to imply that contemporary mushroom rituals are "orgies," despite what a small sensation-hungry segment of the public may choose to believe.)


IBOGAINE AMONG THE FANG


The Bwiti cults of West Africa, discussed in Chapter 3, offer an instructive example: use of a hallucinogenic indole-containing plant provides not only visionary ecstasy but also what its users call "open heartedness." This quality, a caring awareness of others, is widely believed to explain the internal cohesiveness of Fang society and the ability of Bwitists among the Fang to resist commercial and missionary incursions into their cultural integrity:

Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of its opposite.

Paradoxically ibogaine, the indole hallucinogen responsible for the pharmacological activity of the Bwiti plant (Tabemanthe iboga), is widely recognized both as a factor holding married couples together in the face of Fang institutions like easy divorce and as an aphrodisiac. It is perhaps one of the few plants of the many dozens claimed to be aphrodisiacs that actually performs as advertised.' Most other candidates for the title are in fact merely stimulants that can cause a generalized arousal and sustained erection.

Ibogaine seems actually to change, to deepen, and to enhance the psychological mechanisms that lie behind sexual drive; one experiences a simultaneous sense of detachment and involvement that is empowering. Yet in situations where sexual activity is neither sanctioned nor appropriate, ibogaine does not cause, or even raise the possibility of, sexual behavior. In these situations it functions much as ayahuasca functions among its traditional users; as a boundary-dissolving visionary hallucinogen. Here is another example of research only waiting for social attitudes to change in order to be done. If the impact of ibogaine on sexual dysfunction is found to be congruent with its folklore, then further research might be especially promising.

These powerful plants that change our relationship to our sexuality, and our view of self and world, are the special province of peoples whom we are accustomed to thinking of as primitive. This is but one more indication of the extent to which unconsciously imbibed dominator attitudes have robbed us of participation in the wider and richer world of eros and the spirit.

For easily discerned reasons, the dominator societies that arose to replace partnership societies were far less eager to suppress group sexual activities than they were to suppress the hallucinogenic mushroom religion. Group sexual activity without the dissolution of the dominator ego would help the most ego-obsessed males gain power and rise in the social hierarchy. Since domination of others ultimately includes sexual domination as well, this would explain the persistence of orgies and group sexual activities in many of the mystery religions, at the festivals of Dionysus and the Roman Saturnalia, and within paganism generally long after the heart of the pagan world had ceased to beat. Eventually, however, the dominator anxiety about the establishing of clear lines of male paternity outweighed all other considerations. Then ego domination finally achieved complete preeminence. Through Christianity's ruthless extermination of all heterodoxy, orgies were recognized and suppressed as the subversive, boundary-dissolving activities that they are.


CONTRASTS IN SEXUAL POLITICS

Several important contrasts emerge from a comparison of the egobased dominator society and the nonrigid, psychologically unbounded partnership society. Much diminished in the partnership model is the proprietary attitude of men toward women that is so centrally a part of the dominator model. Less prominent as well is the tendency for women to seek extended commitment to pair bonding from men in the pursuit of security and vicarious social ranking. Family organization is not rigid and hierarchical. Children are raised by an extended family of cousins and siblings, aunts and uncles, and former and current sexual partners of their parents. In such a milieu, a child has many different relationships and a variety of role models. Group values are not usually at odds with that of the individual or his or her mate and children. Adolescent sexual experimentation is expected and encouraged. Couples may bond for any number of reasons related to themselves and the welfare of the group; such bonding may be-but is not necessarily-lifelong. Sexuality is rarely taboo in such societies, only becoming so as a result of contact with dominator values.

In dominator society, men tend to choose sexual partners who are young, healthy, and capable of bearing many children. And the strategy of women within a dominator society is often to bond with an older man who, by being in control of group resources (food, land, or other women), could ensure that a woman's worth won't be devalued as she becomes older and passes out of her childbearing years. In the ideal partnership society, older men may have sexual relations with younger women, but without threatening the bonds that have been formed with older women; however, women are not driven to seek reproductive security under the protection of older men.

This situation arose because power did not lie exclusively with aging and powerful males. Rather, power was distributed between men and women and through all age groups. Ultimate power in such societies was the power to create and sustain life and so was naturally imaged as female - the power of the great Goddess.

Jean Baker Miller pointed out that the so-called need to control and dominate others is psychologically a function, not of a feeling of power, but of a feeling of powerlessness. Distinguishing between "power for oneself and power over others," she writes: "In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be."'

Partnership societies do not simply replace a patriarchy with a matriarchy; such concepts are too limited and gender bound. The real difference here is between a society based on partnership and roles appropriate to age, size, and level of skill and a society in which a dominance hierarchy is maintained at the expense of the full expression and social utilization of the individuals within the group. In the partnership situation the lack of concepts based on property and ego inflation made jealousy and possessiveness less of a problem.

The generally hostile attitude of dominator society toward sexual expression can be traced to the terror that the dominator ego feels in any situation in which boundaries are dissolved, even the most pleasurable and natural of situations. The French notion of orgasm as petit mort perfectly encapsulates the fear and fascination that boundary-dissolving orgasm holds for dominator cultures.

http://www.dgswilson.com/text/FoodOfTheGods.pdf

IP: Logged

All times are Eastern Standard Time

next newest topic | next oldest topic

Administrative Options: Close Topic | Archive/Move | Delete Topic
Post New Topic  Post A Reply
Hop to:

Contact Us | Linda-Goodman.com

Copyright © 2008

Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com © 2000
Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.46a