In this chapter we take up the role of witch hunts in indigenous, pre-state, and early state societies in the creation of patriarchy. There are different trajectories in the creation of patriarchy. In one there is an exclusion of women from the higher, ritual sphere of knowledge; this exclusion is sustained through persecuting women as witches for any attempt to break the taboo. In another trajectory the very knowledge that women possessed of the ritual sphere is itself transformed from having been beneficial to society to being the source of evil.

Approaches

In the manner of institutional economics, patriarchy is an institution through which resource rights and control are allocated among the genders within a household. Furthermore, gender struggles are social processes of bargaining over institutions (Folbre 2006). Witch hunts then can be identified as an extreme form of gender struggle through which, in some indigenous societies, men established their domination over the various sites of the society, polity, and economy.

The creation of patriarchy was the outcome of a long historical process. In Europe, according to Gerda Lerner (1986), it took about 2,500 years for patriarchy to be established. There are two major analyses of the type of women's labour that was controlled in this process. Lerner, following Claude Meillassoux and Peter Aaby, identifies women's reproductive labour as being the first labour to be appropriated: ‘Thus, the first appropriation of private property consists of the appropriation of women as reproducers’ (1986: 52, emphasis in original) and ‘the product of the commodification of women—bride-price, sale price and children—was appropriated by men. It may very well represent the first accumulation of private property’ (1986: 213).

Lerner's analysis follows that of Friedrich Engels (1972) who understood women as ‘producers of life’ and men as virtually producers of everything else. He thought that men both hunted and gathered in hunter-gatherer or forager societies. Women largely foraged the plant foods that were the dominant sources of subsistence in tropical climates (Lee and Daly 1999b: 8). Not only did women gather and only, in a limited way, participate in hunting, as attested by cave paintings (for example, the Neolithic site at Burzahom in Kashmir which shows a woman and a man together hunting a big animal with a spear, as also accounts of the Greek epics and India's Arthashastra), with images of women as hunters and soldiers (Singh 2001).