Abstract
I would like to begin this chapter by citing two passages at length. First:
King Overami came into Benin City with a large following, amounting to 700 or 800 people, all unarmed, headed by messengers with a white flag in front. He was supported in the usual way by chosen men holding him up by each arm. Some twenty of his wives who accompanied him, were of a very different class from those seen previously. They had fine figures, with their hair worn in the European chignon style of some years ago, really wonderfully done in stuffed rows of hair, the head not being shaved on top like those of the lower classes, and they wore coral necklaces and ornaments and hairpins galore … . The next day on the sixth, the king … came down to the palaver house with 400 of his own ‘boys’(men), all of whom were stark naked, as was their custom in the presence of the king … The king who is a stout but fine man of considerable intelligence, about forty years of age, was … simply covered with masses of strings of coral, interspersed with larger pieces, supposed to be worth many pounds. His head dress, which was in the shape of a Leghorn straw hat, was composed wholly of coral of excellent quality, meshed closely together, and must have weighed very heavily on his head, for it was constantly being temporarily removed by an attendant. His wrists up to his elbows were closely covered with coral bangles, so were his ankles.
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Notes
H.L. Roth, Great Benin, Its Customs, Art and Horrors (London, 1903), Appendix III, ‘The Surrender and Trial of the King’, pp. xii–xiv.
The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073–1085: An English Translation, ed. H.E.J. Cowdrey (Oxford, 2002), pp. 221–22.
For a synthesis of events see C. Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church From 1050 to 1250 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 113–21, and for sources illustrating the polemical exchanges see B. Tierney, The Middle Ages Volume I: Sources of Medieval History (Cornell, NY, 1970, 2nd edn 1973), pp. 123–31.
K.B. Berzock, Benin: Royal Arts of a West African Kingdom (New Haven, CT, 2008), pp. 5–14.
P.A. Igbafe, ‘The fall of Benin: a reassessment’, The Journal of African History 11 (1970), 385–400.
See M.E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender and History (Oxford, 2001), pp. 12–18, J.P. Zinserr, ‘Gender’, in M. Hughes-Warrington (ed.), Palgrave Advances in World Histories (London, 2005), p. 205, and P.N. Stearns, Gender in World History (London, 2000), pp. 10–19, for useful discussions, and D. Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA, 2005), pp. 263–65, for a general statement.
N. Zemon Davis, ‘“Women’s history” in transition: the European case’, Feminist Studies 3 (1976), 83–103.
K. Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (London, 1979); and for recent reflections on early feminist engagements with Marxist approaches see J.W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1999), pp. 68–90; C. Hall, ‘Marxism and its others’, in C. Wickham (ed.), Marxist History-Writing for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2007), pp. 112–39.
J.W. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053–75, on 1067.
The often-cited social critique of ‘gender’ is J. Hoff, ‘Gender as a postmodern category of paralysis’, Women’s History Review 3 (1994), 149–68, which regretted the diversion it imposed from agency and intentionality.
J. Tosh, ‘What should historians do with masculinity? reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop Journal 38 (1994), 179–202.
R.W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995), p. 77.
An important recent exception to this is L. Brubaker and J.M.H. Smith (eds), Gender in the Early Medieval World East and West, 300–900 (Cambridge, 2004), and particularly J.M.H. Smith, ‘Introduction: Gendering the Early Medieval World’, pp. 1–19.
See A. Davies, Women, Race and Class (London, 1981); J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London, 1999), and B. Holsinger, citing the work of G. Spivak, in ‘Medieval studies, postcolonial studies and the genealogies of critique’, Speculum 77 (2002), 1201.
Cited by J. Alberti, Gender and the Historian (London, 2002), p. 130.
See A. Shepard and G. Walker (eds), Gender and Change, Agency, Chronology and Periodisation (Oxford, 2009), p. 10.
J. Hexter, On Historians (Cambridge, MA, 1979), who characterised all historians in terms of being analytically either ‘lumpers’ or ‘splitters’ of phenomena.
Shepard and Walker (eds), Gender and Change, and see J. Kelly-Gadol, ‘Did women have a renaissance?’, in Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago, 1984), pp. 19–50.
J.M. Bennett, ‘Forgetting the past’, in Shepard and Walker (eds), Gender and Change, pp. 274–278. See also J.M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia, 2006). And, for a feminist historian dismantling golden age thinking, see P. Stafford, ‘Women and The Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994), 221–49.
For definitions of ‘distributive’ and ‘collective power’, see M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 6–7.
As one African historian has put it, ‘cultural representations are arguments in the articulation of consent.’ T.C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 20–1.
M. Castells, Communication Power (Oxford, 2009), p. 10.
For reference to an anti-papal interpretation of Henry IV’s behaviour that depicts it as a form of martyrdom at the hands of a tyrannical pope, see P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton, NJ, 2001), p. 242.
See T. Reuter, ‘Nobles and others, the social and cultural expression of power relations in the Middle Ages’, in A.J. Duggan (ed.), Nobles and Nobility (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 86–95, and for the symbolic meanings of ecclesiastical clothing in the early middle ages see G. Constable, ‘The ceremonies and symbolism of entering religious life and taking the monastic habit, from the fourth to the twelfth century’, Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano de Studi Sull’alto Medioevo 33.2 (Spoleto, 1987), pp. 771–834. For a late antique example, see M. Harlow, ‘Clothes maketh the man: power dressing and elite masculinity in the later Roman World’, in Brubaker and Smith (eds), Gender and the Early Medieval World, pp. 44–69.
The inspiration for this approach comes from F. Bray, Technology and Gender Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (London, 1997), and M. Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (California, CA, 1988).
S.B. Ortner, Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston, 1996), pp. 16–20.
C. Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987); T.C. McCaskie, State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante, p. 20. Similarly L. Abu-Lughod has explored the complexities and subtleties of female cultural agency in a male-honour-dominated society of Bedouin Egypt, in Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in Bedouin Society (Berkeley, CA, 1986, 2nd edn 1999).
For a discussion of these processes see K. Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics (Cambridge, 2007).
I use here the language of J.C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (London, 1990), as a suggestive analogy.
M.E. Wiesner-Hanks concurs: ‘too much world history does not involve gender, and too much women’s and gender history focuses on the United States’ in ‘World history and the history of women, gender and sexuality’, Journal of World History, 18 (2007), 53–67, on 56.
M.E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gender in History (Oxford, 2001), p. 18.
P.N. Stearns, Gender in World History (London, 2000).
The idea owes something to Karen Sacks’s feminist Marxist history of the 1970s, which traces the stages by which women were increasingly marginalised from relations of production in feudal societies and isolated in domestic roles that denied them full adult status. K. Sacks, Sisters and Wives: the Past and Future of Sexual Equality (London, 1979).
For example, the authoritative gender claims of world religions used by Stearns in defining social systems should not be regarded as having simply reflected social realities, as if all that Buddhism had to offer women was the meditative resources to endure foot-binding: P.N. Stearns, Gender in World History (London, 2000), p. 41.
See F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1993); E.L. Jones, The European Miracle Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 1981, 3rd edn 2003), J.A. Hall, Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (London, 1985), p. 83, for blocking factors in pre-colonial India; and S.P. Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations: And the Remaking of the World Order (London, 2002). To be fair, parochiality, albeit without the triumphalism, is written into the social science approaches of the liberal left as well, though the left has done more to eradicate it from its interpretive assumptions. See C. Wickham, ‘Memories of Underdevelopment: What has Marxism done for medieval history, and what can it still do?’, in Wickham (ed.), Marxist History Writing, pp. 32–49.
The tunnel vision produced by this Eurocentric world historical teleology is a central theme of J. Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge, 2005).
The phrase was coined by K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2000), whose thesis I have grossly simplified here.
P. Parsatharathi, ‘Review article: the great divergence’, Past & Present 176 (2002), 275–93, for a useful review of Pomeranz. For related work, see R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (New York, NY, 1997), and A.G. Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, CA, 1998). I would like to thank Kenneth Pomeranz for sending me his recently unpublished paper comparing frontier masculinities in North America and China.
Among its founders might be counted E. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA, 1982), R. Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi, 1983), and M. Sahlins, How Natives Think: About Captain Cook for Example (Chicago, IL, 1995).
D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
Ibid., p. 8.
Indeed, M. Sahlins points out in ‘On the anthropology of modernity, or, some triumphs of culture over despondency theory’, in A. Hooper (ed.), Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific (Canberra, 2000), pp. 44–61, the sense in which Europe could be seen as the odd one out in that its transition to modernity was not a hybridising third-wave response to colonialism, as it was almost everywhere else.
It also speaks to the appeal made by Bill Jordan (and echoed by Judith Bennett in the same edited collection) on behalf of cooperation and coexistence between historians of medieval Europe and people of colour in US higher education, for which see ‘Saving medieval history; or, the new crusade’ in J. van Engen (ed.), The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (London, 1994), pp. 259–72 and J.M. Bennett, ‘Our Colleagues, Ourselves’, ibid., pp. 245–58.
As Timothy Reuter has concluded in the case of one particular period, ‘medieval, both because of its origins and because it is often used as a purely descriptive or conventional term, will not give much help to historians in a globalized world looking for insight through comparison’. T. Reuter, ‘Medieval: another tyrannous construct’, in J.L. Nelson (ed.), Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities (Cambridge, 2006), p. 37.
The celebrated and controversial indictment of historians on this count was, of course, E. Said, Orientalism (London, 1978).
R.W. Connell, ‘The big picture: masculinities in recent world history’, Theory and Society 22 (1993), 606–10, on 606.
K. Pomeranz, ‘Social history and world history: from daily life to patterns of change’, Journal of World History 18 (2007), 85. Chris Fletcher, in the present book, makes a strong case for the methodological priority of cultural ahead of social structural categories in the proper historical comparison of past masculinities. See also R.I. Moore, ‘World history’, in M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (London, 1998), p. 954; and, for a thorough discussion, A. Dirlik, ‘Reflections on eurocentrism’, in E. Fuchs and B. Stuchtey (eds), Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Oxford, 2002), pp. 247–84. And, for more on ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ categories, see Jansen in this volume.
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern (Oxford, 2004), p. 12. These include ‘bodily practices’, such as dress, timekeeping, food, naming practices and sport.
Idem, ‘“Archaic” and “modern” globalization in the Eurasian and African arena, c.1750–1850’, in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London, 2002), pp. 47–73.
V. Lieberman, Strange Parallels: Volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands: South East Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830 (Cambridge, 2009), has recently noted parallels between this land-based predation of the settled by the nomadic and European sea-based intervention in south and south-east Asia from the seventeenth century.
See J. McNamara, ‘The Herrenfrage: the restructuring of the gender system, 1050–1150’, in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 3–29; R.N. Swanson, ‘Angels incarnate: clergy and masculinity from Gregorian reform to reformation’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), pp. 160–77; and K. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester, 2005).
K. Cooper and C. Leyser, ‘The gender of grace: impotence, servitude, and manliness in the fifth-century’, in P. Stafford and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (eds), Gendering the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2001), pp. 6–21.
Ibid., p. 13.
Priests were to be free of local family control, and to mediate between families disputing over land. Their neutrality was to be guaranteed by their celibacy. R.I. Moore, ‘Family, community and cult on the eve of the Gregorian reform’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Ser., 30 (1980), 49–69.
The crux of the matter turns on the subject of marriage and the family as represented simultaneously as a path along which male authority progressed and as a site of rhetorical ambush where the failings of ‘suboptimal’ men lay vulnerable to exposure, for which see C. Leyser, ‘Custom, truth and gender in eleventh-century reform’, in R.N. Swanson (ed.), Studies in Church History 34: Gender and Christian Religion (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 75–91.
See Guy Halsall, ‘Gender and the end of empire’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34 (2004), 17–39, for an important discussion of the implications for female agency of imagined and real women in late antique high politics.
See M.C. Miller, ‘Masculinity, reform, and clerical culture: narratives of episcopal holiness in the Gregorian era’, Church History 72 (2003), 25–52.
R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987).
Idem, ‘The eleventh century in Eurasian history: a comparative approach to the convergence and divergence of medieval civilizations’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History 33 (2003), 1–19.
See E. Gellner, ‘Flux and reflux in the faith of men’, in Muslim Society (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 1–85, for his full thesis.
B. Bossler, ‘Gender and empire: a view from Yuan China’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History 34 (2004), 197–223.
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Yarrow, S. (2011). Masculinity As a World Historical Category of Analysis. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_7
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