That's why we have meetings. Meetings made us Homo.
I have to criticise as well the description of these ways of moving as described by placement of objects. Most species have one style of movement which we often label also by way of a spatial metaphor, the niche, as if animals were just some place in a fitness landscape.
It's better to think of animals (in the macro-scale you have set up) as ways of moving. [Admittedly it is a necker cube as Dawkins describes it, but your metaphor betrays the last ten thousand years of agricultural life as a bias that thinks of hunting as some sort of bug-out prepper method.]
The style of movement that is hunting is a method of connecting at least three vectors, the movement across the landscape of ① hunter and ② prey with a ③mess of energy (weapon, trap). [As another aside here we can see there is a smooth progression from scavenging to setting up cliff-fall ambush).
Gathering has a very different movement, if moves here and home about, if only because it is impossible to go hunting with small children, they destroy the mathematics involved in connecting up the three vectors mentioned above (I can recount trying to work with children below the age of reason and herding guinea pigs but I'll leave it for another day.)
Gathering has much less targetting, and is quite happy to substitute one root for another when digging. When gathers return to camp, they bring home back to its core. When hunters return to camp they return from the home range.
So looking at movement styles rather than the outcomes of these styles provides a better insight into domestic negotiations and their stylistic assumptions. Placement is an outcome.
However, the most important thing about this, as I opened with, is that Homo. sp have managed to negotiate more than way of moving across a landscape. No doubt other great apes will be shown to do some of this, but female wolves do not gather, only humans have manage to do more than one style of movement. Because we did that (way back in the egalitarian revolution of the palaeolithic) we have managed to incorporate more and more styles of movement. Settled city/agriculture is doubled down gatherer mode, nomadism is doubled down hunterer movement (with herds across landscapes) etc etc. They they ramifying into each other and produce empires and axial ages and history as we record it.
and we have manage to do that with meetings and negotiating that, if this is regard as domestic strife, then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG
This kind of thing will be exacerbated if the couple not only have no or little practical division of domestic labour but also no clear "ownership" of its domains: if one accepts the authority of Person A or B over kitchen, utility, garage, workshop, potting shed and bedroom -- to run it as they please -- and if you can possibly stretch to two bathrooms, then it's just the living space/room that remains to fight about. Modern chores-sharing couples might suffer here more, overall.
PS. If sharing a bathroom I suggest the gatherer way ;)
Yeah totally agree. That's why my wife owns the front yard and I own the back :) This division of ownership just cuts down on the sites for possible disagreement.
I loved the examples given here. Great post!
I’m glad you guys are writing these, and I enjoy seeing what you come up with every installment. This was a fun approach to tackle a big topic.
even calling it out as 'household conflicts' is very gather-y→ settled agriculture
That's why we have meetings. Meetings made us Homo.
I have to criticise as well the description of these ways of moving as described by placement of objects. Most species have one style of movement which we often label also by way of a spatial metaphor, the niche, as if animals were just some place in a fitness landscape.
It's better to think of animals (in the macro-scale you have set up) as ways of moving. [Admittedly it is a necker cube as Dawkins describes it, but your metaphor betrays the last ten thousand years of agricultural life as a bias that thinks of hunting as some sort of bug-out prepper method.]
The style of movement that is hunting is a method of connecting at least three vectors, the movement across the landscape of ① hunter and ② prey with a ③mess of energy (weapon, trap). [As another aside here we can see there is a smooth progression from scavenging to setting up cliff-fall ambush).
Gathering has a very different movement, if moves here and home about, if only because it is impossible to go hunting with small children, they destroy the mathematics involved in connecting up the three vectors mentioned above (I can recount trying to work with children below the age of reason and herding guinea pigs but I'll leave it for another day.)
Gathering has much less targetting, and is quite happy to substitute one root for another when digging. When gathers return to camp, they bring home back to its core. When hunters return to camp they return from the home range.
So looking at movement styles rather than the outcomes of these styles provides a better insight into domestic negotiations and their stylistic assumptions. Placement is an outcome.
However, the most important thing about this, as I opened with, is that Homo. sp have managed to negotiate more than way of moving across a landscape. No doubt other great apes will be shown to do some of this, but female wolves do not gather, only humans have manage to do more than one style of movement. Because we did that (way back in the egalitarian revolution of the palaeolithic) we have managed to incorporate more and more styles of movement. Settled city/agriculture is doubled down gatherer mode, nomadism is doubled down hunterer movement (with herds across landscapes) etc etc. They they ramifying into each other and produce empires and axial ages and history as we record it.
and we have manage to do that with meetings and negotiating that, if this is regard as domestic strife, then YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG
This kind of thing will be exacerbated if the couple not only have no or little practical division of domestic labour but also no clear "ownership" of its domains: if one accepts the authority of Person A or B over kitchen, utility, garage, workshop, potting shed and bedroom -- to run it as they please -- and if you can possibly stretch to two bathrooms, then it's just the living space/room that remains to fight about. Modern chores-sharing couples might suffer here more, overall.
PS. If sharing a bathroom I suggest the gatherer way ;)
Yeah totally agree. That's why my wife owns the front yard and I own the back :) This division of ownership just cuts down on the sites for possible disagreement.