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Women's Spirituality Scholars Speak Out:
A Report on the 7th Annual Gender & Archeology Conference
at Sonoma State
By Marguerite Rigoglioso
The purpose of this document is to
provide a report, from my perspective,
on issues relevant to women's spirituality
that emerged from the seventh annual
Gender and Archaeology conference,
which took place at Sonoma State University
in Rohnert Park, CA, October 4-5,
2002.
Perhaps the main event, from the women's
spirituality standpoint, is that Cynthia
Eller was publicly and privately challenged
by several members of the women's
spirituality field about the content
and style of both her presentation
at the conference and her book The
Myth of Patriarchal Prehistory: Why
an Invented Past Won't Give Women
a Future. The title of her conference
presentation was "Religious Uses of
Prehistoric Material Culture: Female
Figurines and the Feminist Spirituality
Movement."
Eller's Presesntation
Eller's presentation built upon the
themes of her book, which is a scathing
attack of some of the scholarship
that has been germinal to the field
of women's spirituality. In her presentation,
she briefly asserted that we cannot
claim that female figurines found
throughout Paleolithic and Neolithic
Europe represent goddesses because
we often do not know what the precise
contexts of these figurines were within
archeological settings, and because
many of them were found in rubbish
heaps. [No mention was given to the
fact that many of these figurines
were found in obvious sacred contexts,
such as graves, shrines, and temples.]
Eller went on to imply that given
that we have no basis for claiming
that these figurines are, in fact,
goddesses, their use by contemporary
Western women for what she terms "religious"
purposes is naive, and, worse, faintly
ridiculous. By showing slides of the
various ways in which female figurines
have been reproduced and sold commercially,
and by maintaining a sarcastic tone
throughout her presentation, she presented
what a number of us at the conference
felt was a lampooning of large segments
of current women's spirituality movement.
Moreover, Eller attempted to discredit
various scholars in the field bycalling
their interpretations of prehistory
"fictions" and by implying that differing
interpretations they have made on
one particular archeological artifact
indicates that the field is rife with
shoddy scholarship and a kind of "anything
goes" mentality. [No mention was made
of the fact that the traditional archeological
literature is filled will similarly
diverse, and often contradictory,
interpretations of finds.] Virtually
everything that came up on her slide
screen, from ads for goddess pilgrimages
and slide lectures, to figurine replicas,
to visionary art work inspired by
ancient female figurines, was treated
in what many of us felt was a mocking
fashion.
Max Dashu Takes the Floor
After Eller's presentation on Friday
evening, Max Dashu (whose own work
was one of Eller's targets) stood
up to challenge her briefly for ridiculing
the Goddess movement in a way that
would be unacceptable for any other
religious group. She said that, for
example, although the weight of archaeological
evidence increasingly disproves Biblical
accounts of Joshua's invasion or the
"united monarchy" of David and Solomon,
Torah believers are not attacked for
embracing historical fictions.
Dashu's main point, however, was that
a systematic global study of the controversial
female figurines has yet to be undertaken.
Those who interpret them as goddesses
may have been faulted for inattention
to their archaeological contexts,
but until recently archaeologists
failed to report those contexts, or
even the dates and sites where they
were found.
She said that it's a question not
just for Balkan finds, but for finds
on a global scale that exhibit comparable
patterns, such as those of the Valdivia
and Puerto Hormigas cultures. Female
figurines have simply not been accorded
the careful attention given to "masculine"
spheres, such as tool assemblages.
Much more work needs to be done in
this arena, but certainly women's
spirituality scholarship is not simply
based on "fantasy." Given that it
was quite late into the evening, there
was no further opportunity for discussion
that night.
[I highly recommend Max's excellent
critique of Eller's book. The earlier
edition (2000) is online at
http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/eller.html
and a more comprehensive version
is available by mail (check or money
order to Max Dashu at P.O. Box 3511,
Oakland CA 94609 USA) for $7 plus $2.
shipping.]
The Explosive Second Day of
the Conference
The next day, when discussion opened after the morning's panel presentations, I immediately moved to continue the dialogue from the evening before. I stated that "one of the presentations" from the night before was not in the kind of spirit of feminism that I would want to be a part of in the academy or in the Gender and Archeology group.
I said that I felt a statement needed
to be made at this point, because this
work had been out in the public eye
for some time now and many people in
the women's spirituality field have
been disturbed by it. Like Dashu, I
challenged this work [i.e., Eller's]
on two counts: 1) its complete dismissal
of the entire body of women's spirituality
scholarship; and 2) the derision with
which the attack has been perpetrated.
I requested not that everybody must agree on viewpoints, but that if this kind dialogue is going to happen, that it happen with respect, that the derisive minimalizing and trivializing tone be dropped, and that we actually have a conversation in which we can discuss data and in which we ALL openly reveal what our biases and viewpoints are, in terms of ontology, epistemology, and methodology. I said it was important that we have a dialog that did not simply dismiss an entire emerging and, frankly, cutting-edge body of scholarship being produced by women. Otherwise, I said, we were just going to be resorting to women-on-women violence.
The room immediately became completely galvanized, revealing that this issue had been present for everyone, regardless of where they stood on it, and that it was a highly charged one about which people had much to say.
It became clear to me that there was
much division along ideological lines,
and it was my distinct impression, based
on the nature of some of these comments,
that many of the people who seemed to
be critical of women's spirituality
as a field had, in fact, read little
or nothing of the scholarship in this
field, apart from what Eller has offered
in her book. One scholar even went so
far as to say that she equated people
involved with women's spirituality with
"fundamentalists" [without acknowledging
that the prevailing positivist, scientistic,
post-modern epistemological framework
in the academy ALSO IS A BIAS and can
be adhered to in a fascistic manner,
as many of us were witnessing].
Eller herself responded, and although she maintained her stance of critique, she did acknowledge that her derisive style perhaps was not entirely appropriate.
A few people from the women's spirituality
field individually approached Eller
afterward to continue the dialogue.
I personally had a conversation with
her in which I told her that I did find
her book valuable in certain ways, in
that it has inspired me to be even more
careful about my scholarship and assumptions,
but I suggested to her that she perhaps
update her own reading in this area,
as many new and nuanced pieces of work
are emerging as we all continue to grapple
with the questions.
One Large Step for Women's Spirituality
The events of this conference, to my mind, represent a significant step on the part of women's spirituality scholars to assert the legitimacy of our field and claim our rightful place at the academic dinner party. This is one of the first times that we have worked together as a group to stand up for ourselves and confront the hostility being directed at us.
The attack that is being leveled against women's spirituality by Eller and others is purported to have the neutral agenda of keeping the academy free of inaccurate and ideologically biased scholarship. However, its larger and much more political agenda is to uphold the hegemony of a very limited, narrow, positivist-oriented ontological, epistemological, and methodological framework.
In other words, the academy is attempting to repress the expanded ways of knowing, seeing, and interpreting that women's spirituality scholars are bringing to the table, and it is using one of patriarchy's favored methods to do so: the silencing tactic of scorn. Whether this kind of repression is being carried out by women or men academics, it is all part of the same patriarchal paradigm. Of course, this is the very paradigm that women's spirituality scholarship is trying to expose and transform. So the attack has been particularly virulent -- involving the even more vicious
tactic of professional discrediting when scorn alone won't do -- because we pose a threat to the reigning paradigm.
Clearly, responsible and accurate scholarship is everyone's responsibility and goal. As scholars in the field of women's spirituality, we are continuing to expand our knowledge in a wide range of disciplines so that our work can be as informed and accurate as possible. Now it is also time for us to make a collective effort to call the academy on the carpet for its ideologically motivated repression of expanded modes of inquiry, and to assert that the denigration of our work cease, so that we can all move onto more constructive dialogue.
Re-Membering Medusa
Synchronistically, the presentation that Joan Marler delivered at the conference was all about the iconography, mythology, and history of the Gorgon in Europe. As she described the story of how Athena cooperates with patriarchy to cut off what I might call her "twin sister's" head -- really, an aspect of herself -- it was clear to all of us that we were participating in microcosm fashion in this great myth here in the academy, where so many Athenean women were taking great relish in cooperating with patriarchy to slice the heads off their Medusan sisters -- we who, through the body of women's knowledge and history that we are exploring, carry the archetype for the element of chthonic wisdom that has been excised from much of Western culture.
Marler ended her presentation with a
statement that, in the end, the Medusa
prevails almost in a joyful fashion,
because she knows who she is. "And when
we know our full powers, generative
AND destructive, "Marler concluded pointedly,
"we don't have to attack anybody, do
we?"
Indeed, scholars in the women spirituality community do not need to resort to attack tactics or stoop to the paradigm of power struggle in order to assert our right to be a part of the academy and have our work treated with respect. We need instead to use our own Medusan energies responsibly, channeling them into the continued pursuit of knowledge and the naming of repression and abuse wherever we see it directed at our field.
In doing so, we will be participating in the great cosmic surgery to sew Medusa's head back onto her with her body, to reunite her with her twin sister Athena, and to incorporate their creativity and wisdom back into Western culture.
I believe that as we continue this work with dignity and dedication, the derisive tones of Eller and others will start to ring more and more hollow. As that happens, a more constructive scholarly dialogue will begin to be heard.
I call upon women's spirituality scholars
to continue to rally together and speak
up on behalf of the field. We are gaining
momentum and are assembling in numbers
too big to be ignored now. Let's take
advantage of that and keep taking steps
to move our field into its rightful
place in the academy.
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