Bear with me here…this post is actually about the status of women in the Georgian economy….

 

When I was an undergrad my rhetoric teacher told us about how she was setting out snacks for a party one afternoon and her young daughter, looking at a bowl of olives, asked 'what are these?'  'They're olives.'  'Do I like them?'  'I don't know--try them and see.'  The girl picked one up, took a small bite, said 'I don't like this one,' and put it aside.  She then proceeded to take every olive out of the bowl, one by one, take a small bite, say 'I don't like this one either,' and put it aside.  Thirty years ago I thought this story was hilarious, but I'm now coming to understand that there's more to this story than I'd realised at the time.

 

It's natural for us to label, categorise and classify the myriad things we experience in the world around us, as a survival mechanism and a way to reduce sensory and cognitive overload.  It (generally) only takes one bad experience with, say, a bee, for us to decide that all bees might hurt us and it wouldn't be sensible to antagonise them.  This ability to label, categorise and classify is also fundamental to the practice of science.  As far as science is concerned, for example, the piece of granite that I'm holding in my hand is the same as the piece of granite I'm holding in my other hand.  In reality they're not--by definition they're not the same; they come from different parts of the Earth's crust, they have had different histories, they have been perceived differently by the entities that have encountered them over the course of their histories.  One of them may have tripped up a running horse; another may have stuck in the paw of a rabbit.  They are in fact two distinct objects.  But for purposes of scientific analysis they're identical.  Anything we can say scientifically about one of them we can say about the other.  As far as science is concerned, that birch tree there is the same as that other one over there.  In reality this isn't true--they're distinct entities.  They live in different environments, have different histories, have different relationships with other things in the world, and (now that we're considering living things) have different subjective experiences of the world.  But for purposes of scientific analysis they're identical.  Anything we can say scientifically about one of them we can say about the other.  Any item in a particular category-box is logically interchangeable with any other item in the same category-box.  Our ability to use science to understand the world absolutely relies on this principle of interchangeability.  When we employ the scientific worldview we categorise every element of the universe we experience, and then extrapolate logical and empirical conclusions about any item in a category to every item in the category.  And the principle of interchangeability has served us well--we've learned a lot about the world by grouping it into plants, animals, clouds, rocks, stars, and any number of categories we have invented in order to gather knowledge about the world.

 

Although interchangeability permeates our most basic ideas and interactions with the world, we don't use it for everything.  A lot of what we do in our daily lives now, and a lot more of what most people did in their daily lives before industrial capitalism, did not rely on the principle of interchangeability. When baking, for example, although we may have rules of thumb about amounts and proportions of ingredients and temperatures and durations of heating, we may vary these depending on the specific situation; contrariwise, we may keep all of our parameters exactly the same and yet achieve different results.  I once bought a beautiful olive-green ceramic bowl at a craft fair; I asked the potter if he had others of the same colour, and he said ‘no, all of the bowls were meant to be blue, but this one was in the corner of the kiln and came out different.’  People who make objects out of wood go to the woodpile, or the forest, to search out a specific piece of wood to make an object; even when they find the right piece of wood, they still adapt the object they create to the characteristics of the particular piece of wood they have selected.  A farmer temporarily managing someone else's farm will draw on her general understanding of her craft, and her years of experience in performing it, but will discover that she still needs to learn the specifics of the situation--the personalities of the animals, the soil and climate conditions of the specific piece of land she is responsible for, the style and preferences of the farm's owner.  In these situations it is not possible to categorise or interchange one loaf of bread, piece of wood, bowl or farmstead for another, even though scientifically, economically and administratively we treat all of these things as interchangeable with other things in the same category.  Living in a world that isn't based on interchangeability requires both more knowledge and different ways of knowing.

 

Until the Enlightenment, we thought of each person as a unique individual, embedded in hir own web of location, history and relationships.  But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we began to apply the scientific principles of interchangeability to our fellow people in two ways--by classifying and categorising ourselves into races, nations, classes, etc. and by creating a unitary classification of 'human', to which we assigned both descriptive and prescriptive characteristics. 

 

The former application has resulted, a couple of centuries later, in our now automatic and unconscious division of people into demographic categories.  Before this became a habit, every person would have been considered as a unique combination of location, relationships and history.  Maybe ‘women’ didn’t typically engage in such activities as, say, blacksmithing or translating Greek philosophy, but it would have been perfectly natural and normal for any particular woman to do something that, say, her family had done for generations.  Her unique position in the web of location, relationships and history was a more significant determiner of what was appropriate for her to do and how it was appropriate for her to behave than her demographic category.  As far as I can tell, only the Church made a big deal about ‘woman’ as a category; this kind of categorisation wasn’t necessarily predominant in the actual activity of daily life and social relations.