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.