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Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the 11th blog and 10th podcast segment since we launched this inaugural podcast series. I can’t believe we’re already this far into the series, and I hope you are all learning something new. I have learned a significant amount from these podcasts and feel that my own knowledge and perspectives have grown since starting this project. Today, we are covering the third podcast with Professor Siobhan Mattison. I would encourage you to watch episodes 1 and 2 if you haven’t already.
In the last two segments, Professor Mattison covered the topics of human behavioral ecology, its methodology, key factors involved, positive contributions of the field toward understanding the flexibility and range in human behavior, evolution of the human family, male and female-centric societies, technicalities in the definitions and constructs of matrilineal vs. matriarchal cultures, and much more. In this segment, we dive a little deeper into some of her past research, particularly around the stages of human life. In addition, we discuss her experience with the Mosuo Tribe and its societal construct, the role of women and men in the tribe, changes in the social structure, as well as the positive elements of the Musou societal framework. In our conversation, she shares how human behavioral ecology is much more about explaining contemporary variation without presuming primitive stages in the way people evolve.
Professor Mattison started working with the Mosuo tribe in 2006 and has a tremendous amount of hands-on experience with the tribe. In her encounters, women were very involved in many aspects of the society’s functioning and shouldered a lot of the duties both inside and outside the home. The tribe’s matrilineal culture provides a tremendous amount of support for women for them to function in this manner. She talks about how the men were also very involved, though it depended on the family and there was some degree of variability vs. the female role. Interestingly, there is a portion of the society that is patrilineal, which is thought to have cleaved off from the original matrilineal society. She also shares how the Musou society has evolved over time and there are variations of the matrilineal construct across families. The positive attributes of the Musou, based on researchers' experiences, appear to be that the health of the women who live in the matrilineal society is better than those who live in patrilineal factions of the society. This seems to be an interesting observation.
This short blog doesn’t do justice to the richness of the information in this podcast, so we really encourage you to watch it in full if you are interested in learning more in depth about the topics I mentioned here.
I will be covering her current research area in more depth during our next episode so stay tuned!
Gabby