[coldtea]

>For instance, looking at the art from Minoan Crete, there's abundant examples of works where women are portrayed in the ways that in other cultures of the region were how the rulers were portrayed, but since we're assuming they were a patriarchy

Who assumes that? For over 40 years I've been reading conjectures about Minoan Crete being a matriarchy or substantially less patriarchical from all kinds of sources, it's quite a common theory. Even Wikipedia: "While historians and archaeologists have long been skeptical of an outright matriarchy, the predominance of female figures in authoritative roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was matriarchal, and among the most well-supported examples known."

[roughly]

Yes, and the reason it's taken more than 40 years to go from conjecture to broadly if grudgingly acknowledged theory is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries. Looking at the evidence on its own without the notion that a matriarchy would be outlandish and weird, there'd be no doubt what you were looking at, but instead we spent a long time talking about how strange it was they kept painting fancy women on the walls and we couldn't figure out who their kings were.

[coldtea]

>is that there is and has been a baseline assumption of patriarchy within the field for centuries

Given 100% of present societies and all examples from recorded history can you blame them for this baseline? That's literally what a baseline is supposed to be!

[roughly]

> all examples from recorded history

This is literally the thing we're talking about. Remember the Minoans?

[PoignardAzur]

I think GP meant "all examples where we have records telling us how their society worked and we're not guessing from pictures".

[bigstrat2003]

> Given 100% of present societies

100% of present societies are not patriarchies. Not even close to 100%.

[coldtea]

You mean states, or some tribes here and there?

Like, you're adding say USA (350M), China (1.4B), France (80M), etc with say, some Amazonian tribe of 5K people (which you don't count as part of the 99.999% patriarchical Brazil)?

I guess in that way it's enough that 200 tribal villages (more than the UN nations iirc) to be matriarchical for the world to be "predominantly matriarchical" or at least 50%-50%.

[xyzzy123]

Agree op is wrong as worded. Sort of depends how you count though. If you count like an anthropologist, tons of non patriarchal examples.

But they don't seem to have scaled in the same way for one reason or another.

If you count by membership the number of people who live in patriarchal societies vs not, I think you would come up with an answer very very close to 100% patriarchal.

[roughly]

There's a little bit of an interesting facet of this, which is that it depends on how you're defining patriarchal societies - if you're looking at what is explicitly encoded into the legal systems, it's hard to argue that, as of today, the US or really most of modern world qualifies, and similarly if you're looking at who holds power, while the gender skew is still towards males, a disinterested observer from the future would not observe a society in which power is either exclusively or as a rule held by men. I'm not sure the legal structures around gender in China or India (if we're talking about percentages of the global population), though, although at least for India one could argue Indira Gandhi might have been the most powerful person in India since the empire.

Culturally is a different question, obviously.