One of my missions on the trip was to seeking out cultures that remained matrilineal, meaning that they inherit through the mother (as opposed to patrilineal cultures where you inherit land, family name, wealth, etc. from your father.) It makes a great deal of sense, since you always know who your mother is.

A smattering of matrilineal cultures can be found throughout the world. With some of them, you wouldn't notice anything different from any other culture. But overall matrilineal cultures have a lower-than-average rate of warfare and aggression. In a few of them, war is unknown. In most of them, women have more power than they tend to in patriarchal cultures, and there tends to be a more equal sharing of wealth and power.

This was true of the Ngada people of Flores, Indonesia, where war was unknown and either a man or a woman could become chief of the village. The most prominant matrilineal culture we visited was the Minang Kabau people of Western Sumatra. Possibly due to the influence of Islam, women didn't seem to have much public and political power; however, they owned their own homes and had so had the means to leave bad husbands. They also felt free to be flirtacious, which is very unusual for Asian women. And perhaps it was unrelated to their matrilineal traditions, but the Minang Kabau people had an extremely high level of literacy--99%--very different from their neighbors. The matrilineal Thai Lu people of Laos also had a high literacy rate compared to their neighbors, and were likewise relatively prosperous.

Many people use the terms matriliny and matriarchy interchangeably, but matriarchy (and patriarchy) imply that one sex dominates over the other, while matriliny and patriliny simply refer to patterns of inheritance. Two related terms coined by Riane Eisler in her book The Chalice and the Blade are dominator and partnership models. A dominator culture is one where the strong rule the weak, while a partnership culture is one where cooperation is more of a factor than competition. While partnership cultures are practically non-existant nowadays, there are a few, and they tend to be matrilineal.

Many scholars believe that in prehistory there were many more partnership societies than there are today. They believe that both patriliny and dominator models became much more prevalent after 5000 BC, and that by 1500 BC the only major partnership civilization was Minoan Crete. That would imply that for the first 30,000-some years of human civilization, the majority of people lived more or less peacefully. There is a great deal of debate about this of course, and evidence is hard to come by either way (some would claim that dominator cultures deliberately destroyed evidence of partnership cultures to brainwash people into forgetting; there are phrases in the Bible that suggest this). Some scholars even believe that the dominator paradigm originally arose in one or a few places where conditions were harsh, such as the desert environment of the Israelities, or northern Russia, home of the Indo-Europeans. The Indo-Europeans did in fact dominate much of Eurasia with their horses and chariots, which is why almost all languages today are descended from the Indo-European language.

Although hard evidence is scarce, the myths of a great many cultures allude to an earlier time when women had more power and people worshipped a Mother Goddess. Many myths speak of men stealing power from women. In every new culture I visited, I would try to find information about their ancient history and mythology, and I usually found references to an earlier time when women had power.

At any rate, it seems suggestive that the world "matrimony", which means marriage, is so closely related to the word "matriliny"--dating back to a time when the man married into the woman's family? Hints can be found everywhere; for example in Jewish tradition you are technically Jewish only if your mother is.

If you are interested in reading more about ancient matriliny or the partnership model, look for Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade or look through books by Marija Gimbutas', the reknowned archaelogist. You can also read my amateurist harebrained theories about how the dominator/partnership split relates to availability of resources.