Ramastaarn: a fantasy culture with strange gender-role specialisation

[Agemegos]

MatthewVitler's thread about Medieval fantasy institutional gender role reversal seems to be settling into a cozy squabble over revisionism in anthropology and prehistory; it would be a shame to disturb it by talking about fantasy settings. Besides that, what I have to say is not directly relevant to the OP of that thread, since the gender roles in Ramastaarn are not so much reversed as orthogonal or even skew.

Prolepsis: don't bother to tell me if you think the following is unrealistic; I will only be gratified if it is, since it is not meant to be realistic but to be fantastic.

Ramastaarn

In my usual fantasy setting, about three thousand miles east of the centrepiece kingdom, there is an extensive archipelago of generally low atolls and limestone islands called Ramastaarn. The customs of Ramastaarn are based on the proposition that the land belongs to women (with horticulture as the archetypal women's work) and the sea belongs to men (with fishing as the archetypal men's work). This is supported by the fact that every island in the archipelago happens to have a female geist, while the geist of the Ocean is male.

Women in Ramastaarn live in matrilineal matriarchal clans, each of which occupies a more-or-less fortified palace and a larger or smaller, richer or poorer swatch of land. The richer matriclans own wide farmlands and produce surpluses of taro, plantains, pork, poultry, vitaminiferous fruits and vegetables, timber, dimension stone, hemp fibre, oilseeds etc., which they sell, often hiring labourers to work their fields etc. Land-poor matriclans sell labour to buy food. In these circumstances the ownership of land is as important to matriclans as it was to mediaeval dynasties.

Boys are brought up by their mothers and female relatives until the edge of puberty. Between the ages of about ten and fourteen each goes through a ceremony with an itinerant male oneiromancer. This includes a night of drug-enhanced dreams; the oneiromancer interprets these as omens, and on that basis assigns each boy to a particular men's lodge.

Lodges of men live (mostly) in long-houses that stand beside water, or over it on pilings. In the manner of a caste, each lodge owns a particular occupation and often a resource to support it. The archetypal lodge owns a fleet of fishing-boats and the fishing rights to a particular area of ocean, but there are variations. Some lodges possess for example pearling, lobster-trapping, or murex-diving rights in waters where others own the fish. Others own craft occupations such as stone-knapping, boat-building, sail-making. Others own and live on cargo ships and own in effect shipping lines. In the interiors of larger islands there are anomalous lodges that own hunting and gathering rights in forests — this is felt to be effeminate, and is the opposite of prestigious. But it is neither so effeminate nor so low in prestige as the plight of those lodges that cannot support themselves of their own and that rely for subsistence on letting their labour to landowners in women's jobs such as farming, timber-getting, quarrying…. They may receive good wages where there is a premium on strength, but a social stigma is attached.

The lodges are mostly local, but there are a few itinerant lodges that practise with a national scope. Most obvious of these are the ship-dwelling merchant lodges. Another is Sky Dome Lodge, to which the oneiromancers belong. Others include Red Flower Lodge (which consists of professional monster-slayers), Raven Lodge (which supplies mercenary bodyguards, bounty hunters, executioners), Palm Lodge (which supplies arbitrators, notaries, trustees etc.). Some of the itinerant lodges are technically mendicant and subsist on privileges, perquisites, and gifts rather than by selling products or services.

Custom does not allow adult men to live in women's palaces (except, in limited circumstances, allowing Sky Dome Lodge oneiromancers and Raven Lodge guards temporary occupancy of special quarters), nor women to live in men's lodge-houses; for a couple to set up house together would be considered indecent and would be subject to social sanctions such as a Boycott. Ostensibly there is no marriage, no person has sexual rights to nor exclusive sexual access to any other person, and there are no permanent sexual relationships. Ostensibly the men who wish to be sexually available make a display of their various charms and the women choose from among the offers thus implicit. Any children resulting are members and the responsibility of the woman's matriclan. In practice, of course, men sometimes contrive that their offers are not made at large but only to preferred partners, couples establish private understandings for regular trysts, and the male charms on display include goods that will be made gifts: some, needless to say land-poor, matriclans amount in effect to castes of prostitutes. Similarly, some lodges amount in effect to guilds of menial labourers.

In these circumstances men often fight other men as a mating display, and lodges of men make war on each other over fishing rights and the placement of crab-pots, but men have little interest in fighting over land. When matriclans do dispute over land, and cannot agree on arbitration, it is mostly women who fight (they sometimes hire a few men as mercenaries); therefore, it is more often women who own heavy war gear. Men (or at least men in lodges of wealth and substance) mostly fight over fishing rights and at sea on boats. Not caring to be drowned by the weight of their armour, they favour light equipment and missile weapons.