Riane Eisler

Riane Eisler

Riane Tennenhaus Eisler (born July 22, 1931 ) is an American cultural historian, systems scientist , sociologist, lawyer, speaker, political advisor and author whose impetus for cultural change has been taken up by numerous scholars, politicians and social activists around the world.

Biographical

Riane Eisler was born in Vienna in 1931 and fled with her parents from the National Socialists to Cuba in 1939, where she lived in the slums of Havana. She later emigrated to the United States. There she earned degrees in sociology and law from the University of California at Los Angeles ( UCLA ).

Career

Eisler taught seminars on women and law at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), making her a pioneer in this field. She has also taught in the Transformative Leadership Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies and at the Anthropology Department of the University of Alabama, Birmingham. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota and President of the Center for Partnership Studies, which is dedicated to research and teaching in the field of the partnership model developed by Eisler. She is an honorary member of the World Future Council and the Club of Rome and a member of numerous other organizations, from the IEEE to the Social Ventures Network to the World Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Partnership and dominance model

Eisler proposes new social science paradigms that push the boundaries of traditional social confrontations such as religious vs. secular, right vs. left, capitalist vs. communist, east vs. Western and pre-industrial vs. exceed industrial or post-industrial. It notes that societies of all categories have historically shown themselves to be repressive and violent and that they have largely ignored the question of what types of institutions and beliefs support more just and peaceful relationships. In answering this question, Eisler's multidisciplinary, intercultural research offers a new analytical tool for understanding and improving social systems: a biologically and culturally sound partnership-dominance matrix. In this matrix, partnership structures on the one hand and a model of control on the other hand describe the two poles of a continuum. In this continuum, societies orient themselves in one direction or the other and thus create different realities of life or their own forms of exclusion and participation of groups of people. Eisler identifies the partnership system and the system of domination as two basic social configurations that differ primarily in how they conceptualize the relationship between humans and nature, parent-child relationships, gender roles and relationships in wider social contexts, and what importance they place in caring for Give man and nature.

Dominance system

Eisler introduced the term domination system to describe a system of top-down hierarchies that is ultimately supported by fear or violence and about the rule of man over man, man over woman, "race" over " Race ", religion over religion and man over nature. The configuration of the system of rule consists of four mutually supporting core components: - Top-down control in families, economies and states as well as other social institutions - Rigid male dominance and thus the devaluation of everything that is stereotypically viewed as "female" Men and women, including the areas of care and welfare - the acceptance or even idealization of abuse and violence as a means of imposing their own will on others - a belief system that presents relationships of submission as inevitable and desirable. Examples of societies that are closely based on the dominance system are National Socialist Germany, the Stalinist Soviet Union, fundamentalist Iran, the Taliban, and cultures of yesteryear in which chronic violence and despotic rule were the norm.

Partnership system

In contrast, the configuration of the partnership system consists of: - a more democratic and egalitarian structure in the family, business, state or social groupings - an equal partnership between women and men and thus a high appreciation of characteristics and activities that can be found equally among men and women are stereotypically viewed as female, which is reflected in the values ​​of social and economic policy - a low level of abuse and violence, because these are not needed to maintain rigid rankings of rule - a belief system that partnership relationships and mutual respect are normal and represents desirable. The Tiruray on Mindanao, agrarian societies such as the Minangkabau , and technologically advanced states such as Sweden, Norway and Finland, where there is a more democratic and egalitarian structure in the family, economy and state, an equal partnership, are named as examples of partnership-oriented societies between men and women and a care-oriented social policy (with general health care, paid parental leave and high-quality early childhood education) as well as the rejection of violence in intimate and international relationships.

Partnership dominance continuum ( partnership / domination continuum )

When comparing partnership and dominance systems in their book Nurturing Our Humanity (2019), Eisler and her co-author Douglas Fry draw on both the social and life sciences, including findings from cognitive research, to show how this works Growing up in partnership-based or dominance-oriented cultures or subcultures has a direct impact on the development of children's brains and thus on how people think, feel and act. The book contains, among other things, Fry's research on foraging, with which he counteracts the position held in popular theories that humans are prisoners of evolutionary imperatives that inevitably lead to war, rape and other atrocities. In his argument, Fry points out that for a long time people lived as collectors in groups that he describes as " the original partnership societies ". In previous works such as The Chalice and the Blade (1987) and Sacred Pleasure (1995), Eisler analyzes androcracy (the rule of men in social organizations) as observed in Indo-European and other societies and compares it to a stronger one Orientation towards the partnership system as claimed by various research papers for the social organization of Neolithic Europe and the later Minoan civilization in prehistoric Bronze Age Crete. To substantiate the thesis that there were societies in which neither men nor women dominated each other, Eisler drew on archaeological evidence from south-eastern Europe, especially Crete. It was based on the research of the archaeologists Nikolaos Platon , Vere Gordon Childe and Nanno Marinatos, but also on research such as that of Marija Gimbutas or James Mellaart , the results of which are nowadays criticized or no longer tenable. Eisler's work has enabled other scholars to apply the conceptual framework for partnership / domination and cultural transformation to areas ranging from politics and economics to religion, economics and education. No society is completely based on a dominance or partnership system. Eisler therefore describes her system as a continuum between the two poles of partnership and power orientation. In view of the location of a society on this continuum, much of what otherwise appears to be accidental and incoherent begins to become clear in its cultural-social context - including the development of economic systems, such as Eisler in The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics and has documented in many articles and book chapters.

Books

Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future by Riane Eisler and Douglas Fry combines Eisler's partnership-dominance matrix with comprehensive insights from neuroscience and other disciplines. It wants to show that, in contrast to the thesis of "egoistic genes", which are supposed to determine human behavior, the way people think and feel is strongly influenced by whether they grow up in a partner-like or dominance-oriented environment. It also documents that, in the course of evolution, humans have actually developed a tendency towards empathy, care and creativity, which, however, is inhibited in systems of rule. It also points to interventions that can accelerate the current movement towards partnership and prevent further regression to a system of dominance.

Eisler's earlier books include her international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future , which anthropologist Ashley Montagu called " the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species " . The book has seen countless reprints and has been translated into 26 languages, including German, most European languages ​​as well as Chinese, Turkish, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, Urdu, Japanese and Arabic.

Her 2007 book The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics proposes a new economic approach that gives visibility and value to human care work for people and the environment. The book was described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as " a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking ", by Peter Senge as " deperately needed " and praised by Gloria Steinem as "revolutionary" ( revolutionary ).

In 2014, Eisler co-wrote Transforming Interprofessional Partnerships: A New Framework for Nursing and Partnership-Based Health Care with Professor Teddie Potter from the University of Minnesota. It provides health professionals with the tools to review current health systems and build a more caring, sustainable system. The book was the winner of the 2015 Capstone International Book Award and the 2014 American Journal of Nursing Book Award.

Eisler's other books include The Power of Partnership and Tomorrow's Children as well as Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body - New Paths to Power and Love , an exploration of the origins of human violence and an examination of the importance of gender in mind on the quality of life in societies.

Documentaries

In 2011 Tiroir A Films (TAF) based her documentary Mother, Caring for 7 Billion on the theories of Riane Eisler and also put Eisler himself in the picture. In 2018, filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newson made her film The Great American Lie , which was shown for the first time in 2019 and also deals with Riane Eisler, among others.

activities

Riane Eisler works worldwide as a keynote speaker for conferences and as a consultant for companies and authorities in the application of the partnership model introduced in her work. She was a guest at the General Assembly of the United Nations, the American State Department and Congress, the German Bundestag, in Colombia and the Czech Republic.

Riane Eisler is a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG), a member of the World Academy of Art and Science and the World Business Academy. She is an honorary member of the Club of Rome and the World Future Council in Europe. She is a co-founder of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV) and Chair of the Center for Partnership Studies, which is dedicated to research and education. In 2003 she was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto . She is also a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS).

She is the author of over 300 essays and articles in publications, among others in the areas of behavioral science , futurology and political psychology. You can find them in the UNESCO Courier , in Brain and Mind , Yes! Magazine , the Human Rights Quarterly , the International Journal of Women's Studies or the World Encyclopedia of Peace . Eisler was one of the founders of the Women's Rights Law Reporter , the first legal journal exclusively to focus on women's rights.

reception

Riane Eisler's research has found resonance in numerous disciplines and around the world. Her book The Chalice and the Blade inspired a Chinese publication ( The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture ). In her book Gender and Information Technology: Moving Beyond Access to Co-Create Global Partnership , published in 2008, Mary Kirk uses Eisler's theory of cultural transformation to offer an interdisciplinary, sociological perspective on questions of access to technology. Eisler also inspired Antonella Riem and a group of scientists at the University of Udine, the Partnership Studies Group (PSG), to conduct further multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research based on considerations of the partnership-dominance matrix.

Honors

Eisler has received the Humanist Pioneer Award and the first Alice Paul ERA Award, among others. In 2018 she received the first Safe Ireland Leadership Award (SÍLA) for her visionary leadership role in gender equality. She received the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation . She was the only woman to be included in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians for her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist .

Center for Partnership Studies ( Center for Partnership Studies )

The Center for Partnership Studies (CPS) in Carmel, California was founded in 1987 to research, develop and disseminate education based on the partnership model developed by Riane Eisler.

Caring Economy Campaign

The Caring Economy Campaign is a project of the Center for Partnership Studies, which focuses on building a partnership system in which the economic benefits of care work for people and nature can also be quantified. To this end, the Caring Economy Campaign developed Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) to help policymakers develop an economic system that takes into account unpaid or underpaid work, health, well-being and the well-being of the general population.

SAIV (The Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence)

SAIV is dedicated to combating forms of intimate violence, including violence in the context of war, terrorism, political repression and crime. SAIV was founded by Riane Eisler together with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams and is a project of the Center for Partnership Studies, a non-profit organization recognized by the United Nations as a non-governmental organization.

Literature selection

• Dissolution: No Fault Divorce, Marriage, and the Future of Women . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.
• The Equal Rights Handbook: What ERA means for your life, your rights, and your future . New York: Avon, 1979.
• The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future . New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
• Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body . San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.
• The Partnership Way: New Tools for Living and Learning , with David Elliot Loye , San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990 (reissue Brandon: Holistic Education Press, 1998).
• Tomorrow's Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century , Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000.
• The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life , Novato, California: New World Library, 2003 [2002].
• Educating for a Culture of Peace , Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004.
• The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics . San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007.
• Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future , with Douglas P. Fry , New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

In German:

• Chalice and sword: from rule to partnership. Feminine and masculine principles in history . Munich: Goldmann, 1993 (Original: The Chalice and the Blade , 1987).
• The children of tomorrow. The basics of partnership education . Freiamt in the Black Forest: Arbor-Verlag, 2005 (Original: Tomorrow's Children , 2000).
• The misunderstood fundamentals of economics. Paths to a Caring Economy , Marburg: Büchner-Verlag, 2020 (Revised and abridged essay based on: The Real Wealth of Nations , 2007).

Web links

• Literature by and about Riane Eisler in the catalog of the German National Library [1]
• [2] (in English)
• Center for Partnership Studies (in English)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Keynote lecture by Riane Eisler at the Conscious Capitalism 2020 conference .
2. ^ Keynote lecture by Riane Eisler at a conference on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 .
3. ↑ Prominent statements on Riane Eisler's work .
4. ^ Riane Eisler: The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics . Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco 2007, p. 1, 126, 307 .
5. ↑ IJPS homepage .
6. ^ Riane Eisler - CAS - Department of Anthropology | UAB. Retrieved May 28, 2020 (UK English). 
7. ↑ Riane Eisler's current résumé on the website of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama in Birmingham .
8. ^ Riane Eisler: Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics . Berrett-Koehler, 2007.
9. ^ Riane Eisler: The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future , First. 2nd edition, HarperOne, New York, NY September 21, 1988, ISBN 9780062502896 .
10. ^ S. Schlegel: Wisdom From A Rainforest . University of Georgia Press, 1988.
11. ^ Peggy Reeves Sanday: Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy . Cornell University Press, 2003.
12. ^ Riane Eisler: Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics . Berrett-Koehler, 2007.
13. ^ Douglas P. Fry: The Human Potential for Peace: An Anthropological Challenge to Assumptions about War and Violence . Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 262.
14. ↑ Frank Thadeusz: The falsification of the bronze age . 4th June 2018.
15. ^ Riane Eisler: Human Possibilities: The Interaction of Biology and Culture . University of Minnesota. 4th June 2015.
16. ^ Riane Eisler: Contribution by Riane Eisler in Challenge, vol. 55, No. 2, March / April 2012, pp. 58–86. . 2012.
17. ^ Riane Eisler on WAMC Northeast Public Radio: How Domination and Partnership Systems Shape Us . January 28, 2020.
18. ↑ Riane Eisler in an interview with Standard: We help shape our evolution ourselves . August 25, 2019. https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000107679384/riane-eisler-wir-gestalten-unsere-evolution-selber-mit
19. ^ Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Retrieved May 28, 2020 (American English). 
20. ↑ An interview with Dr. Riane Eisler , mungbeing.com
21. ^ Review: The Real Wealth of Nations (SSIR). Retrieved May 28, 2020 (American English). 
22. ^ The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics . Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco 2007, p. unpaginated (before page 1) .
23. ^ Mary Pat Aust: Transforming Interprofessional Partnerships: A New Framework for Nursing and Partnership-Based Health Care . In: Critical Care Nurse . tape 34 , no. 3 , June 1, 2014, ISSN  0279-5442 , p. 88-88 , doi : 10.4037 / ccn2014649 ( aacnjournals.org [accessed May 28, 2020]).
24. ^ Media, Communications, and Publicity Awards. Retrieved May 28, 2020 . 
25. ↑ & Na ;: Book of the Year Awards 2014: . In: AJN, American Journal of Nursing . tape 115 , no. 1 , January 2015, ISSN  0002-936X , p. 66-69 , doi : 10.1097 / 01.NAJ.0000459633.38162.7f ( wkhealth.com [accessed May 28, 2020]).
26. ↑ Documentary Mother: Caring For 7 Billion . 2011.
27. ^ Documentary The Great American Lie . 2019.
28. ^ Riane Eisler Presents to the State Department on March 21, 2013. Retrieved May 28, 2020 . 
29. ↑ Dr. Riane Eisler: We Have to Make the Economic Argument at a Congressional Briefing on March 20, 2013. Retrieved May 28, 2020 . 
30. ^ Members - Club of Rome , clubofrome.com
31. ↑ World Future Council , worldfuturecouncil.org
32. ↑ SAIV Partners , centerforpartnership.org
33. ↑ Notable Signers . In: Humanism and Its Aspirations . American Humanist Association. Retrieved September 15, 2012.
34. ↑ Yu Xiaogang: Book Reviews: Min Jiayin (ed.); The Chalice and the Blade in Chinese Culture: Gene of Relations and Social Models; Beijing: China Social Sciences Press; 1997; 637 pages; Y50 RMB . In: Gender, Technology and Development . tape 2 , no. 3 , November 1998, ISSN  0971-8524 , p. 423-429 , doi : 10.1177 / 097185249800200305 ( sagepub.com [accessed May 28, 2020]).
35. ↑ Kirk, Mary. (2008). Gender and Information Technology: Moving Beyond Access to Co-Create Global Partnership . Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
36. ↑ Partnership Studies Group , all.uniud.it
37. ↑ Documentary Mother: Caring For 7 Billion . 2011.
38. ^ Riane Eisler: Building Cultures of Peace. In: Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. November 7, 2009, Retrieved May 28, 2020 (American English). 
39. ↑ Macro History And Macrohistorians , metafuture.org
40. ↑ What are Social Wealth Economic Indicators? , centerforpartnership.org