يوهان ياكوب باخوفن

الأعمال

• 1861حق الأم (Das Mutterrecht)

  اعتمادًا على أساطير وحكايات وأعراف قانونية من ليكيا وكريت إلى مصر والهند، يقترح الكتاب تتابعًا لمراحل ثقافية من حياة جنسية غير منظمة عبر «حكم النساء» (غاينيكوقراطية) دينية إلى القانون الأبوي في روما.

الموقف

Bachofen is on the map because of the long and contradictory reception of “Das Mutterrecht” (1861). Reading myths, legends, tomb symbols and legal customs as historical sources that preserve the memory of forgotten stages of culture, he proposed a sequence: an original “hetaerism” of unregulated sexual life, then a religiously grounded “gynaecocracy” in which descent was traced through the mother and the cults of earth and night prevailed, and finally the paternal principle of light and law that triumphed in Rome and in Apollonian religion. For Bachofen the last stage was the higher one; the earlier stages were not a lost paradise. In ethnology, Lewis Henry Morgan (on the Iroquois, 1851) and John F. McLennan (Primitive Marriage, 1865) had described descent through women independently; Morgan drew on Bachofen’s “work of vast research” in “Ancient Society” (1877), and Engels combined both in “The Origin of the Family” (1884), where he called the overthrow of mother right the “world-historical defeat of the female sex”. Erich Fromm and Walter Benjamin wrote on him in the 1930s, the circle around Ludwig Klages and the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler made him a herald of a mythical, anti-rational world view, and parts of the women’s movement later saw in him evidence of a matriarchal prehistory. Anthropology and archaeology today reject the idea of a universal matriarchal stage; Bachofen is read as a pioneer of the study of myth and symbol and as a document of nineteenth-century ideas about gender (see “Context & critique”).

الحياة والسياق

Johann Jakob Bachofen was born on 22 December 1815 in Basel into a wealthy family of silk-ribbon manufacturers. He studied law and philology in Basel, in Berlin, where he heard Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and in Göttingen, and continued his studies in Paris and England. In 1841 he became professor of Roman law in Basel, but resigned in 1844 after political attacks; he remained a judge at the Basel court of appeal until 1866. Free of the need to earn a living, he devoted himself to private research and travelled in Italy and Greece, studying tombs, monuments and myths. He married late, in 1865, and lived a retired life in Basel’s patrician society. The young Nietzsche was a guest in his house in the early 1870s. He died in Basel on 25 November 1887.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten (1859)
• Die Sage von Tanaquil (1870)
• Antiquarische Briefe (1880–86)