Demand-sharing

Women, children, the elderly, and disabled rarely hunt and still get shares. The article lacks coverage on typical rules of bride service as obligate sharing (Marshall, Reference Marshall1976; Marshall Thomas, Reference Marshall Thomas2006; Woodburn, Reference Woodburn, Lee and DeVore1968). Multilocal residence practice has a life-history arc (Endicott & Endicott, Reference Endicott and Endicott2008; Marlowe, Reference Marlowe2004c, Reference Marlowe2010; Wood & Marlowe, Reference Wood and Marlowe2011), with young mothers tending to stay where their mum lives. A hunter’s affines make obligatory demands on him, none more than his wife’s mother (Woodburn, Reference Woodburn1964, Reference Woodburn, Lee and DeVore1968). This avoidance relation is a key structure of reverse dominance with a woman’s mother nearby giving her leverage (Knight, Reference Knight1991; Lewis, Reference Lewis2002; Marlowe, Reference Marlowe2004c; Woodburn, 1964, Reference Woodburn, Lee and DeVore1968).

Risk-pooling

In evolutionary terms, it would be mainly women who needed distributed effort to subsidise their heavy reproductive energetic costs.

Reputation

In whose interest is it for men to gain reputation or prestige by generous, prosocial, modest behaviours? Who drives this? Do women prefer men with those traits? Would women and children benefit from domestication/inhibition of reactive aggression in cooperative childcare contexts (see Boeckx, Reference Boeckx2023; Kraft et al., Reference Kraft, Cummings, Venkataraman, Alami, Beheim, Hooper, Seabright, Trumble, Stieglitz, Kaplan, Endicott, Endicott and Gurven2023; Power, Reference Power2024)?

Status-levelling

We appreciate the authors identifying specific ritual forms of gendered resistance, and the “pendulum of power” – Morna Finnegan’s model – swinging between the sexes, never allowing power to get stuck (Finnegan, Reference Finnegan2013). Clearly, solidarity and collective consciousness are needed, which Boehm (Reference Boehm1999) understood as “reverse dominance” but failed to gender. Skilled cultural body techniques enlist sound, smell, colour, beauty, and alluring movement to attract the spirits with “technologies of enchantment” (Lewis, Reference Lewis2015; and see Power, Reference Power2010).

Persistent individual resistance – day-to-day dyadic counterdominance (Erdal & Whiten, Reference Erdal and Whiten1994) – may flourish with periodic displays of reverse dominance. Moadjo, for example, a technique of nonverbal mimicry, rather than a ritual itself, is strongly gendered and likely ancient. It can be flexibly deployed by an expert older woman autonomously, a coalition or, with sufficient insulting provocation, launch a full-scale ritual revolt (Bombjaková, Reference Bombjaková2018). Rules governing taboos, sex, initiation, kinship, marriage, etc., will be upheld through periodic ritual action. These may protect women from coercion.

Consensus/collective decisions

Acting together, women overcome obnoxious male behaviour. An Aristotelian perspective here assumes that women’s biology is somehow defective, resulting in lesser power and marginalisation. This is not what hunter-gatherers express in cosmologies of supernatural potency involving menstruation, pregnancy, and childbearing (Endicott, Reference Endicott1979; Lewis, Reference Lewis2008; Power, Reference Power, Power, Finnegan and Callan2017; Tacey, Reference Tacey2018; Watts, Reference Watts2024; Woodburn, Reference Woodburn1974, Reference Woodburn, Bloch and Perry1982b). Hunters also observe menstrual taboos (Lewis, Reference Lewis2008; Mouriki et al., Reference Mouriki, Gipo, Zengu, Power and Rennein press; Woodburn, Reference Woodburn1974).

Women dance, play, and laugh not just as autonomous, self-interested individuals but as militantly joyful song-and-dance formations (Finnegan, Reference Finnegan2015; Kisliuk, Reference Kisliuk1998). Their “bodies in motion” speak with authority and influence collective decisions through action (Finnegan, Reference Finnegan2013).

Residential mobility

Women need to be able to vote with their feet, with risk of worse exposure to marital/domestic violence when they can’t move (Draper, Reference Draper and Reiter1975b, Townsend, Reference Townsend2016).

Ritual

Initiation and healing effect a moral and emotional “reset.” Communities can transcend second- or third-party interaction by re-entering First Creation together (Keeney & Keeney, Reference Keeney and Keeney2013). In Malaysia, Batek Maia trancing rituals reveal shamanic power to be a collectively produced and gendered achievement rather than the possession of male ritual specialists. Women’s hunting ritual can direct men (e.g., yele Lewis, Reference Lewis2015; bobanda, McCreedy, Reference McCreedy, Burch and Ellanna1994, and see Finnegan, Reference Finnegan, Power, Finnegan and Callan2017) while menarcheal ritual may critically influence hunting. Women gain authority where their own ritual “work” governs and directs hunting success. We place ritual central to all these processes – an overarching framework of periodic, women-led reverse dominance (Finnegan, Reference Finnegan, Power, Finnegan and Callan2017; Lewis, Reference Lewis2002, Reference Lewis2015; Power, Reference Power2015).