Riane Eisler - interviewed for the Signs out of Time project



Dr. Riane Eisler is an internationally known scholar, futurist, and activist. She was born in Vienna and fled from the Nazis with her parents to Cuba as a child, later emigrating to the United States. She has degrees in sociology and law from the University of California. She is the author of many articles and books, including The Chalice & the Blade, Our History, Our Future (Harper and Row, 1987) and Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body (Harper San Francisco, 1996). She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies in Northern California, where she lives with her husband.

Riane coined the term "Dominator Culture" to describe the conflict between an androcracy (governance of social organization dominated by males) versus what she proposes was a partnership model (as distinct from matriarchy) for the social organization of ancient cultures. To support the idea that neither men nor women dominated one another in the distant past, Eisler cites archaeological evidence from southeast Europe, especially Crete, drawing much from the research of Marija Gimbutas and V. Gordon Childe. Her hypothesis also relies strongly on the Gnostic Gospels and on the history portrayed by the ancient poet Hesiod.

Belili Productions is offering Riane Eisler's complete interview on VHS as part of the Behind the Screen series -- see our ORDER PAGE for details.

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