Causes of Polygyny: Ecology, Economy, Kinship, and Warfare

We discuss and test competing explanations for polygyny based on household economics, malecentered kin groups, warfare, and environmental characteristics. Data consist of codes for 142 societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, including new codes for polygyny and environmental characteristics. An explanatory model is tested for the worldwide sample using regression analysis, and then replicated with regional samples. We obtain convergent results with two different measures of polygyny, cultural rules for men's marriages and the percentage of women married polygynously. We conclude that the best predictors of polygyny are fraternal interest groups, warfare for capture of women, absence of constraints on expansion into new lands, and environmental quality and homogeneity.     

Language, Ideology, and Political Economy

After sharply defining and contrasting an "analytic-scientific" and an "emotional-ethical" approach and their interrelations, this article goes on to explore some possible interconnections among the three main phenomena, before discussing each in more detail. The first is political economy in several important senses; germane problems are noted that deal with (ethno) quantification and the innovative individual. The second phenomenon is ideology, in three senses: (1) notional ideology, (2) ideology for maintaining or changing a sociopolitical order, and (3) ideology for masking a structure of domination. The third phenomenon is language, again in various senses, but particularly as (1) a symbolism with a structure analogous in some ways to that of economics, and (2) a mediator between ideology and political economy; considerable attention is given to the political-economic functions of language figures such as irony and synecdoche. A fourth, analytically crucial kind of ideology, "linguacultural ideology," fills in the foregoing structure. Alternative logics, alternative combinations of variables, and alternative complementary theories are suggested throughout, particularly in the final section.     

Transnational Migration in Rural Oaxaca, Mexico: Dependency, Development, and the Household

Contradictory models of dependency and development have dominated the discussion of migration between Mexico and the United States. Transnational models of migration resolve these contradictions by defining a series of interdependencies (economy and society, for example). Using data collected in a rural Zapotec community in Oaxaca, Mexico, this article focuses on three areas: the stage-specific development of transnational movement; the domestic cycle, household decision making, and migration/remittance outcomes; and the changing nature of community participation. Rooting the discussion in household decision making captures the important role local social variability and economic dynamism play in understanding transnational processes and advancing migration studies. [ households, migration, transnationalism, dependency and development, Oaxaca, Mexico ]     

A Generation Later: Household Strategies and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines: Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms

Generation Later: Household Strategies and Economic Change in the Rural Philippines. James F. Eder. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. 191 pp.
Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms. Laura Lee Junker. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999.477 pp.     

Kinship, Networks, and Exchange

Kinship, Networks, and Exchange. Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White. eds. New York; Cambridge University Press, 1997. 338 pp.     

The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy

The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. Roger N. Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo. eds. New York; Routledge, 1997. 574 pp.     

Odds and Ends: Risk,Mortality, and the Politics of Contingency

Medical anthropology's cogentrethinking of conventional biomedicalcategories has largely overlooked the coreproblems of one key concept of both biomedicaland social scientific analysis: risk. Inparticular, the use of the term in medicalanthropology (and the social sciences moregenerally) frequently rests on two assumptions:(1) that contingency necessarily constitutes athreat to individual experience or socialorder; and (2) that a risk management paradigmthat relies on a model of statisticalprobability is the ontologically preeminent wayof engaging chance. Other approaches which donot take risk as the starting point forunderstanding contingency also have problems;they too assume that contingency is necessarilycause for crisis. These problematic rootassumptions lead social analysts to miss howindividual actors and local communitiesvariously engage, rather than minimize,contingency. I suggest a new approach thatinstead aims to treat contingency asnormatively neutral and as arising in fourdomains of experience. Conventional approachesalso miss how attempts to account forunexpected events themselves involve strugglesbetween competing paradigms (or tropes) ofchance. This contest over accountability I callhere the politics of contingency, and Iseek thereby to signal the need to renovate ourlanguage of uncertainty in order to address itspolitical dimensions. I trace the literature toidentify some sources of these terminologicalproblems, and through an examination of thelife and death of a close contact in Chania,Crete, I explore his own approach to chance andthe different, competing interpretations of hisdeath. I thereby demonstrate the importance ofrevamping the conventional approach tounderstanding the contingent nature of humanlife.     

Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power and Technological Innovation

Reproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power and Technological Innovation. Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné. eds. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. vi +245 pp.     

Agonistic aiding: Kinship,rank, age,and sex influences

An analysis of 3,774 episodes of agonistic aiding collected during a two-year study of a rhesus monkey group (Macaca, mulatta) indicated the differential influence of kinship and rank relationships on the participation of different age-sex classes in both aid to victims and aid to aggressors. Most aiding favored victims rather than aggressors and was much more likely to occur when matrilineal kin were involved. Females were more likely to aid than were males, and the frequency of their participation increased with age. Females were much more influenced by kinship than were males and defended or aggressively supported kin against any third party regardless of dominance relationships. Adult males seldom aided against animals that were dominant to themselves; the rare exceptions occurred when adult males defended kin. Aiding was far more likely to occur if the victim was squealing, and noisy agonistic episodes often involved multiple aiders on both sides. Aiding patterns had some potential to insure dominance rank inheritance within families, in accordance with the Kawamura hypothesis. In aiding animals outside of their own matrilines, however, group members aided randomly with respect to this model. There was little evidence that aiding functioned to support individuals when they targeted animals to which they should be dominant as adults based on matrilineal dominance relationships. Most defensive aiding seemed to function primarily to defend victims (primarily kin) of aggression. Aggressive support of the attacker, on the other hand, seemed to function primarily to reinforce coalitions with the attacker. The identity of the victim was unimportant as long as it was neither kin to nor dominant to the aider. Aggressive support of attackers did not overturn existing dominance relationships.     

Refusing to Sing: Gender,Kinship and Patriliny in Macedonia

The issue of whether formal kinship structures and sentiments reflect the reality of social relations was of particular concern to specialists at the height of the kinship debates in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues to be in some contemporary studies. So too, the classifications ‘patrilineal’ or ‘matrilineal’ have clearly been shown to be problematic given that there are multiple levels of discourse and relational and ideational realities in any given society. For many contemporary kinship specialists in fact no simple correlation can be made between type of descent system and actual social relations, especially relations between men and women. However, some anthropologists continue to argue that patrilineal kinship systems are somehow indicative of control or domination by men or, put inversely, of women's lack of power and authority. It is argued in this paper that even where the formal kinship structures and ideological discourses are dominated by agnation as appears to be the case in south Slav societies generally, and Macedonian in particular, this is not automatically mirrored in gender relations between men and women. In short, there is a long leap from patriliny to patriarchy.