From bridewealth to dowry?

Significant amounts of wealth have been exchanged as part of marriage settlements throughout history. Although various models have been proposed for interpreting these practices, their development over time has not been investigated systematically. In this paper we use a Bayesian MCMC phylogenetic comparative approach to reconstruct the evolution of two forms of wealth transfers at marriage, dowry and bridewealth, for 51 Indo-European cultural groups. Results indicate that dowry is more likely to have been the ancestral practice, and that a minimum of four changes to bridewealth is necessary to explain the observed distribution of the two states across the cultural groups. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 16^th meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), Berlin 2004. Mark Pagel and Andrew Meade provided the software, the coded linguistic data, and valuable advice on their use. LF is funded by Fondazione Ing. Aldo Gini (Italy), the ESRC (UK), and the UCL Graduate School (UK). Five anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments. The authors are based at the Department of Anthropology of UCL and members of the AHRC Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour (CEACB). LF is studying towards a PhD, CH is a CEACB Senior Research Fellow, and RM is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology.     

Families and Firewood: A Comparative Analysis of the Costs and Benefits of Children in Firewood Collection and Use in Two Rural Communities in Sub-Saharan Africa

Domestic firewood collection is compared across study sites in Malawi and Tanzania. The study focuses on accommodation of infant-care within wood collection, the influence of family size on firewood demand and the contribution of girls to firewood collection. Malawian women carry their infants on wood collection trips. The Tanzanian women leave their infants behind. The shorter trips of the Tanzanian women, and the ready availability of alloparental care may facilitate this. Mean per capita wood consumption was similar across the two sites. However, a marked economy of scale was evident in wood use at the Malawi site. Girls at both sites assist with wood collection. Their contribution appears more than sufficient to compensate for their own wood use. Having a daughter therefore need not represent a net energetic cost to a woman in terms of firewood acquisition and consumption. While family size and structure appear to influence firewood consumption and acquisition, differences in the environment between the two sites may underpin much of the variation. The longer journey times, heavier load, and less frequent journeys undertaken by Malawian women may reflect the steep terrain and risks associated with firewood collection within a national park.