PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION
| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 |
| Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Test your comprehension |
Pasternak,
Ember, and Ember's
Sex,
Gender, and Kinship
Table of Contents: click
on table entries to retrieve chapter notes
| Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Test your comprehension |
JACK
GOODY'S
PRODUCTION
AND REPRODUCTION
Chapter 1 . (return to table of contents)
The evolution of the domestic economy: the hoe and the plough
McLennan and his interest in "long term evolutionary change".
Goody says "Any human institution is best understood if on can examine not only its meaning and function in a particular society but its distribution in space and time." (p. 2).
The study of developmental or long term change. Talcott Parson's "evolutionary change". Discuss this term or use of the term as it relates to ideas about progress and complexity. Workers such as Levi-Strauss, Lewis Henry Morgan, and George Peter Murdock.
The problem of drawing historical inferences from cross-sectional data.
Problem of complexity and social form: nuclear families and kinship terminologies from Eskimo and urban America. Or matrilineal societies more common to simple hoe horticulturalists than to foragers or moderns.
Inter vivos: between living people, a gift.
Distinguishes between diverging (or bilateral) inheritance and homogenous inheritance. In homogenous inheritance resources are given to males either through a male or female connection (i.e. either through sister's brother to sister's son or from father to son). In diverging inheritance resources are given to daughters at the time of marriage to form a conjugal estate and then later to sons more frequently at the time of the father's death.
In diverging devolution resources can be diffused outside the descent group since women marry men who belong to other groups and are given a dowry for her children who also are members of a different group. But could not the same be said of bride price in that lineage resources are given to members of another lineage in exchange for a wife. The key difference is that in diverging systems dowry is called an inheritance while in homogenous systems inherited resources stay within the lineage even though bride price is paid out.
Characteristics of Corporate Descent Groups: (from lecture)
Chapter 2 (return to table of contents)
The theory, the variables, and a test
Goody will use the Ethnographic Atlas, a data base containing 89 columns of data on 863 societies around the world.
Problems: one must use the data available in the Atlas. In this case, information on inheritance as to whether land and moveables involved but no distinction made for dowry.
Defines devolution as property transmission between holder and heir. It would therefore include dowry and inheritance and indirect dowry (groom giving to the bride).
The analysis, data: all societies were classified as diverging where daughters have a share in land or movable property and in which dowry was the main or an alternative marriage arrangement. The negative cases were those who did not share the above but not counting those where there was no data or where there was in individual property rights or no rule of transmission.
Distributional Results
Basic argument: if women gain dowry then that will influence nature of marriage especially if dowry includes land (basic means of production). Therefore, her marriage will be sharply controlled and she will need to marry someone of her own or higher status, otherwise her standard of living will drop.
In addition, control of courtship will be important so that good marriages are arranged or poor ones are avoided.
In addition, premarital sex will be controlled. Positive association between taboo against pre-marital sex and inheritance of property by females. Love is a passionate rebellion against parental wishes for a same status match
In addition: homogamy or marriage to someone of the same social status. In this case, diverging devolution associated statistically with endogamy and caste systems.
Later he presents statistics to suggests that FBD marriage should be associated with DD since it is done to maintain status and wealth. He goes on to argue in the case of cousin marriage that it has a bimodal distribution. At one end we find it common in foraging societies where it functions to tie groups together and at the other end we find it in advanced horticultural societies where it serves to maintain wealth. The idea of different functions for the same trait in different circumstances.
On FBD marriage: positive association between DD and preferred FBD marriage and if one includes cases where it is permitted the association increases.
Positive association between DD and monogamy. Here, polygyny could only impoverish a household since a man would have to set up two conjugal funds, one for each wife. The goal is to marry someone of the same status.
Three of the four cases of polyandry are associated with DD. Obviously, sample too small to draw any statistical conclusion.
Given sex ratio distributions, there will be a number of families who will have no male heirs. Instead they will have daughters who will inherit which will lead to uxorilocal marriages where they mode is virilocal. However, his findings are not upheld for there is a negative association between neolocal and ambilocal marriages and DD.
Kinship terminology: in Eskimo the children of siblings are differentiated from each other. That is, one's children (sons and daughters) versus one's nephews and nieces. This is done to emphasis the pattern of giving to children and not nephews and nieces. If they were the same, then one might expect that they would be equal heirs. For example, in a bifurcate merging system, FB kids are called son or daughter by father and brother and sister by siblings.
Basic Argument
The scarcer the resources, the more intensively they will be used and the more likely that these resources will be retained in the basic productive and reproductive unit through vertical transmission and women and well as men will be provided for as heirs. Advanced agriculture allows land to be more intensively cultivated and hence it becomes more valuable and the population becomes more dense which intensified the process of diverging devolution.
Positive association between plough and DD and political complexity and DD.
Key Terms:
Direct dowry (passage of goods to a daughter from her parents upon marriage) and indirect dowry (passage of goods from the groom to the bride upon marriage). Brideprice refers to the passage of goods from the groom's kinship group to the bride's kinship group (and it usually allows the bride's kinship group the wherewithal the provide goods when the bride's brothers or kinsmen marry).
Page 12: Table of diverging devolution shows that it is rare in Africa (6%) but common (52%) in Eurasia and Circum- Mediterranean, 20% in America, and 41% in the Pacific. Present in 27% of the ethnographic sample.
1. Intensive agriculture: the plough makes land more valuable (it produces more) and in the context of high population density (which brought it about) the need to transmit it to children to maintain their social status - it cannot be thrown back to the clan (improvements have been individually made on it) since the competition for land within the clan is so high?
2. Monogamy: land is limited and must be worked intensively by a couple and can only support the children of one wife. However, serial monogamy occurs with barren wives or concubines for wealthy males. The child of the concubine was legitimate but it was a dowry less marriage that could be afforded only by rich males. Concubinage was almost invariably associated with monogamous systems and didn't occur among polygynous peoples.
Step-mothers exist in monogamous societies but the term is not used in polygynous systems (a child calls his father's co- wives mother). Fairy and other tails (of the 134+ versions of the Cinderella story 100 describe a wicked step-mother) describe the conflict between step-mothers and children and how the wicked step-mother wants to take the property of the children and give it to her own.
The role of spinster and bachelor is not uncommon in Eurasia but it is uncommon in Africa despite high rates of polygyny. In Eurasia these people were unable to have property given to them (for males the case of primogeniture) and thus unable to marry. Such people went either into the clergy or hired themselves out as domestics (women, and they could not marry) or as laborers or soldiers. Celibate and unisexual religious orders are not found sub- Saharan.
Divorce rates will be low because of the need of two parents to be able to invest in their children by providing dowry and inheritance. Furthermore, remarriage of widows is proscribed or difficult in monogamous systems whereas it is common in polygynous systems. Monogamy militates against remarriage because a woman would have to split her dowry among two sets of husbands' children (it would spread her estate too thinly).
3. Endogamy: "in-marriage and dowry as methods of preserving differences of property and status in contrast to bridewealth and out-marriage which diffuse them." (p. 106). Because land was scarce and the source of status one wanted to make sure that children either stayed within their own class or women (hypergamy) to marry up. In Africa land was plentiful and labor was scarce. Furthermore, there was little difference economically between high status and low status (no serfdom) individuals and there was a great deal of cultural homogeneity. As a result exogamy was practiced as a means to maximize the number of wife's (labor is scarce) a man can marry. Since land is plentiful there is little need to channel property through diverging devolution to maintain the status of a child upon marriage.
Chapter 3 (return to table of contents)
Making casual inferences
Diverging devolution is the transmission of property to children of both sexes and the goal is "to maintain the status of their children vis a vis other members of the community" (p. 23).
Remarks on Childe and the urban revolution: intensive agriculture that could support cities, elites, and craft specialization. In Africa intensive agriculture (irrigation, cattle for traction, and cereal cultivation) did not spread from the Nile because of poor soils (or so it is claimed by Lord Hailey) and Boserup suggests that women play a large role in agriculture because men are reluctant to take on the work of plough agriculture. Suggests with the plough a man could cultivate 60 acres instead of the 2 acres per head which was about the limit in Africa with the hoe.
Talks about causal factors and making inferences. We talk about co-variation (according to Radcliffe Brown) but it is the system overall which is being affected. However, Goody feels that we should weight factors to determine their importance. To disentangle relative influences he proposes to use path or linkage analysis. In this technique the mutual correlations between variables are used and pairs of variables are grouped based on how closely they correlate with one another.
Mention of Galton's problem.
Data reduction procedures: endogamy and father's brother's marriage yields "in-marriage" or plough agriculture and intensive agriculture to form "advanced agriculture".
Chapter 4 (return to table of contents)
Farming, Labor, and Sex
The work of Tillion (Le Harem et les cousins) in 1966. Makes a contrast between savage society which is exogamic and intensive cultivators which are endogamic. Suggests that exogamy of foragers and simple horticulturalists who wished to maintain territorial integrity and did it through exogamic marriage to maintain alliances with other groups. Suggests that this is a technique of demographic control. However, changes in marriage by intensive cultivators is associated with endogamy, a "return to "incest", polygyny, war, and racism.
Rationale of the System:
Influenced by Boserup`s The Role of Women in Economic Development. Male and female farming systems: (1) shifting cultivation and low population density where women do most of the work and polygyny is common: here women are valued as workers and child bearers; (2) densely populated plough cultivation where men do most of the work, polygyny is rare, dowry is common, and a man's primary responsibility is to his family and not his kinship groups: here women are valued as child bearers and women are entirely dependent on their husbands for economic support, and; (3) intensive cultivation of frequently irrigated land where men and women must work equally hard on small parcels of land.
Test of Boserup
Male farming is associated with intensive cultivation while female farming systems are associated with shifting cultivation. In addition, we find that male farming systems are associated with high population density (indexed by mean community size) while female farming systems tend to be associated with low community size.
In plough agriculture women are secluded and child bearers, land is held privately, and a landless class available for hire. This, according to Boserup, tends to occur in complex society. Indeed, Goody shows a statistical association between female agriculture and simple polity and dowry and male agriculture is found with more complex society.
Tests of division of labor (male dominant agriculture) and diverging devolution. The findings indicate that male agriculture predicts sibling kin terms, advanced agriculture, complex polity, and endogamy better than diverging devolution while diverging devolution predicts prohibited pre-marital sex and monogamy better. Coefficients are on page 34, Table 20.
What to do now that division of labor is a powerful determinant of diverging devolution. He notes that intensive agriculture is done with the plough and draft animals that in most places are handled by men. So he proposes a new model which begins with advanced agriculture which leads to complex polity and male farming which in turn determine diverging devolution and monogamy, endogamy, prohibited sex, and sibling kin terms.
Chapter 5 (return to table of contents)
Concubines and co-wives: the structure of roles in Africa and Eurasia
Begins with a semantic discussion of Nadel, Radcliffe Brown, and others about roles and abstractions. He simply wants to describe certain kinds of roles in Africa and Eurasia: a classification of roles and associated behaviors. The role of co-wife and concubine are the focus.
In Africa polygyny rates average 35% of all marriages (from Dorjahn, the percentage of all married men who are polygynous) but it is absent or when present the rate of polygyny is low in Asia.
When plural marriages occur in Asia it is usually a heir producing technique. There are four ways to produce an heir, with the fourth being the African solution and the first three are Eurasian options:
1. adoption
2. divorce
3. concubinage
4. polygyny
Does the story of Hagar and Sarah. Says that concubinage is simply not found in Africa.
Attempting to define concubinage: depends on the status of the woman. Essentially, the women taken does not have full rights as a wife, although her children may have equal rights as the children of the man's wife. Goes through European time and space and talks of the church's initial approval and later disapproval. Interesting observation: if priests could not marry then the church was the heir of their property - the main way they got their wealth. Same applied to nuns: the church encouraged the inheritance of land by women so that nuns could cede property to the church.
In Eurasia concubines had not property but their children had full rights of inheritance. (In other words, concubine means slave wife.) Symbol of concubine's children's legitimacy is the biblical requirement that the handmaiden give birth on the knees of the wife (as if the children were issuing from the wife).
An aside on Boserup and others that polygyny is associated with hoe agriculture because of the need (or wealth increasing ability) for extra labor.
The reason concubinage is associated with monogamy is that monogamy is a kind of funded marriage "since the spouses have to commit their property in order to get a partner of the right standing" (p. 51).
"In other words, to start by trying to explain polygyny is to start from the wrong end. As far as human cultures are concerned, it is monogamy that is rare, polygyny, common, anyhow until recently, though of course it was the larger more advanced societies that display monogamous tendencies" (p. 51)Mothers and Step-Mothers
In Europe there is no duplication of the mother role which is allocated to one person only. This is not the case in Africa where mother or father is a category. This is because of the inheritance of property which is given by one man to his children while in Africa children of any of the father's wives will inherit equally. In Europe, the children of a specific union will get the property. If a mother dies and new children come of a second wife, then that wife's property and unclaimed property of husband may go to children of second wife.
'Mothers' and step-mothers
In many African societies there is no term for step-mother because a person has other mothers and fathers who can fill the mother or father role.
Again, all children of polygynous unions are equal but in Eurasian society the deal made at marriage (dowry and man's estate) are designed for the children of that union. Therefore, provisions must be made to protect dead spouse's children from the interests of the step-siblings and step-parent.
Step-mother, in a variety of languages, has evil or cruel connotations. In Europe one would expect that the step-mother would be associated with witchery as the co-wife is in Africa. (One still sees jealousy of the co-wife but it is over what her husband may give her children by favoring his other wife. In Europe, it has to do with the step-mother killing her step-children so that her natural children may inherit).
Data on Cinderella stories where the step-daughter is ill-treated and marries up. In the majority of cases it is ill-treatment by a step-mother.
He notes in European stories the maternal brother is good and the father's brother is evil. He makes little of this except to note that the father's brother in Africa is not considered evil or threatening. One would expect that the mother's brother would be kind from an evolutionary biological perspective since it is in his reproductive interest to make sure that his sister's children are cared for and get their mother's dowry. In contrast, the father's brother could gain the dead brother's children's wealth and us it for his own children. Presumably, the mother's brother could not recover his sister's dowry should his sister in order to use it for his own children and therefore deprive his nephews and nieces.
Spinsters and Bachelors
Despite polygyny nearly all men and women in Africa are married or married at some time in their lives. The rate of spinster hood and bachelor hood is greater in Europe (in table 23, p. 57) contrasts Belgium and Sweden with Bulgaria with Bulgaria coming closer to the African situation.
Story of the filthy aunt in the attic. Spinsters tended to be more frequent in cities and in wealthy families.
Some General Comparative Points:
Since it is difficult to arrange marriage in Eurasian societies it is also difficult for divorce. Focus on the establishment of a fund.
Affinity is a more permanent, individualized relationship in Eurasia. Alliance in Africa is more transitory [since payment of bridewealth followed by successful reproduction is the goal]. Also, plural marriage makes each affinal relationship less valuable.
Widow remarriage is not prevented in Africa while it is usually difficult in Eurasia.
Chapter 6 (return to table of contents)
Adoption in Cross-cultural Perspective
There is little or no comparative work on adoption cross-culturally. The Ethnographic Atlas does not code for it.
Interesting note on social education in Ghana listed on page 67 which suggests that the western model (importance of family unit, difficulties for children with divorced parents, importance of satisfactory family life for sound mental health, etc.). Essentially, based on the ideal of the western family.
The Functions of Adoption
In the West:
Adoption Defined
Change in status of child such that it is not longer regarded as the child of its current (or biological) parents but the child of the adopter. From a natural filial relationship to a social or fictive or filial relationship. In African systems a child was always the member of a lineage and should a child lose a parent there was always a ready group of caretakers (other lineage members) and does not or could not lose his or her status as a lineage member.
Rome
In Rome a person became a stranger to his own agnatic natal family and even ceased to worship their ancestors. According to Cicero only a man with no offspring could undertake adoption.
Greece
The situation was similar to Rome. A man without a son would adopt one who then could marry his daughter. Or he would adopt his son-in-law's son (his grandson) who would then inherit. Would frequently adopt close kin or affines.
Hindu India
On method, the appointed daughter, was to give a daughter in marriage to a man with the stipulation that the offspring (grandson) would be the father-in-laws son or legal heir. The goal, according to Maine, was the perpetuation of the male line.
Commonly, adoption should be a close kin, as in China and Greece. The best would be a brother's son or a more distant agnate. Men on the mother's side could also be adopted
Even in modern times adoption is based on the needs of the adopting family to perpetuate the family line and manage the family estate.
China
Common type of adoption called ssu chi, or to continue the succession. Clear rules for adoption which focuses on agnates and it is a requirement (legal) that a man choose someone if he has no male heirs. Disputes in adoption are really disputes in inheritance.
Maine on adoption
Maine regarded adoption is an important fiction that moved it towards civilization since it broke down bonds of kinship and allowed strangers to be integrated into society. Now society has ties of contiguity as a basis of organization. To counter, Goody points out that Nuer and Tallensi, among others, have adopted neighboring clans of different tribes into their system. However, Goody wonders whether one should refer to this as adoption. However, fictions in adoption occur in tribal societies where adoption is designed to continue a descent line. Concludes, legal fictions were never absent from kinship societies; therefore, adoptions are fictive and ancient.
"Adoption that has nothing to do with the welfare of children" appears to be connected with vertical rather than horizontal systems of inheritance. Furthermore, adoption is not done of same generation collaterals (brothers) but rather lower generation collaterals (brother's sons) for two reasons: (1) inheritance is for sons (younger generation) for it is a dependent relationship; and (2) and ancestor worship cannot be for a collateral but it must be for an ancestor (brothers cannot fulfill this role).
[Note that the explanation is purely cultural. We need to know why there is consistency in such beliefs across societies analyzed.]
Alternatives to adoption
Distinguishes between two types of adoption (i) designed to care for deprived children; and (ii) designed to provide social progeny for heirless couples. Type ii is dominant in Eurasian society.
When polygyny is not practiced then divorce, concubinage, handmaiden, or the appointed daughter.
Again, talks about the problem of too many heirs or daughters to be endowed and not having enough heirs to maintain the family position through time. Clearly the goal is to maintain the family estate intact.
Fostering in Africa
Because of the ecological situation in Africa (extensive agriculture, little improvement, no important traction or transportation animals [except in East]) there is little need to restrict inheritance. Therefore, there was no problem in heirs. Therefore no problem in heirs and an abundance of children is an advantage since labor and not land is scarce.
Suggests that the function of the levirate is to breed an heir of a dead brother through "fictitious" wives achieved through bridewealth. In Africa adoption is rare but fostering is common.
Adoption in Africa today
In Ghana family responsibilities are still strong. Deprived children are cared for by kin which is not the situation in European societies. There is a problem that modernizers will have the state step in an deal with the children and set up expensive and special state-organized custodial systems.
CHAPTER 7 (return to table of contents)
STRATEGIES OF HEIRSHIP
Will deal with the material aspects of heir ship: how resources are passed on from generation to generation. The problem: social replacement has no problems if carried on laterally but severe problems if done vertically.
The problem of security: (1) support in dotage; (2) continuity of the family estate; and (3) for the after-life. Notes that it is difficult for moderns to understand support in dotage since state tends to take care of us.
The demographic problem: Collver's study shows that 22% have no sons at end of reproductive careers while 30% have one living son and 50% have two. In earlier times mortality rates were such that 50% would have not living sons at end of reproductive career. Also problems of widowhood and orphanhood and so extended kinship ties are ways of dealing with such problems.
Lateral inheritance
In Africa the problem is not great because the lineage provides ample heirs through lateral inheritance. In about 40% of the cases property will pass to collaterals.
Lineal inheritance
In Eurasia lineal inheritance is the norm and the function of this rule is often the preservation of the status of offspring in a society with differentiated strata based on property-holding (or other relatively exclusive rights).
Central problem: what if a man has no male heirs and does not wish property to pass to collaterals. The knife edge problem of having too many heirs which would badly subdivide an estate to no heirs.
Solutions to demographic imbalances for inheritance:
Adding wives
Because of problems in dowry already mentioned, concubines were designed to produce heirs since the offspring may inherit. This is not true of morganatic marriages which are for sexual and domestic purposes and not for her heir producing abilities or property (dowry). Serial monogamy is also used in the case of a sterile wife. The problem with serial monogamy is that the conjugal fund must be dissolved.
Adding children
If a man has a daughter then a uxorilocal marriage is arranged such that the daughter's son becomes the heir. This arrangement is attractive to a man whose older brother may get the farm. He will be able to marry an heiress and break the usual patrilocal or virilocal marriage.
filiacentric unions: a man marries uxorilocally in a system that is virilocal.
Subtracting childrenappointed daughter or epicleros: a woman becomes the heir, a man in-marries and their son inherits the land. The woman acts as a social male by inheriting the land and her husband does not gain title.outside male: the father's brother's son inherits the uncle's land. This may be combined with the epicleros, as described above.
Here we deal with attempting to balance the estate against heirs. Abortion, infanticide, or rules that require that the oldest inherit, or requiring that only unmarried children may remain on the estate as in the stem family, surplus children may go into service (church, urban centers, military, servants).
These patterns are revealed in demographic data where reproduction is more likely to end with the birth of a male than of a female. This is not true for modern urban populations.
Conclusion
Africa where hoe cultivation reigns, land has low productivity and is not the basis for social stratification, and labor rather than land is limiting. In Europe a man was concerned about his own security and the future of his estate which led him to attempt to make sure that he had a male heir.
Chapter 8 (return to table of contents)
Class and Marriage
The problematic of the chapter: Observation of Sir Richard Burton that the son of a prince may be a poor man and that of John Mensah Sarbah who noted that a pauper class in unknown and that there is no class antagonisms.
The idea of class or other forms of grouping is centered around the ability of mobility, the degree to which people can change group affiliation through time.
The class system in Eurasia may be of three types:
Marriage in Eurasia
Even in a so-called open in North America situation, 83% of all marriage occurred among people of the same neighborhood or who are members of adjacent classes.
Davis says that the cardinal principal of every system of stratification is that people shall marry equals because marriage implies equality. He states "a wife reared in a social stratum widely different from her husband's is apt to inculcate idea and behavior incompatible with the position the children will inherit from their father, thus creating a hiatus between their status and their role" (Davis, 1941: 337-8).
The blocks to communication between groups via (1) marriage; (2) eating; and (3) other forms of social intercourse are critical to understanding nature of system.
Marriage in Africa
The only time we have class endogamy in Africa is when a ruling ethnic group has conquered another ethnic group (Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda). However, in most cases one was required to marry outside one's group, even if one were in the ruling clan or lineage. A Gonja prince once remarked "All our mothers were slaves".
Cooking. Since class differences could not be institutionalized there were no differences based on various practices (speech). The example given is the lack of a haute cuisine or a basse cuisine. Where specific differences did occur they reflected role differences (rulers and tax collectors) and not class differences.
Implications and Explications. Wants to answer the question of endogamy versus exogamy in the African and Eurasian contrast. Describes the work of Bloch on feudal Europe and how serfs married their own and even within in the village and bailiffs tried to have daughters marry sons of bailiffs (overseer of an estate or an assistant to a sheriff).
The goal in marriage was to match like with like. The usual mechanism was a matching of property through dowry.
So there was a tendency to preserve status and wealth in Eurasia and to diffuse (through bridewealth and exogamy) it in Africa. How to account for this.
In Africa one could farm as much land as one wanted. However, hoe technology limited the amount that could be farmed and the productivity was low. Hoe in Nigeria could cultivate about 8 acres while a plough could handle at least 20 acres. However, in Europe with the plough the more one possessed the more one could produce. This caused land to become scarce and a surplus in production to be produced.
In Africa what was critical was the right to transmit office. Since differences were not great, one did not have to pursue a strategy of homogamy."If there is a plentiful supply of land, no man need bend his knee to a lord simply in order to get a living. It is critical to my thesis that in Africa there were no landlord-tenant relationships, nor any institution one can legitimately call 'serfdom' or 'peonage'." (p. 108).
Ethiopia"Since the social status and living standard of the family groups that exploited the land were little affected by the transmission of the means of production, there was less pressure either to individualize those rights or to channel them to one's offspring." (p. 109).
The Amhara of Ethiopia used the plough and as are result we find diverging devolution in Africa. Women can receive land from parents although the amount is less than a son's share. Interestingly, parents spend more money on girls to clothe them properly so that they may attract a wealthy husband.
In addition, there is a clear social hierarchy of poor religiously conservative farmers and those who are rich land owners and who are in the secular and religious hierarchy. These differences are marked by sumptuary restrictions, forms of speech, etiquette, forms of deference, brewing of beer, permission to slaughter cattle must be granted by a social superior, and the like.
Where social stratification is extreme in Africa is based on conquest of one ethnic group by the other.
He is not talking about a lack of stratification or social distinction but rather the particularly European notion of class.ConclusionNyerere notes "I doubt if the equivalent for the world "class" exists in an indigenous African language; for language describes the ideas of those who speak it, and the idea of "class" and "caste" was non-existent in African society (1962:).
However, Goody says that those who deny the reality of class in Africa merely attempt to bolster their regimes. While there is some truth to this in highly urbanized sections of Africa, it is largely incorrect for most of Africa.
Those African chiefs and rulers who stratify only do so in a rough political sense which has no strong economic base and it is therefore temporary.
The social system in Africa is very fluid.
Chapter 9 (return to table of contents)
Retrospect
Deals with the problem of classification. Ideas such a feudal, oriental despotism, primitive states, snowball states - the work of splitters and mergers in classification.
"The literate states developed a more elaborate bureaucracy, a more decisive system of communication, partly because they possessed the art of writing. And at the same time their modes o production were more elaborate because of the mechanization provide by the plough, the requirements of large-scale irrigation, the development of craft specialization, combined with the demands of ecclesiastical and political rulers." (p. 117).
Additional Notes (return to table of contents)
HRAF
Know what the HRAF is, the uses to which it is put, the Outline of
Cultural Materials and indexing of culture, coding of variables, and
levels of measurement (nominal and categorical, ordinal, and interval).
Problems in the Use of HRAF Data
Describe the approaches of early cultural evolutionists such as Morgan and Tylor? What were they attempting to demonstrate and what is the legacy of their work? What were their results and how do they compare to modern forms of cultural evolutionism.
Why are concubines, step-fathers, step-mothers, orphans, spinsters, and bachelors common in Eurasian societies but rare in African societies?
Who is Esther Boserup and how did here distinction between female and male farming systems influence Goody's work?
Why are brideprice, bride-wealth, dowry, and inheritance critical in distinguishing systems of homogenous inheritance and diverging devolution?
Why does Goody consider adoption, divorce, and consubinage as mechanisms for creating heirs? Related to this, why is having too many or too few children of one sex or the other not a problem in African societies?
Why are monasteries, convents, and other same sex religious orders more common in Eurasian than African societies.
Why are the Amhara of Ethiopia the exception that proves the rule?
What does Goody mean by the following?
Why are step-parents a serious threat to children in diverging devolution societies but not in homogenous inheritance societies? And how may the rules of the levirate and sororate insure that children are treated well?"In other words, to start by trying to explain polygyny is to start from the wrong end. As far as human cultures are concerned, it is monogamy that is rare, polygyny, common, anyhow until recently, though of course it was the larger more advanced societies that display monogamous tendencies" (p. 51).
How are adding wives, adding children, and subtracting children solutions to heirship problems in Eurasian societies? In this regard think of primogeniture, the epiclerate (or appointed daughter), and filacentric unions.
How does Goody use the observation that African systems are labor (people)
limited while Eurasian systems are land limited?
Sex, Gender, and Kinship
At the outset the authors say that they want to discover patterns of social structure that work. But we might ask "How can be tell or what criteria could we possibly use to determine whether a particular social structure?" Here are some potential criteria. Can you think of others?
Chapter 2: Sexuality (return to table of contents)
Culture Channels Sexuality
Cultures that frown on child sexuality are more likely to condemn and
punish premarital and postmarital sex. Also cultures that do not
insist on child modesty in dress and are open and free in sexual talk do
not punish harshly extra or premarital sex.
Some findings from Frayer’s HRAF Research:
The honor-shame complex in the Circum-Mediterranean is characterized by restrictive control of female sexuality and difficulty of divorce (barrenness is about the only way aside from adultery). Remarriage after divorce or death is also difficult. Frayer suggests that is so because of considerable resource competition and low levels of political integration which lead to codes of honor as mechanism of social control.
Homosexuality
Some ethnographers suggest we should distinguish those societies were homosexuality is mandatory (as a phase in the life cycle) as in certain parts of Melanesia. In the Big Nambas during their circumcision ritual guardians of the boys will possess exclusive sexual rights over their boy. The guardian becomes the boy’s husband and the relationship is exclusive. Later these boys marry heterosexually and become husbands to younger boys as their guardians. Also expected in other societies such as the Sieans of Egypt.
In other places it is a matter of adolescent experimentation. At times it is reserved for special times nights of saturnalia among the Papago. Or male transvestites in North
Berdache (North America). While they followed female gender roles, not all berdaches engaged in homosexual activities. In some cases they married non-Berdache men while others married women heterosexually.
Crapo distinguishes between generational and inter-generational homosexuality (mentorship homosexuality which is the same as mandatory above) and finds that inter-generational is more likely found where there is:
In some societies sex is the best thing in the world while in others “it is a little like work”. In a great many New Guinea societies sex with women is dangerous. They believe it is detrimental to male health and every ejaculation diminishes male vigor.
Ember deals with four hypotheses regarding male fear of sex:
Chapter 3: Gender, Division of Labor, and Social Behavior (return to table of contents)
Division of labor by gender
Four theories
Why does agriculture involve more male labor?
This is an important issue for the evolution of male farming systems
as you have seen in Goody's presentation.
The following are cross-cultural results for women who are heavily engaged in primary production:
Mead attempted to show in Sex and Temperament in Primitive Society that personality traits of men and women were completely culturally determined.
On the Status of Women
When we speak of gender and status we are asking which gender is:
Determinants of Female Social Status
The research of Martin Whyte finds that the measures we commonly use
to indicate status are not strongly associated. Therefore, status
is multidimensional. For example, one of his nine measures of status
deal control over women’s marital and sexual lives and it is composed of
the following measures:
Chapter 4: Marriage and Other Mated Relationships (return to table of contents)
Stable Mated Relationships
Following Murdock most anthropologists argued that marriage had a number of functions such as
Why Share a Husband?
The following hypotheses been put forward to account for polygyny:
The standard explanation is that it requires the labor of two men to maintain a family in a harsh environment. However, the work of Goldstein indicates that this explanation is unlikely and the real explanation revolves around attempt by large land owner to reduce their tax burden and maintain the size of their agricultural plots which is critical for retention of high status. In many ways it is an alternative to primogeniture and other mechanisms found in Asia and Europe to prevent the fractionalization of land holdings.
Chapter 5: Marriage and the Incest Taboo (return to table of contents)
Forbidden Sex: How Universal is the Incest Taboo?
Refers to sex and marriage of people who are judged to be too closely
related.
With some exceptions, Murdock found that sex between family members
(save husband and wife) was universally tabooed except for a few cases
(royalty and more recent evidence suggests that it was common in the Roman
period of Egypt among non-royalty).
Also, in most cases, uncle-niece or aunt-nephew marriages are prohibited.
First cousins are usually the closest permitted.
Explaining the Incest Taboo
Forcing Alliances: the goal of the taboo is to create alliances through marriage (Tylor originated) this: the practical alternative between marrying-out or be killed out".
In fact marriage does not always produce inter-familial harmony and in some cases (New Guinea) enemies are married. Marvin Harris points out that such marriages may balance imbalances in the sex ratio between groups.
Promoting Family Harmony
"Sex with its accompaniment of courtship, jealousies, and competition,
is not compatible with the attitude of reverence and submission characteristic
of child-to-parent relations."
They point out that women share a common husband in polygynous marriages or men share a common wife in polyandry.
Notes that in the above cases sex is regulated serially. They also point out that sex may not entail strong emotional bonds (yes but).
Short-Circuiting Psychological Attraction
The standard Freudian explanation: we are attracted to mothers or fathers,
this attraction creates conflicts (son against father and daughter against
mother), which would lead to disruptive jealousies. Therefore, incest rules
act to suppress these natural desires. The model given in Totem and Taboo
is pseudo-historical and does not square with primate literature [but neither
is it clear that it should].
Accommodating Natural Aversions
There is evidence that even without cultural rules primates and humans
may avoid intra-family matings.
The general rejection of simplistic racial and biological explanations of cultural behavior accounts for the hostility initially accorded Westermarck's hypothesis. (p. 111).
Levi-Strauss regarded the taboo as representing the passage from animal to human life.
Review:
Some problems:
Ember (also Durham) predicted that societies with endogamous marriages
would more likely prohibit cousin marriages and that the effect would be
strongest in small communities. However, Pasternak believes that the tests
do not really test Westermarck because intimate relations are multifaceted
such as those that occur in the nuclear family. Perhaps a better test would
be to look at marriage prohibitions in societies that contain extended
families which would suggest that extended families would not permit children
in the family who are cousins to marry.
They correctly point out that people need not have knowledge of genetics and reproduction for the trait to be adaptive. All they have to do is make a negative association between intercourse and close relationships.
Durham found that the majority of societies recognize the relationship between inbreeding and bad reproductive results. Of those, 73% prohibit or punish incestuous sex; 40% mention supernatural sanctions; and 50% the production of bad stock.
On the psychological mechanism Parker suggests that habituation is associated with boredom and novelty is associated with interest, exploration, arousal, and activation.
Durham attempts to deal with the fact that it is a cultural rule that seems unnecessary if there is a natural aversion. He suggests that the natural habituation does not work for all in a community but wonders why it applies to adopted children or why the community generally feels a general repugnance. Parker suggests that the taboo has a biological basis (aversion) which is culturally elaborated to permit family stability, reduction of poor offspring, and created greater social alliances.
Biological Advantage of the Taboo
Harris argues (pace Livingston) that a small population can breed out the dangerous allele if they are willing to do it at the cost of initially reduced fitness. Ember suggests that the taboo may have not occurred until the spread of agriculture which increased population because increases of recessive alleles would have increased with population size. Both of these models assume that the breeding pools of foragers was small enough for recessive alleles to be wiped out with close inbreeding. This is unlikely or they have to show mathematically how this would be true. Even if the pool was small it would just take a few matings with members outside of the pool to introduce new alleles into the population.
For some reason they have ignored the considerable medical evidence
presented in Neel and Centerwall and Semonova showing the problems with
close inbreeding.
Test your comprehension (return to table of contents)
Describe some of the theories of the division of labor. How may Brown's model be used to account for changes we see in contemporary society and what are some other factors (ERA, need for two breadwinners, etc.) that may be additionally required to account for such changes?
Describe theories that attempt to account for variation in female political participation. According to Ross' work which of these is supported or contradicted by cross-cultural research.
Ross identified a number of factors that increased female political participation. Can you provide any theoretical reasons why these factors ought to be linked to variation in female political participation?
Frayser notes that female sexuality is more restricted than male sexuality and attributes this to maternity certainty and paternity certainty. What does she mean?
Describe the theories that account for the existence of polygyny and polyandry.
Describe the proximate and ultimate causes of the incest taboo? If the incest taboo were lifted in the United States, would the incidence of incest increase much and if it did, would there be negative consequences for those who practiced it.
What were Martin Whyte's findings on factors that increased or decreased
female status. Would you have defined status in the same way he did?