IBSS-Ex: Wealth, Wealth Inequality, and Marraige Systems

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This interdisciplinary research project focuses on relationships among wealth, wealth inequality, and polygyny in three population groups (farmers, horticulturalists, and foragers), with special emphasis given to addressing different marriage systems among different cultures. Distribution of different marriage systems has been a focus of anthropological investigation since the discipline's birth, with explanations drawing on sex ratio, women's economic contributions to production, social complexity, fraternal interest groups, available habitats for expansion, and parasite loads. Given the importance of marriage as an economic institution, economic explanations have come to prominence. These explanations show an interesting convergence with ideas developed by behavioral ecologists studying the distribution of polygyny in non-human species. It is widely thought that polygyny will be more common where material wealth is both more unequally held among men and more important to a population's production and reproduction. While this intuition explains why horticulturalists tend to be more polygynous than foragers, it results in a paradox, because farmers, among whom material wealth is both more important and more unequally distributed, are less polygynous than horticulturalists. The project will draw on insights from demography, anthropology, and economics. The researchers will combine ethnographic data with mathematical models of the interacting dynamics of family structure and wealth disparity. The major empirical component of this project entails estimating key model parameters using individual-level data from 13 small-scale populations. The analyses of data from these different sources will allow determination of the relative strengths of these joint effects of different factors and provide a test of possible resolutions of the polygyny paradox.This project will contribute to basic understanding of the dynamics of disparities in wealth and how they impact on the social structures. The resolution of the polygyny paradox has implications for general knowledge about interactions between wealth and family structure that extend beyond the small scale societies that the project will study. Project results may help address a range of factors that influence marriage dynamics in modern advanced societies, such as a tendency for higher divorce rates and more socially acceptable forms of polygyny, such as individuals having multiple spouses through a series of monogamous marriages over time. The project also will advance the methodological use of mathematical modeling, experimental techniques, and intensive analysis of individual level data to address the trade-off between the depth of an ethnographer's individual-level data and the power of cross-population comparisons. Broader impacts of this project will include facilitation of interdisciplinary research across economics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, special education and training opportunities for a post-doctoral researcher, and annual meetings to advance the use of advanced methodologies tested in this project among scholars in relevant fields. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.