Foundational to this discussion are two papers on "identity" by George A. Akerlof and Rachel Kranton [2000, 2005]. We contribute to their development of this issue with additional factors that are arguably essential to the analysis of identity formation. While they indicate the importance of norms as the bases of identity, we suggest additionally the relevance of independence, individual creativity and the exploration of behaviors beyond norms. A violation of normative expectations has the potential of entering and affecting the social terrain interactively with positive feedbacks, generating non-linear processes of innovation and social change.

Our most important finding is that when individuals promote innovation in the performance of a social role, the innovation is unlikely to be mimicked by other role incumbents unless the formal rewards to those innovators are perceived to be more than proportional to the significance of the innovation. If those formal rewards are less than proportional to the significance of the innovation, a general disapprobation of the innovators may arise that potentially vitiates the benefits to innovators, retards the diffusion of the innovation and frustrates further innovation.

Contrary to Fordist notions of cost-minimization, our model suggests the development of challenging career paths where all workers of a given category are rewarded for innovation, rather than restricting rewards to specific innovators, in order to create dynamic innovative environments. Our results echo the achievements of Apple and Google, who have created heterogeneous teams of employees, rewarding all members of such teams for advancing innovation.

It is argued that the commonly asserted non-existence of group marriage arises solely from an abandonment of Morgan’s (1877) definition of marriage and that the commonly accepted alternative to that definition lacks ethnographic generality. As defined by Morgan group marriage has been practiced by over one-third of the hunter-gatherers listed in Murdock (1971).

Marriage payments: a fundamental reconsideration

Abstract This paper is a constructive critique of the well-known book by Jack Goody and Stanley Tambiah (1973), Bridewealth and Dowry. Given the general acceptance of Goody’s framework in contemporary studies of marriage and marriage payments, it is essential that we refer to this framework as we advance new theoretical concepts of marriage-related socio-economic processes. As some reviews of this paper have observed, this critique is certainly overdue.

In the course of this discussion we shall set forth analytical conceptions of wealth and consumption goods that we find to be foundational to an understanding of marriage payments and other economic processes; and we provide consistent criteria for studying the cross-cultural incidence of payments, gifts, bequests and inheritance that are often associated with marriage.

For cross-cultural analysis it is important that the dimensions of social process be clearly delineated, in spite of confusion that arises at the level of common discourse. Unfortunately, the Goody-Tambiah presentation amplifies this confusion in the interest of an ethnocentric evolutionary scheme. And in the context of the study of marriage payments in China, Goody’s construction of the “indirect dowry” is particularly unfortunate.

Abstract

Monogamy is ethnographically peculiar as an ethical ideal and emerged in the Early Middle Ages as a form of sexual repression imposed by the Church and employed by secular authorities to decompose powerful elite lineages. In its continued modern form, the independent and isolated monogamous household has been advanced as socially optimal by economists and as essential to civilization by anthropologists.   Although marriage, as a rightful claim on the sexuality of a woman, is a nearly universal institution, recent legislation and judicial opinion in both Europe and the United States have abrogated this basic marital right with the new crime of “marital rape”, thereby undermining the essential and defining characteristic of marriage. It is argued herein that these changes reflect the loss of relevance and significance of the domestic household to contemporary systems of capital accumulation; and it is in this new context that same-sex marriage becomes feasible.

Today a convergence between the fields of anthropology and economics has re-emerged after decades during which the dictates of methodological individualism, as strikingly elucidated by Kenneth Arrow, had seriously limited and hampered effective scholarship in studies of economic and social development in developing countries. A new generation of development economists represented by Spolaori and Wacziarg (2013) and (Spolaori 2016) has reopened the possibility of fruitful cross-disciplinary interaction, enabling economists and anthropologists to investigate those many social structures wherein resources are jointly held and wherein social goals are the product of interests held by groups, rather than exclusively by pairs of individuals stripped of a context of ethics.

The continually expanding data of Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969) provide a wide range of variables that make it possible to test theories regarding development and causality in human societies. Furthermore, new software facilitates the testing of these theories in the context of diffusion, historical language families and ecological contexts. Together, the data and the new software are essential to any effort to test theories of human evolutionary history and development.

We institute here a policy of occasionally publishing noteworthy PhD dissertations that advance anthropology or related sciences. Such publications are to be copy edited by the dissertation author, nominated by the author's PhD committee, and must receive unqualified support in our review process of at least two assigned referees, as well as by the editors of Structure and Dynamics.

In inaugurating the Structure and Dynamics journal, we offer a conduit for refereed electronic publication, debate, and editorial communication in the domain of anthropology and human sciences. We as editors dedicate our effort to facilitating and disseminating interdisciplinary discussion and research in anthropology and related sciences. We invite you—as a subscribed reader at no cost—to contribute and to participate in raising the aspirations of the human sciences today.