More Cows, More Wives

It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room: that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual state of civil war and are unable to develop stable modern institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can take the cows they need by force.

The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.

If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.

> And fathers who wish to divorce assume that the mothers of their children will be fine raising children alone with the support of their family, the state, and their salaries.

This makes the false assumption that men don't care about their children. Society and the courts tend to agree with it, but the vast majority of divorced men I know complain about how little they get to see their children, combined with how they are seen as only a paycheck and not as a parent. Things are slowly changing, men are more likely to get custody, and joint custody does happen - but there is still a lot of the "men are not able to raise kids" attitude around.

most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.

Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.

Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be taken away from you (sure visitation rights, but pratically the child grows up in the household of another man, if she remarries).

> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers.

OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.

Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.

But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...

great article.

one thing it mentions is how in Europe etc - places with limited land quickly pivoted to monogamy was due to limited resources. in places with limited resources, raising kids under monogamy has shown to produce the best results i.e kids tend to have better future success.

however, even though legal systems in the west restrict polygyny - due to inequality - its coming back - we already see that with onlyfans etc / high levels of prostitution in younger western females - the richer guys can maintain a harem - while the plebs become sexless incels.

Excellent submission. I particularly appreciate the lack of technical drama submissions on weekends. Again, this is a great read and a new favorite.

> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

Usually, polygamous societies tended to become monogamous or perish. Most of the young men who couldn't afford wives could be send to war and die there. Else, they could become very violent very fast because they had nothing to lose.

Not an anthropologist - but instead of "How farming promotes inequality", I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for fishing, or whatever.

> In contemporary Western societies, unigeniture is either considered wrong or is illegal; we no longer differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate offspring...

At best, those are common ideals in Western society. Try talking to an old attorney who does family law.

Also worth a mention - in primitive conditions, polygamy can speed the spread of highly beneficial genes through the society. The textbook case is immune system genes - historically, disease killed a lot of our ancestors.

Eden was probably just a metaphor for life before agriculture

I mean it makes sense, all you really need are cows and wives to turn sunshine into children. What more could a man need.

This approach is correlational and interpretive. The same raw data points can be assembled into substantively different, even diametrically opposed, narratives depending on which mechanisms, confounders, or weighting someone wants to emphasise.

Correlation is not causation. Just because they appear together doesn't mean the cows caused the marriage system. It could be that a third factor, like high male mortality in war prone herding societies, caused both.

She ignores polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) which occurs in some herding societies like Tibet. If "livestock = polygyny" was a hard scientific law, Tibet shouldn't exist as an exception.

> For much of history, this complexity was invisible to Westerners. Northwestern Europeans assumed that their way of doing things, lifelong monogamous marriage sanctified by religion and nuclear families with male breadwinners, was the natural order.

Hard to take this nonsense seriously. Northwest europe was christian and there are plenty of examples of non-monogamous marriages in the bible.

> One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans.

No shit. Heck, even within europe it was known. Such as the areas controlled by muslims. It was known for hundreds of years.

> It’s easy to see how the arrival of wealth reshaped marriage: more cows, more wives.

This is true prior to farming. Those who claimed the best hunting grounds ( wealth ) or access to water ( wealth ) would get more wives.

> Women, however, do. They have a choice: be the second or third wife of a rich pastoralist or be the first wife of a poor one. It can pay to be the former.

Did women really have a choice? Or wouldn't it make more sense for the father to marry her off to the guy who offers him the most dowry? The guy writes further down : "Parents can also command a higher bride price for daughters seen as compliant and chaste.".

> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

Monogamous systems happened in most "civilizations" to maintain peace. When you have a significant group of men without women or prospects for women, it can lead to instability. Especially in civilizations with large populations. Monogamy introduces a sense of fairness which everyone - men, women, fathers, mathers, etc can buy into.

It's why monogamous systems are dominant in every developed civilizations from europe to east asia and in between. And nonmonogamous systems are dominant in rural tribal backwards areas.

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> So how does one explain the parts of the world, like Europe and large parts of Asia, that are unequal yet predominantly monogamous?

Note that when we talk about polygamy in the past, it's about, like in TFA, a man with many wives. Not a woman with many men.

How does the modern "free" and "liberated" world reconcile that with feminism? When we talk about modern-day polygamous societies, it's basically islam. And islam is a highly patriarcal society.

So what's the take of feminists on these facts?