3 - Mating Effort and Demographic Strategies

Summary

Mating Effort as Demographic Strategies

Evolutionary ecology's separation of mating and parenting effort is to some extent based on classificatory ease. In reality, it is much more difficult to separate the two “efforts” of mating and parenting, particularly when parental strategies focus on the twin goals of keeping resources within a familial line as well as passing sufficient amounts of genetic material to ensure the perpetuation of that family line. In addition, whereas transmitting genetic material across generations is central to the very definition of evolutionary ecology, the material aspects referred to as “resources” seem far removed from the symbolic definition of culture stressed in the preceding chapter by both cultural and evolutionary anthropologists. In fact, many anthropologists make a clear distinction between the symbolic nature of culture and the economic necessities of making a living, exemplified by Hammel's (1995) analysis of historic Balkan fertility data that is wonderfully titled, “Economics 1, Culture 0.” Yet there clearly is a linkage, as cultural ideologies underlie and motivate economic behavior. Furthermore, ideologies vary between cultures with regard to the value of variation in emic, or internally constructed, cultural measures of success:

The Nuer value cattle and strive to increase the sizes of their herds, and a man with many cattle is judged successful. Tiwi men strive to acquire large numbers of wives, and, preferring a single quantitative measure of a man's success, measure it in terms of his wife list which includes all the living and deceased wives he has ever had, much as academics measure success in terms of the number of citations in an individual's bibliography.