I’ll be giving the following talk in the Bristol Archaeology and Anthropology Research Seminar on February 8th 2012.
To the Manor Born? The cultural evolution of land tenure, residence and labour in Austronesian societies.
Cross-cultural differences in norms of land tenure may reflect both individual and population-level adaptations to ecological and social factors. A complex interplay is likely to exist between kinship practices such postmarital residence and descent, the type and division of subsistence-related labour, and the form of land ownership. Here I present work from a number of comparative studies in which we have used phylogenetic and simulation methods to disentangle the (co)evolution of these factors in the Austronesian-speaking societies of the Pacific. This framework allows us to practice “virtual archaeology” to infer past states of social norms, and to test adaptive hypotheses derived from behavioural ecology and anthropology about both the coevolution of kinship and subsistence labour, and land tenure and kinship. More broadly, I hope to demonstrate how these approaches can bring together social anthropology, population prehistory, and evolutionary theory in a new cross-cultural anthropology.
Link and info here.
Really interesting approach! I would have liked to attend. Apart from Ruth Mace’s work and a really recent paper by Thomas E. Currie, what readings would you recommend, especially regarding land tenure and labor ?