A key attribute of a society is the rules which designate who can marry whom. The Natchez, a sedentary tribe of agriculturalists living along the lower Mississippi, were visited by Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz, a Dutchman who ran one of the French concessions at Natchez from ca. 1720-28 and wrote a three-volume Histoire de la Louisiane in 1758, containing almost all the evidence on Natchez kinship subsequently used by scholars. [Thanks to Patricia Kay Galloway of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, for this information.]
Although the discipline of Anthropology was then unknown, the visitor made systematic observations about the activities and governance of the tribe, one key set of which are set out below.
The Natchez had four groups: in order of increasing prestige they are Stinkards (St=400 persons), Honoreds (H=200), Nobles (N=200), and Suns (S=100). (Total of 900 persons in the tribe.) Marriages were permitted among persons from only certain combinations of groups. The table below shows the permitted marriage combinations, with the initial of the children's group membership.
Dad
S N H St
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|
S | S
|
|
Mom N | N
|
H | H
|
|
St | N H St
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Can you speculate about the social significance of these rules and possible
adaptations which the Natchez might make?
There are some obvious but radical "fixes." We could ask the Natchez to adopt a caste system: then S mom + S dad -> 2 S kids; N mom + N dad -> 2 N kids, etc.
A less radical adaptation might be to add one more permissible marriage. Still less radical might be to change the group membership of the offspring of one marriage. What do you propose?
This is an interesting problem because some of the Natchez have a choice of marriage partners.
Let's assume (for simplicity: the result is qualitatively unchanged if we drop this assumption) that each Natchez Mom+Dad produce two children, one boy and one girl. Further, let's assume that all marriages occur at the same time, and that all children are born at the same time one generation later. Finally, let's assume that there is no immigration and no emigration, and all Natchez choose to marry.
After one generation, what happens?
Let's assume that women choose first (it is, after all, a matrilineal society) and that Stinkards choose mates last. Then we get the distribution in generation 1 of
In 1993, Ms Tracy Harbin proposed this solution.
What do the statics of the Natchez Indians have to do -- in the abstract -- with Lenin's description of the statics of capitalist economy? How about its abstract relations with Realists' theory of Balance of Power?
Suppose that you are presented with a coherent set of knowledge claims of the sort that we have been calling a theory of some aspect of international relations. If these claims are such that it is NOT possible to deduce comparative statics, of what uses is this theory?
What sort of information are we offered above? We learn that marriage rules. We "inherit" our prior knowledge about human reproduction. We make some simplifying assumptions about the order in which Natchez can select mates. (But the qualitative result: Natchez population -> 0 holds even if we relax these.)
The marriage rules capture one feature of Natchez society at a particular time: they "transform" adults into future adults. Such information is called synchronic. From this synchronic information and a starting population, we can deduce the population at all future times: in other words, we derive the comparative statics of Natchez population. (If we relaxed the assumption that all Natchez marry and breed at once, then we could derive dynamics of Natchez population.) If -- it's a big "if" -- we have sufficient additional information, we might claim to infer some structural changes in Natchez society, e.g., change in the marriage rules in order to prevent the tribe from going extinct. We call that inference diachronic.
Realists who commit to the permanence of the state system, who argue the superiority of power politics to advance the national interest of each state, plus a version of balance of power that hesitates to eliminate "essential actors," tend to conclude that no diachronic change of the international system will occur.
Marxists who argue that class conflict is unavoidable, that progressive replacement of human (variable) capital with machines (fixed capital) is essential in capitalist competition, and that the economy is closed -- specifically, that no "import" of surplus value from outside the economy is possible -- conclude that diachronic change is inevitable, that is, capitalism must collapse. (Note that Lenin "opened" the closed Marxian economies, but superimposed a process of unavoidable competition among distinct monopolist capitalist empires which eventually must collapse (as a result of the Marxian dynamics) because the world as a whole becomes a "closed" economy. Of course, a revolutionary party might terminate the capitalist system, but theoretically it is not essential.
Explaining -- and, where possible, predicting -- diachronic change in international affairs is the BIG OBJECTIVE.