where do clans come from?

in “Family Structure, Institutions, and Growth: The Origins and Implications of Western Corporations,” stanford economist avner greif wrote [pgs. 308-09]:

“There is a vast amount of literature that considers the importance of the family as an institution. Little attention, however, has been given to the impact of the family structure and its dynamics on institutions. This limits our ability to understand distinct institutional developments — and hence growth — in the past and present. This paper supports this argument by highlighting the importance of the European family structure in one of the most fundamental institutional changes in history and reflects on its growth-related implications.

“What constituted this change was the emergence of the economic and political corporations in late medieval Europe. Corporations are defined as consistent with their historical meaning: intentionally created, voluntary, interest-based, and self-governed permanent associations. Guilds, fraternities, universities, communes, and city-states are some of the corporations that have historically dominated Europe; businesses and professional associations, business corporations, universities, consumer groups, counties, republics, and democracies are examples of corporations in modern societies….

“In tracing the origins of the European corporations, we focus on their complementarity with the nuclear family. We present the reasons for the decline of kinship groups in medieval Europe and why the resulting nuclear family structure, along with other factors, led to corporations. European economic growth in the late medieval period was based on an unprecedented institutional complex of corporations and nuclear families, which, interestingly, still characterizes the West. More generally, European history suggests that this complex was conducive to long-term growth, although we know little about why this was the case or why it is difficult to transplant this complex to other societies….

“The conquest of the Western Roman Empire by Germanic tribes during the medieval period probably strengthened the importance of kinship groups in Europe. Yet the actions of the church caused the nuclear family — consisting of a husband and wife, children, and sometimes a handful of close relatives — to dominate Europe by the late medieval period.

“The medieval church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined kinship groups…. The church … restricted marriages among individuals of the same blood (consanguineous marriages), which had historically provided one means of creating and maintaining kinship groups….

“European family structures did not evolve monotonically toward the nuclear family, nor was their evolution geographically or socially uniform (Greif, 2006, chap. 8).** By the late medieval period, however, the nuclear family was dominant. Even among the Germanic tribes, by the eighth century the term ‘family’ denoted one’s immediate family and, shortly afterwards, tribes were no longer institutionally relevant. Thirteenth-century English court rolls reflect that even cousins were as likely to be in the presence of nonkin as with each other. The practices the church advocated (e.g., monogamy) are still the norm in Europe. Consanguineous marriages in contemporary Europe account for less than 1 percent of the total number of marriages, in contrast to Muslim and Middle Eastern countries where such marriages account for between 20 and 50 percent per country (Alan H. Bittles, 1994). Among the anthropologically defined 356 contemporary societies of Euro-Asia and Africa, there is a large and significant negative correlation between the spread of Christianity (for at least 500 years) and the absence of clans and lineages; the level of commercialization, class stratification, and state formation are insignificantly correlated (Andrey V. Korotayev, 2003).”
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the presence (or absence) of clans in societies is somehow connected to the mating patterns of societies. in fact, it seems to be that a whole range of kinship-based societal types is somehow connected to a whole range of mating patterns: the “closer” the mating patterns in a society, the more “clannish” it tends to be — the more distant the mating patterns, the less “clannish.”

so we see a spectrum of “clannish” societies ranging from the very individualistic western societies characterized by nuclear families and, crucially, very little inbreeding (cousin marriage, for instance) to very tribal arab or bedouin societies characterized by nested networks of extended families and clans and large tribal organizations and having very high levels of inbreeding (specifically a form of very close cousin marriage which increases the degree of inbreeding). falling somewhere in between these two extremes are groups like the chinese whose society is built mostly around the extended familiy but in some regions of china also clans — or the medieval scots (especially the highland scots) whose society for centuries was built around the clan (h*ck, they even coined the term!). these “in-betweener” groups are, or were, characterized by mid-levels of inbreeding (typically avoiding the very close cousin marriage form of the arabs).

furthermore, not only do the degrees of extended family-ness/clannish-ness/tribal-ness in societies seem to be connected to the degrees of inbreeding in those societies, the degrees of “clannism” also seem to be connected to the degree of inbreeding — the more inbreeding, the less civicness, the less democracy, the more corruption, and so on.

it’s not clear what exactly the mechanism(s) behind this inbreeding-leads-to-clannishness pattern is, but since mating patterns are involved, and mating is a very biological process, it seems likely (to me anyway) that the explanation is something biological — i.e. some sort or sorts of evolutionary process/es — like natural selection — resulting in different/different degrees of behavioral traits related to “clannism” in different populations with inbreeding acting as a sort of accelerant for those processes.

clans and clannism, then, are not things that peoples “fall back on” in the absence of a state as mark weiner suggests in The Rule of the Clan [kindle locations 106-108]:

“[I]n the absence of the state, or when states are weak, the individual becomes engulfed within the collective groups on which people must rely to advance their goals and vindicate their interests. Without the authority of the state, a host of discrete communal associations rush to fill the vacuum of power. And for most of human history, the primary such group has been the extended family, the clan.”

rather, people’s attachments to their extended families/clans/tribes — and, more importantly, their tendencies towards clannish behaviors — are likely innate behaviors. and those behaviors likely vary, on average, between populations since (long-term) mating patterns have varied — and, indeed, still vary — between populations.

such innate behaviors cannot be changed overnight — certainly not within a generation or even two (evolution does take some amount of time — but not, necessarily, extremely long amounts of time either) — and definitely not by simply changing a few laws here and there in the hopes of encouraging individualism. as avner greif grasped, although probably not fully because he’s likely missed the underlying biology of what he’s noticed, family structures need to be altered in order to effect changes to larger societal structures (again, all via tweaks to innate behavioral tendencies). and, again, that can’t be done overnight — as greif pointed out, the process in europe began in the early medieval period (with the church’s bans on cousin marriages) and didn’t really start to take hold until the late medieval period — i.e. a 500 year (or, conservatively, a ca. 25 generation) timeline.
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see also: Cousin Marriage Conundrum by steve sailer and Why Europe? by michael mitterauer (in particular chapter 3) and Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade by avner greif.

**see “mating patterns in europe series” in left-hand column below ↓ for further details.

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the zadruga

at the beginning of the year, i wrote a post about mating patterns in eastern europe in which i mentioned the zadruga as being a general slavic family form. szopeno took exception to that — and he was right!

i’ve done some more reading about eastern european — in particular balkan — family types, and, as far as i can tell, the only consensus amongst historians and social scientists wrt the extreme extended family form known as the zadruga is that there is noooo consensus about the zadruga. it is (or was) a family form amongst southern slavs — i.e. not all slavs — but also amongst other balkan peoples like the vlachs as well. the zadruga apparently wasn’t found everywhere in the balkans or at all times — but here’s something interesting from Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism in the Balkans (2009) [pg. 149]:

“Zadruga is the popular term used to describe the complex (exteded and multiple) family. The term itself is quite recent, its institutionalized usage dating from the nineteenth century. There is a long-standing historiographical discussion on almost all aspects of the zadruga, its status, origins and function. For a long time a ‘nativist’ historical approach, cogently supported by ethnographic and folklore studies, treated the zadruga as a perennial phenomenon (dating from the Middle Ages) and pertaining specifically to Slavic and Balkan civilization. Most recent scholarship has heavily contested not only the ‘from time immemorial thesis,’ but also the ‘all Balkan’ and the ‘specifically Slavic’ thesis. Zadruga zones in the nineteenth-century Balkans were unevenly distributed, showing a concentration in the mountainous stockbreeding area between the valleys of the Sava and Morava, the northwestern part of the Balkan range, that is, the mountainous territories between Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and the Rhodope, the tribal regions of Montenegro and Northern Albania, while valley belts were present in the military frontier of Croatia, Slavonia and Vojvodina, some valley of Serbia, Western and Central Albania, Southern Macedonia and Southern Albania. The presence of the zadruga thus can be evidenced only for some Balkan territories, and not all exclusively Slavic (ex. Albania or Southern Hungary). In Bulgaria it was concentrated in the most western part of the country, it was almost completely absent from Romania and Greece.”

ah ha! so we’re back to (possibly/probably inbreeding) uplanders being clannish or tribalistic.

here’s an extended excerpt from Household and Family in the Balkans: Two Decades of Historical Family Research at University of Graz (2012) [pgs. 50-51 -- links inserted by me]:

“Both the Balkan joint family [i.e. the zadruga] and the patrilineage emerged first as results of pastoral economies and the patriarchal influence of Illyrian cultural legacy. (In part, the comparable culture of the Central Balkans is an autonomous development.) After the Roman conquest of the Illyrian lands these features were preserved by Albanian and Vlach nomads. They were later joined by Slavic groups who followed them into the uplands. What we have here is a phenomenon within limits of an adaptive strategy based on both ecological factors and predatroy expansion.

“The idea of a relationship between pastoralism and the existence of both the joint family household and the patrilineage is not new. [no, it is not. - h.chick] Todorova describes the highest concentration of joint family households in Western Bulgaria in regions with a large area of meadows and a developed pastoral economy (Todorova 1990: 18-19). Earlier, Mosely stated that, in general, the joint family had shown a greater viability in the mountainous regions of the Balkans than in the plains (Mosely 1976a: 31). Filipovic notes, the ‘appearance and persistence of the zadruga as an institution originated in connection with livestock herding’ (Filipovic 1976: 273). While Mitterauer states that the distribution of the joint family households is basically confined to mountainous, remote regions where a money economy and forms of wage work played a lesser role, he also suggests that a pastoral economy might have promoted the emergence of complex family structures (Mitterauer 1980: 67-69).

“The Ottoman conquest of the Balkans from the 14th to the 16th centuries was generally accompanied by massive migrations of the Balkan people in a variety of directions. Reconstruction of the migration movements is difficult, but the main direction was from south to north following the pattern of conquest. Pastoralists or semi-pastoralists, recently settled, rediscovered their former survival strategies. The mountain regions became repopulated (Cvijic 1922: 127-181). Generally, the Ottoman administration did not absorb the mountain dwellers…”

so, no state to put a damper on violent behaviors.

“…and so they independently developed appropriate social structures and concomitant survival strategies based on the patrilineage and patriarchal joint family.

“The joint family, like the lineage of which it was a part, was never static but underwent fissioning following the dynamics of the life course and family cycles. The tribal lineages constructed of these joint families were reinforced by their focus on shared sentiment and ritual. Thus the Balkan joint family became the basic unit for patrilineal tribal lineages that developed from the 14th centrury onward….”

the opposite process, really, of what happened in medieval nw europe.

“…This system was flexible enough to adapt to the bilaterally based kindred of Vlachs and Sarakatsans. [remember that the pre-christian germans -- including the anglo-saxons -- reckoned their kinship bilaterally as well. -- h.chick] At the same time, this plasticity enabled the individual household to create cyclical alternations of nuclear and joint family households depending on fertility, fission and fusion (Halpern & Anderson 1970: 83-97). In this way these units also functioned for settled agriculturalists….”

this reminds me of the settled farmers of pakistan and afghanistan who adopted the arab mating pattern of father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage — a practice which grew out of the arab (or levantine) pastoralist traditions, but which was exported — along with (i think) all the related tribalistic sentiments which (i also think) develop, in part, because of the inbreeding — by the arabs to south asia when they invaded the region. i’m also reminded of the upland “auvergnat pashtuns” of france.

“…What characterized patriarchal Balkan social structure, as the pioneering works of Cvijic illustrated, was the constant interrelationship between becoming settled farmers and/or pastoralists. Until the 19th century this was a reversible process. This ended with the spread of industrialization, urbanization, and the modern states. It is thus much more logical to assign the origin of the Balkan joint family to the goat- and sheep-keeping families of the mountains that to see it as a result of conditions in the plains. But the fact is that many joint families resided in the valleys and plains.

“How then did patriarchal joint family and patrilineage emerge in the plains? For centuries pastoral families of the mountainous regions migrated into the plains where they settled. In the generally chaotic situation caused by the Ottoman conquest not only did Slavic families flee to the mountains, but others, especially those of the Vlachs, left their mountainous homelands and settled in Ottoman-occupied territories. The valleys of Serbia, Bosnia, and, especially along the borders between the Ottoman and the Habsburg empires, were favoured sites.“

hmmmm. time to google for a good map….

previously: mating patterns in medieval eastern europe and balkan endogamy and more on albanians and the flatlanders vs. the mountain people

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theories

so i think the connection between inbreeding (or outbreeding) and the evolution of the “innate social aptitudes of man” [pdf] works something like this:

inbreeding in and of itself does not change the frequency of genes (alleles) in a population [pg. 65], but it does move them around, concentrating them in certain family lines.

if, then, some sort of genetic mutation arises in one family line which, let’s say for the sake of argument, results in the carriers somehow behaving more altruistically towards their fellow family members than strangers, and this results in them being able to increase their inclusive fitness, then that genetic mutation will be selected for.

it will really be selected for (i.e. the selection rate will be accelerated) because of the inbreeding because: 1) since the inbred family will have greater than average numbers of this “altruism gene” because it is inbreeding, its members will likely execute a greater total number of altruistic behaviors towards one another and, so, they will really benefit fitness-wise from this new gene. also, 2) perhaps — perhaps — all else being equal, the inbred family members will feel even more strongly altruistic towards their fellow family members than an outbred family would since they are so much more genetically similar to their family members. to be honest with you, i’m not so sure about that second proposition, so i’m just going to skip it for now and focus on the first one.

wrt the first proposition, that the rate of selection of “genes for altruism” is faster in an inbreeding population is exactly what wade and breden found when they ran some models — the more inbreeding, the more rapid the selection of the altruism genes:

you can imagine why.

if you have a bunch of different families in a population, and one of those families possesses some sort of “familial altruism” gene which means that its members help each other out (or whatever) more than the members of the other families do, and this increases the fitness of a majority of this special family’s members, then they are simply going to be more successful than the other families. they’ll leave more descendants behind and, thus, more of those genes behind. IN ADDITION, if this successful family ALSO inbreeds, each of its members is much more likely to have at least one, or even two, copies of this familial altruism gene, so more members of this successful family will be even more altruistic to each other and voilà! — they’ll increase their fitness and success even more than they would have done without the inbreeding.

these familial altruism genes — genes that lead to behaviors in which individuals somehow favor their own family members over non-family members — and by family members i mean extended-family members — are only going to arise, of course, in a population in which there is more than one family. if you’ve got some tiny band somewhere that has absolutely no contact with any other group (doubt that’s ever existed), then my evolutionary scenario simply won’t happen. it’s the competition between the individuals from the different families that is driving this.

naturally, genes in any population — even an inbreeding one — won’t remain restricted to any one family for very long. no family anywhere inbreeds 100% exclusively, so if some successful familial altruism genes do arise in some inbreeding family somewhere, they will quickly spread to the other families in that population. thus, there is probably an ongoing familial altruism genetic arms race in inbreeding populations.

also, i think fewer familial altruism genes — or not such strong ones, perhaps — are going to arise in a comparatively outbreeding population. the accelerated selection due to the inbreeding won’t be there, nor will this arms race to keep one step ahead of the joneses when it comes to familial altruism. additionally, i think that in an outbreeding population, there’ll be greater selection pressures than in an inbreeding population for “reciprocal altruism” genes — i.e. genes which lead people to be willing to cooperate more with non-family members — since more of those sorts of behaviors will likely be required to be successful in life.
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so what do these “familial altruism” genes look like?

i dunno.

maybe there are differences in oxytocin-related genes? — the luuuuv hormone that “turns out to be the hormone of the clan.”

or — ya’ll know that i’m kinda fascinated by interclan fighting which is the flip-side of being nice to your family (i.e. be extra un-nice to your non-family) — so maybe one familial altruism gene is the “warrior gene” (MAO-A gene)? dunno.

one that i speculated about before is CYP21A2, the gene connected to congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), a recessive genetic condition which affects the production cortisol which, in turn, affects the production of androgens (like testosterone) — notably, in the most common form of CAH, androgen levels are increased. the condition is a recessive one, so you need to have two copies of the deleterious allele to have the condition, but as i mentioned in my previous post on CAH, carriers with one copy of the allele have been found to have excess androgens — and androgens have been connected to aggression. (also, children with CAH have been found to have smaller amygdalae, so … they’re less fearful? don’t know if this also holds true for adults with CAH.)

increased aggression? fighting at the drop of a hat? interclan fighting? see where i’m going with this?

the interesting thing is — at least i think it’s interesting — is that there are different frequencies of CAH found in different populations. what we’d really want to know, of course, are the gene frequencies for CAH for different populations, but in lieu of those … here are some incidence rates of classical CAH in different populations [numbers acquired from or via here and here]:

1:282 – Yupik Eskimos, Alaska
1:2,141 – La Reunion
1:4,081 – Western Australia Aborigines
1:5,000 – GLOBAL
1:5,000-7,000 – Moroccan Jews
1:5,041 – Zurich, Switzerland
1:7,000 – Kuwait
1:10,866 – France (Whites)
1:10,866 – Italy (Whites)
1:11,500 – Sweden
1:11,764 – Netherlands
1:14,300 – Hungary
1:14,403 – Croatia
1:14,500-23,344 – New Zealand
1:14,869 – Western Australia
1:15,518 – Emilia-Romagna, Italy (Whites)
1:15,800-18,000 – Japan
1:17,098 – Scotland
1:19,939 – Minas Gerais, Brazil
1:20,000 – Norway

i dunno, but i see — maybe — the more inbred clannish fighters (yupik eskimos, moroccan jews, kuwaitis) having more cases of CAH than the more outbred peaceniks (new zealanders, norwegians, even northern italians). also…

- “The Texas data indicate a lower disease frequency in African-Americans when compared with Caucasians, and international data indicate higher frequencies in native Yupik Eskimos, Brazilians, residents of La Reunion, and Filipinos.” [source]

- “The prevalence of the disease [non-classical CAH] in Ashkenazi Jews was 3.7%; in Hispanics, 1.9%; in Yugoslavs, 1.6%; in Italians, 0.3%; and in the diverse Caucasian population, 0.1%.” [source] (non-classical CAH refers to a less severe form of CAH which might not get noticed until adulthood when it expresses itself in features like a woman having, perhaps, a bit too much facial hair.)

again, what we’d really want to know are the gene frequencies for CAH in different populations. then the über-human savants that we call population geneticists could do their math wizardry to see if these genes were under positive selection or not (zey hav vays av mayking ze data talk). (another interesting thing, btw, is that there are many different mutations in this gene which cause a range of CAH conditions from mild to severe — and different mutations are more common in different populations — see here and here and here for instance.)

of course, maybe these mutations in CYP21A2 aren’t being selected for for increased aggression/upside-down familial altruism. maybe it’s something else. witchel, et al., found that heterozygotes for mutated CYP21A2 alleles (i.e. individuals with just one copy of the cr*ppy gene) had increased cortisol levels and cortisol is, apparently, important for the immune system, so maybe these mutants simply survive infections better. others have found a possible connection between higher iq and CAH (masculinization = higher iq?) — see here and here and here — so maybe that’s it.

or maybe these genes are not being selected for at all. however, fertility rates of people (women) with CAH are low, so it seems like a strange bunch of genes to have around if they don’t have some sort of benefit.

previously: inbreeding and the evolution of altruistic behavior and looking for altruism genes and visions of altruism genes

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familism, justifiability of divorce, and corruption

following up from the last post on familism and corruption (familism, respect for parents, and corruption), here is the second element in lipset & lenz’s “familism index”: “the percentage of people [responding on the world values survey] who think that divorce is unjustifiable.” i looked at the 1999-2002 world values survey wave. the relevant question is:

“Please tell me for each of the following statements whether you think it can always be justified, never be justified, or something in between: Divorce.”

i took the “Never justifiable” responses and plotted them against the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index results — and got a correlation of -0.58. not as high a correlation as between “respect for parents” and corruption (-0.72), but still pretty high. so the more you feel that divorce is unjustifiable whatever the circumstances, the more corrupt you’re likely to be (click on chart for LARGER view):

here’s the data table for the above chart sorted by the “Never justifiable” responses (highest to lowest). i’ve got the fbd marriage groups (the arabs & co.) in red, and the european groups that i think have been outbreeding for the longest (netherlands, germany, great britain, belgium and france) in blue (click on table for LARGER view):

again, italians and the irish in ireland more familistic on this scale than the people in great britain. and mexicans MUCH more so.

previously: familism, respect for parents, and corruption and familism in the u.s. of a. and anglo-american vs. mexican family values and hispanic family values and familism and facebook

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familism, respect for parents, and corruption

m.g. points out (thanks, m.g.!) that in “Corruption, Culture, and Markets,” lipset & lenz worked up a “familism index.” unfortunately, they don’t seem to have published it anywhere — at least not that m.g. or i can find. they do describe it in the above mentioned chapter, though, along with a terrific summary of familism and its related … problems. here is a longish quote from them [pgs. 119-120 - links and emphases added by me]:

“Amoral Familism

“The second major cultural framework, one derived from Plato via Banfield, assumes that corruption is in large part an expression of particularism — the felt obligation to help, to give resources to persons to whom one has a personal obligation, to the family above all but also to friends and membership groups. Nepotism is its most visible expression. Loyalty is a particularistic obligation that was very strong in precapitalist, feudal societies. As Weber implied, loyalty and the market are antithetical. The opposite of particularism is universalism, the commitment to treat others according to a similar standard. Market norms express universalism; hence, pure capitalism exhibits and is sustained by such values.

“Plato contended two and a half millennia ago that family ties, especially those between parents and children, are the chief forces underlying institutionalized social classes and ascription. He argued that to create an egalitarian society, a communist one, such ties — the family itself — would have to be eliminated. Children would have to be reared from birth in public institutions, not knowing their parents. Plato, of course, could not have believed that a society without parental ties was viable, but his discussion points up the social power he attached to the family.

“In trying to understand capitalism’s initial rise in Protestant cultures, Weber noted that the pre-industrial norms in Catholic societies were communitarian, requiring above all that the society, the family, and the dominant strata help the less fortunate. He believed that these vales worked against the emergence of a rationally driven market economy. Conversely, a stress on individualism, concern for self, is more conducive to capital accumulation. Calvinism and Protestant sectarianism fostered such behavior. Sectarians believe that God helps those who help themselves. Weber pointed out that ‘the great achievement of … the ethical and ascetic sects of Protestantism was to shatter the fetters of the sib [the extended family].’ As Lawrence Harrison notes, ‘There is evidence that the extended family is an effective institution for survival but an obstacle to development.’ Solidarity with the extended family and hostility to the outsider who is not a member of family, the village, or perhaps the tribe can produce a self-interested culture.

“Edward Banfield, studying southern Italy, carried the analysis further with the concept of ‘amoral familism’: a culture that is deficient in communitarian values but fosters familial ties. He writes: ‘In a society of amoral familists, no one will further the interest of the group or community except as it is to his private advantage to do so.’ There is little loyalty to the larger community or acceptance of behavioral norms that require support of others. Hence, familism is amoral, gives rise to corruption, and fosters deviance from norms of universalism and merit. Anything goes that advance the interests of one’s self and family. The Mafia is an extreme example of amoral familism. Banfield, in effect, argues that corruption in southern Italy and comparable traditional societies is an expression of forces similar to those that sustain the Mafia.

“The World Values Survey 1990, together with aggregate statistics from the World Bank, provide data that we employ to create a scale of familism. The first item in the scale deals with unqualified respect for parents, measured by the percentage of people who agreed that regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, a person must always love and respect them. The second item is the percentage of people who think that divorce is unjustifiable. The third, from the World Bank, is the mean number of children per woman.

“Those nations that score high on this scale tend to be among the more corrupt. Known for their strong familial ties, most Asian nations rank among the more corrupt. On the other hand, Scandinavians are by far the lowest on the familism scale — as noted, these countries are considered the least corrupt. Regression analysis affirms the association. The familism scale and CPI relate strongly. The relationship remains significant when controlling for per capita income. A model that includes the familism scale, the achievement scale, and purchasing power parity explains a great deal of the variation in the CPI.”
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i don’t think that what we’re witnessing here — the differences between particularistic and universalistic societies — is a cultural phenomenon. i’m sure that cultural practices reinforce the behaviors that you find in these two types of societies, but what i think we’re looking at are innate behavioral tendencies that differ between these different population types due, in part, to their mating patterns histories. it’s partly mating patterns (inbreeding or outbreeding) and partly selection for which of these sets of behavioral traits worked in the various populations’ evolutionary histories (the two things are connected, i think).

lots of inbreeding over the course of many, many generations alters the relatedness between family members which, in turn, can eventually — via a little evolutionary magic — affect how altruistic these family members wind up being towards one another and/or towards unrelated individuals. so the english and other nw europeans, with their (comparatively) long history of (comparatively strong) outbreeding (see mating patterns in europe series below ↓ in left-hand column), tend towards universalism, lack of familism, low levels of corruption, high levels of civicness and liberal democracy. at the opposite end of the spectrum, arabs and other middle eastern/maghrebian/mashriqian/south asian muslims with their (comparatively) long history of (comparatively strong) inbreeding (see also here), tend towards particularlism, strong familism, high levels of corruption, low levels of civicness and difficulties with liberal democracy.

familism, then, i think — although interesting in and of itself — is a symptom of a set of underlying innate behavioral traits, namely those connected to familial altruism. the more “genes for familial altruism” (whatever they might be) your population possesses, the less universalistic, etc., etc., it is going to be — and vice versa. familism reflects another aspect of human biodiversity, and is not just an example human cultural diversity.

(sorry if i sound like a broken record, but there’ve been some new folks stopping by here lately — hi, new folks! — and i thought they might appreciate a crash course on The Theory.)
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so, lipset & lenz hinted around at a familism index that they had devised, but not published anywhere(?), so i thought i’d try to reconstruct it as best as i could. the first element in their index is “unqualified respect for parents, measured by the percentage of people who agreed [on the world values survey] that regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, a person must always love and respect them”. lipset & lenz looked at the world values survey for 1990 — i looked at a more recent wave: 1999-2002. the question is:

With which of these two statements do you tend to agree?:
A. Regardless of what the qualities and faults of one’s parents are, one must always love and respect them.
B. One does not have the duty to respect and love parents who have not earned it by their behaviour and attitudes.

i took the “A. Always” responses and plotted them against the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index results — and got a correlation of -0.72 (so the more you feel you should always love/respect your parents no matter how horrible they are, the more corrupt you’re likely to be – click on chart for LARGER view):

here’s the data table for the above chart sorted by the “Always” responses (highest to lowest). i’ve got the fbd marriage groups (the arabs & co.) in red, and the european groups that i think have been outbreeding for the longest (netherlands, germany, great britain, belgium and france — there might be a few more that need to be included — like the swedes?) in blue (click on table for LARGER view):

note that the italians exhibit much more familism (79.40%) on this scale than the population of great britain (65.10%) and are also more corrupt (3.9 on the cpi versus 7.8 for the british). this appears to support what i found in my familism in the u.s. of a. post the other day — that italian-americans are more familistic than anglo-americans. (see this post for some recent history on inbreeding in italy.)

similarly, the irish (in ireland) respect their parents no matter what more than the british (71.90% vs. 65.10%), but they’re not at all as corrupt as the italians (7.5 on the cpi). and the roman catholic irish in the u.s. are more familistic than anglo-americans. (see this post for a brief history of inbreeding/mating patterns in ireland.)

and mexicans! 90.20% said they’d respect their parents no matter what. 3.0 on the cpi. and very familistic in the u.s. (see this post for a little info on the history of inbreeding/mating patterns in part of mexico.)

these, i think, are innate, not just learned, feelings (reinforced by cultural practices, i’m sure), and they’re not going to change anytime soon as shown by the fact that italian- and irish-americans are still very familistic despite living amongst the anglo-americans for several generations now.

previously: familism in the u.s. of a. and anglo-american vs. mexican family values and hispanic family values and familism and facebook
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edit - see this comment below for explanation:

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familism and facebook

vasilis asked a good set of questions the other day:

“I wonder, doesn’t immigration break apart the extended family into nuclear family fragments? Does anyone actually bring along all 52 first cousins with them, along with spouses, children, parents etc? Of course ‘familismo’ values will be carried over the border, but to what degree can they be instilled in the next generation in the absence of all these people in their daily lives?”

now that i’ve thought about it a bit, though, i wonder if the picture he paints isn’t one that was more true of 20+ years ago than it is today in our über-connected world. i mean, i can follow in real time how my 12 year-old first cousin-once-removed’s gymnastics competition is going — or commiserate with her on how horrible her school lunch was today — and she lives in a different country! i can keep in touch with her and her brother and all my other cousins’ kids in a way i couldn’t do with their parents. back in the day, it was the odd phone call and even (omg) letters. now it’s email, facebook and txt messaging. instant gratification for the familist! (~_^)

and anyway, we’ve seen that both italian-americans and r.c. irish-americans are more familistic than anglo-americans, and … how long have they been in the country now? how long does this assimilation business take anyway?

assmiliation? pshaw. here from “Who is to blame for fractured Britain?” published last year in the telegraph:

“What ruined our community and the personality of our neighbourhood were the young Eastern Europeans who poured in from 2004 onwards. I am not criticising the character of these young migrants. They were generally hardworking, eager and ambitious. But they arrived all at once in large numbers and, most significantly, had zero interest in integrating. They lived and socialised exclusively together, watched Polish television channels via their satellite dishes, chatted to family back home for free on Skype, set up Polish shops to sell Polish food, newspapers and books, and they learnt only as much English as they had to. Seeing shop after little shop put up the words Polski sklep marked the end of the village I knew.”

mexicans in the u.s. don’t even need satellite television. they’ve got univision which is available on cable. any idiota can hook it up. i don’t know how much mexicans/hispanics in the u.s. use facebook, or if they’re all still on myspace, but they’ve (nearly) all got cellphones afaict and, i’m sure, can txt pretty easily to family members back home in mexico/wherever.

nope. i have a bad feeling that modern communications — not to mention the ease of travel nowadays — prolly lends itself to greater opportunities for immigrants to practice familism if they want than ever before. i know i can.

previously: hispanic family values and anglo-american vs. mexican family values and familism in the u.s. of a.

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familism in the u.s. of a.

following up from yesterday’s post, i thought i’d look at familism in some other ethnic groups in the u.s. in addition to the anglos and mexicans.

again, i’m looking at how much contact the individuals from different groups have with family members. this is a way of measuring “behavioral familism” — familism “expressed in everyday actions, or major decisions, informed by one’s attachment to family ties”. this time i stuck to just extended-family members (aunt/uncles, nieces/nephews, cousins) ’cause i thought that might be more telling — if you’re in regular contact … a LOT … with these more distant relatives, you’re probably familistic. that’s my thinking, anyway.

looked at the following questions from the 2002 general social survey:

- “How often do you contact your uncles/aunts?”
- “How often do you contact your nieces/nephews?”
- “How often do you contact your cousin(s)?”

the possible answers were:

- “More than twice in last 4 weeks.”
- “Once or twice in last 4 weeks.”
- “Not at all in last 4 weeks.”
- “I have no living relative of this type.”

i’ve collapsed the first two together to make the responses sorta “yes” or “no” (contacted x in the last 4 weeks). i also skipping the “no living relative” answer. if you’re dying to see all data, i can post it.

the variables chosen were: COUNTRY OF FAMILY ORIGIN, HOW OFTEN DOES R CONTACT UNCLES OR AUNTS, HOW OFTEN DOES R CONTACT NIECES AND NEPHEWS, HOW OFTEN DOES R CONTACT COUSIN, and for the irish RELIGION IN WHICH RAISED to try to distinguish the scotch-irish from roman catholic irish. none of it is perfect, i know, but you gotta work with whatcha got.

the countries with a good-sized data set (n≧50) were: england & wales (the “anglos” – n=96), italy (n=53-54), scotch-irish (protestant irish – n=51), and germany (n=150). the mexicans (n=32) and irish catholics (n=42-43) came up a little short, but i’ve included them anyway. keep in mind that the numbers for those two groups are kinda low.

without further ado (click on charts for LARGER views)…

“How often do you contact your uncles/aunts?”

“How often do you contact your nieces/nephews?”

“How often do you contact your cousin(s)?”

as you can see, in each of the three categories, all of the other groups are in contact with their distant-ish relatives more than the anglos — except for the scotch-irish who appear to behave the most like the anglos here. mexicans are much more likely to keep in regular contact with their aunts/uncles or nieces/nephews than anglo-americans (53% vs. 32% and 75% vs. 48% respectively), but italian-americans are also much more likely to keep in touch with their aunts/uncles on a monthly basis (47%). the roman catholic irish, too, more familistic than anglo-americans — and even german-americans, except for the keeping-in-touch-with-nieces/nephews category, appear to be more familistic than anglo-americans.

so much for assimilation.

remember that familism goes hand-in-hand with fun things like corruption.

i also think it’s kinda neat to see that the familism goes more in the direction of the genetic flow than not: greater contact by aunts/uncles to nieces/nephews than the reverse, for instance. cool.

previously: anglo-american vs. mexican family values

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anglo-american vs. mexican family values

one of the ways to measure familism — behavioral familism (familism “expressed in everyday actions, or major decisions, informed by one’s attachment to family ties”) — is to find out how much contact the individuals in a given population have with their various family members: brothers, sisters, aunt, uncles, cousins, etc.

so i checked out the 2002 general social survey in which they asked questions like…

how often do you contact your cousin?”

…for the results for people whose family origins came from england or wales (“anglo-americans”) and from mexico. (i dunno how “anglo” some people from wales are, but what can an hbd chick do? gotta work with the data available.) obviously there’s no time depth here: the people with family origins from england — well, their families might’ve come over on the mayflower, or the gss people could’ve been interviewing the derb for all i know! same goes for the mexicans — could be recent immigrants, or fourth generation mexican-americans in new mexico.

unfortunately, the sample sizes for mexicans are on the small side — n=27-32 — so … grain of salt! the numbers for anglo-americans are better: n=80-96. here are the results (blue=anglos, orange=mexicans — click on charts for LARGER views):

Consider your favorite brother or sister – how often do you visit this brother or sister?

on the whole, mexicans are more likely to have more frequent person-to-person contact with their favorite sibling than anglo-americans, although the “daily” score is pretty close. no anglo-americans said that they lived with their favorite sibling, whereas 10% of mexicans in the u.s. said so.

Consider your favorite brother or sister – how often do you contact this brother or sister via telephone or letter? (remember: this is 2002.)

again, the general pattern seems to be more frequent telephone calls/correspondence between mexicans and their favorite sibling than with anglo-americans and theirs. twice as many mexicans responded “less often” than anglo-americans, but maybe ’cause that’s ’cause they actually see their favorite sibling so often. -?-

this pattern of mexicans having more contact with their family members than anglos becomes more pronounced/clearer to see with the more distant family members…

“How often do you contact your uncles/aunts?”

“How often do you contact your nieces/nephews?”

“How often do you contact your cousin(s)?”

now i’m curious to check out other ethnic groups…. (^_^)

previously: hispanic family values

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