the hajnal line

from wikip:

“The Hajnal line links Saint Petersburg, Russia and Trieste, Italy. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered it divides Europe into two areas characterized by a different levels of nuptiality.

“West of this line, the average age of women at first marriage was 24 or more, men 26, spouses were relatively close in age, and 10% or more of adults never married. East of the line, the mean age of both sexes at marriage was earlier, spousal age disparity was greater and marriage more nearly universal. Subsequent research has amply confirmed Hajnal’s continental divide, and what has come to be known as the ‘Western European marriage pattern’, although historical demographers have also noted that there are significant variations within the region….”

here it is. the caption on wikipedia reads: “The line in red is Hajnal’s. The dark blue lines show areas of high nuptiality West of the Hajnal line.”

so, basically, we’re talking about germanic peoples (west of the line).

michael mitterauer offers several explanations for the characteristics of marriage east of the line including:

“e) Influences of the church

“As a rule, Christianity helped to weaken bonds of lineage and descent and strengthen the relations between spouses everywhere. Not everywhere, however, did these principles succeed to the same extent. The penetration of principles of church marriage laws was generally stronger in the area of the Western than in that of the eastern church. Also corporative and communal social forms supported by the church were stronger in the West. Consequently, patrilinear kinship structures were less affected in the area of the orthodox church than in the West. In the long run, however, also in the East Christian principles worked against structures of lineage and descent. Patrilinear patterns totally in contradiction to church marriage law, such as levirate marriages or second marriage in case of a childless first marriage, were maintained in areas of weak church influence in eastern and southeastern Europe.”

from “Whatever Happened to Hajnal’s Line”:

“Interestingly enough, Hajnal’s line followed quite closely the Iron Curtain, then dividing Europe into capitalist and socialist societies.”

this is one of emmanuel todd’s major points in “The Explanation of Ideology” — i.e. that almost all of the nations that became communist in the 20th century had a particular family structure based, amongst other things, on strong, patrilineal lineages. (i’m gonna write up a post on his book — soon. i promise!) i pointed out what looked like a connection between slavs and ex-communist countries here.

also from wikip:

“The region’s late marriage pattern has received considerable scholarly attention in part because it appears to be unique; it has not been found in any other part of the world prior to the Twentieth Century. The origins of the late marriage system are a matter of conjecture prior to the 16th Century when the demographic evidence from family reconstitution studies makes the prevalence of the pattern clear….“

interestingly, tacitus wrote about late marriage practices amongst the german tribes. it’s hard to tell, tho, if he was working from accurate information, or just reproaching his fellow romans for their morally loose marriage practices. here, from jack goody [pg. 39]:

“Marriages are not made early, for ‘the young men are slow to mate, and their powers, therefore, are never exhausted. The girls, too, are not hurried into marriage’. Was the ‘European pattern’ of late marriage (Hajnal 1965) already in evidence or was this too a figment of Tacitus’ moralising?”

in any case, delayed marriage for westerners (esp. western westerners) is not a new-fangled thing.

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what about the franks?

the franks — like the other germanic tribes — had been inbreeding before the arrival of christianity. here’s from “Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900” [pgs. 36-37]:

“Marriages between close blood relations and in-laws were also [along with marriages between freed persons and slaves] dissolved. Children issuing from these unions were marked with infamy and excluded from inheritance. In the beginning of the sixth century, kings were able to disregard incest laws with impunity, but by the end of the century they could no longer do so: the church took a firm stand on the issue. Theudebert of Austrasia, for example, had to perform penance for having married his brother’s widow.”

while st. augustine had struggled with the anglo-saxons in britain, it was st. boniface who struggled with the (practically heathen) franks [pg. 76]:

“The marital customs he observed among the Germanic tribes in general and among the Franks in particular troubled Boniface [ca. 672–754] deeply. He sought advice from popes on the definition of adultery and incest. Gregory II [early 700s] answered him with a series of prescriptions on incest, and Pope Zachary [mid-700s] sent Pepin excerpts from the ‘Dionysiana’ on impediements to marriage. The church’s concept of incest was so broad, extending the prohibitions to the seventh degree of consanguinity [i.e. sixth cousins — that was in the 11th century], as well as to relationships by affinity and spiritual kinship, that it considerably restricted the capacity of aristocratic families to form extended alliances through marriage. Introduced into the Frankish councils by Boniface, the prescriptions were included by Pepin the Younger in the capitularies….

“In an effort to eradicate all forms of incest, Boniface also concerned himself with extramarital fornication between relatives. Sexual intercourse before or after marriage with a relative of the spouse was held to constitute a bond of affinity similar to that arising from bethrothal, marriage, baptism, or confirmation. Disregard for these bonds of affinity or for consanguinity, even in the case of casual intercourse, was considered a serious offense and disqualified the transgressors from marriage for the rest of their lives. Their punishment was lifelong penance, to which Charlemagne added confiscation of their property.“

meanwhile, with the bretons (in brittany) [pg. 116]:

“The marital legislation of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious had little effect in Brittany, if we are to believe one of the court poets in Louis the Pious’s entourage. The poet accused the Bretons of being Christians in name only, of practicing incest — brothers sleep with sisters and rape their sisters-in-law. These were ancient customs that Carolingian legislation may have been less successful in eradicating in Brittany than in other parts of Gaul. Frankish influence, however, was not completely absent in Brittany; even after 841 it was exercised in areas where families of Frankish descent had settled, that is, in the dioceses of Rennes and Nantes.”

previously: more on inbreeding in germanic tribes

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most dangerous profession

anthropologist? graphic artist (see update below!):

PNG tribesman attacks New Zealander with arrows

“A tribesman in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea shot and badly wounded a young New Zealander with arrows and also attacked his terrified French girlfriend, an aid group said Wednesday.

“The pair were bathing in a river in the Nomad area of Papua New Guinea’s Western Province when the young man, an anthropologist who was working in the area, went to retrieve his towel and was hit by the arrows.

“‘There was an arrow in his ribs and one in his stomach,’ Delene Evans, the general manager of Australian Doctors International, whose volunteer medics helped save the man, told AFP.

“‘The attacker also hit him on the head with a rock….’

“They were treated by Sydney couple doctor Josette Docherty and her medic partner Allan Mason, who donated a unit of his own blood to the deathly pale victim, who had lost 1.5 litres of blood.

“In her report on the incident, Docherty said the three-hour emergency surgery revealed that one of the arrows had pierced through the man’s stomach and stopped just short of the aorta….

“Papua New Guinea faces extreme development challenges and some tribes hold to the traditional way of life, including the use of bows, arrows and spears.”

update 07/01: oh, wow. so, it seems like the guy who got shot with the arrows was not an anthropologist (he’s a graphic artist) — the anthropologist is his girlfriend who is doing her ph.d. research in png. a report in the u.k.’s daily mail says one of the local guys took a fancy to the (french) ph.d. student, even wanting to marry her, and so he tried to rape her. when her kiwi boyfriend stepped in to rescue her, the png guy shot him twice with arrows.

what a story for the grandkids! (~_^)

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americans prefer boys, too

i’ve had a couple of posts up recently about the gender imbalance issue in china and india because of sex selective abortions in those countries.

well, turns out that americans prefer boys, too — and they have done since at least 1941! from gallup:

Americans Prefer Boys to Girls, Just as They Did in 1941
“Men tend to want boys; women are divided in their gender preferences

“If Americans could have only one child, they would prefer that it be a boy rather than a girl, by a 40% to 28% margin, with the rest having no preference or no opinion on the matter. These attitudes are remarkably similar to what Gallup measured in 1941, when Americans preferred a boy to a girl by a 38% to 24% margin….”

so, the preference for a boy child doesn’t seem so culturally-based. in fact, it’s starting to sound kinda — you know — universal to me. (more data req.) the imperative to act on this preference, tho, doesn’t seem so strong in the states for whatever reason(s).

see also: Couples With Daughters More Likely to Divorce (oh noes!)

previously: india and china’s missing girls and mara hvistendahl is a… and mara hvistendahl responds to dawkins

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more on inbreeding in germanic tribes

(this is turning out to be one weeeird meta-topic for a blog, but … eh … what the hey!)

in “The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe,” jack goody is in agreement with giorgio ausenda that the german tribes had had endogamous marriage practices, including cousin marriage, before the arrival of christianity. (they also had a lot of other good stuff like polygamy and concubinage. oh those wacky germans!)

goody suggests that cross cousin marriage (mother’s brother’s daughter marriage, for instance) was probably a common form amongst the germans since it is the most common form of cousin marriage in general — but, like ausenda, he doesn’t rule out father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage as a possibility.

personally, i’m leaning towards the conclusion that fbd marriage was not so common amongst the germans since they had a bilateral kinship system — in other words, an individual would reckon his extended family on both his father’s and mother’s sides (like most westerners do today). in societies where fbd marriage is common — like arab countries — kinship systems tend to be unilateral, in particular patrilateral, i.e. the father’s lineage is the most important. on the other hand, ausenda showed that the father’s brothers were the most significant family members after one’s immediate family in germanic society, so maybe the germans did tend towards a patrilateral system. perhaps their most common cousin marriage was patrilateral cross cousin marriage, i.e. father’s sister’s daughter, tho and not fbd marriage. dunno.

ausenda looked at the early german law codes to see what he could infer about germanic marriage patterns and kinship systems; goody looked at some law codes (like those of the anglo-saxons in britain) plus some other primary and secondary sources like correspondence between the early church fathers and the venerable bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English Church and People” completed in 731 a.d.

here’s what goody had to say [pgs. 34-7]:

“Bede tells of some of the problems involved in converting the pagan English. He explains how after Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury, arrived in 597, he sent messengers back to Pope Gregory at Rome seeking advice on certain current questions, including ones relating to marriage….

“[T]he Letter of Gregory provides us with some very valuable evidence….

“Four of the nine questions on which Augustine asked advice from the Pope had to do with sex and marriage…. Augustine’s fifth question was more complicated and more revealing: ‘Within what degree may the faithful marry their kindred; and is it lawful for a man to marry a step-mother or a sister-in-law?’

“Pope Gregory’s reply clearly indicates the change that Christianity had brought to Rome and presumably to the other countries of western Europe. ‘A certain secular law in the Roman State allows that the son and daughter of a brother and sister, or of two brothers or two sisters may be married. But we have learned from experience that the offspring of such marriages cannot thrive. Sacred law forbids a man to uncover the nakedness of his kindred. Hence it is necessary that the faithful should only marry relations three or four times removed, while those twice removed must not marry in any case, as we have said….’

“Since a special dispensation had to be given to those who had contracted such unions before conversion, it is clear that the practices of close marriage (presumably to cross-cousins, and possibly, as in Rome, to parallel cousins, at least to the father’s brother’s daughter) and of marriage to the widow of the brother or father (though not one’s own mother) must have been common in English, and indeed German, society. But they are now forbidden, the arguments against them being framed partly in physical terms (the likelihood of infertility) and partly in religious ones (on grounds of incest…).”

further, on how the political powers-that-be were also in on the action (along with the church) — we already saw this in all the law codes that ausenda looked at [pgs. 39-40]:

“Yet marriage to any close kin was forbidden by the Church and its proscriptions were given legal sanction by Christian monarchs. In Anglo-Saxon England the punishment for breaking these rules was very heavy, namely slavery, with the man passing into the ownership of the king and the woman into that of the bishop. Eventually these extensive prohibitions, which varied in extent over time, were relaxed as a result of the Protestant Reformation….”

finally, here’s a summary of how the regulations on cousin- and other close-family marriage became more restrictive throughout the medieval period [pg. 56]:

“In the sixth century the ban [on cousin marriage by the Church] was extended to the third canonical degree, that is, to second cousins, the offspring of a common great-grandparent ‘in imitation of Roman law which limited inheritance to the sixth degree of kinship’ (Oesterle 1949: 233), calculated in the Roman manner, that is, the third degree reckoned by the German or canonical method, which became dominant in the medieval period. Later the prohibition was pushed out still further to the fourth degree and then, in the eleventh century, to the seventh canonical degree, when the later method was used to recalculate the earlier prohibitions. Not only were these enormously extended prohibitions attached to blood or consanguineal ties, but they were assigned to affinal and spiritual kinship as well, producing a vast range of people, often resident in the same locality, that were forbidden to marry.”

william jervis jones shows that a linguistic shift in kinship terminology took place in german starting in the 12th century and continuing through, at least, the 15th century. to give a really broooad summary of his work, he found that, starting in the 12th century, more specific kinship terms shifted in meaning to be more inclusive or have wider definitions [pg. 195+].

just one example [pg. 190]:

“(3) From late in the 13th century, evidence begins to accumulate for a set of ‘downward’ extensions, in which a given Ego employs the same term for Alter and for Alter’s children (or Alter’s sibling’s children) of like sex. Interestingly, the earliest recorded cases have the linkage via the sibling, and are exclusively on the maternal side. Thus about 1300 we have signs of aeheim … being used with reference to the ‘mother’s sister’s son’, though its sense is still predominantly ‘mother’s brother.” A similar extension of muome to ‘mother’s brother’s daughter’ dates from 1336….”

kinship terms generally outline who you can and cannot marry [<< link opens powerpoint file]. in the case of the germans, before the medieval period, they had rather specific terms for people like "mother's sister's son" and "mother's brother's daughter" in order to distinguish these individuals — because some of them were probably more likely to be spouse material than others.

starting in the 1100s and onwards, these terms became increasingly fuzzy and less specific, prolly because you could no longer marry any of them, so what’s the point of distinguishing between them! nowadays all we say (in english) is "cousin" for a broad variety of people, both male and female, from either side of our family. we don't bother to distinguish between them, because most of us don’t consider any of them to be marriable (or, depending on where you live, there are even laws against it).

(presumably the same was true for the hawaiians, on an even broader scale. i'm guessing that they couldn't marry anyone of their own generation in their own village/sub-clan — all referred to as “brother” or “sister” — because any of those individuals might have been a sibling. the arabs, on the other hand, with their strong preference for fbd marriage have very specific kinship terms for all the players.)

german peoples were probably tribal once-upon-a-time because they practiced, not just endogamous marriage, but cousin-marriage. their tribes, however, don’t seem to have had quite the same flavor as arab tribes which practice fbd marriage, so i’m guessing the germans didn’t marry in that way much. tribes are tribes because people inbreed; but there are different sorts of tribes because different peoples inbreed in different ways.

european populations used to be tribal, but because we stopped inbreeding so much (thanks to the holy roman catholic church and other powers-that-be), we’re not so tribal anymore.

previously: whatever happened to european tribes? and inbreeding amongst germanic tribes and st. augustine and st. thomas aquinas

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sports i can understand

now here’s some sports rivaly i can actually understand (via pat buchanan @vdare):

“In Israel, a Soccer Game Reflects a Divide”

“If Bnei Sakhnin, the only Arab-Israeli team in Israel’s first division, loses today, the club will drop to the second division, an ignominious distinction, the equivalent of going from the major to minor leagues in baseball.

“And the team that Sakhnin has to beat to survive is the one they hate the most, Beitar Jerusalem, which has been associated with right-wing politics in Israel for decades and may be the only first-division club never to have an Arab player on its roster….

“‘It’s just a game,’ I say [to one of the arab fans], trying to calm things down.

“‘For you, maybe,’ Ali responds, ‘because you’re a Jew. But for us, soccer is the only place we’re equal in this stinking country. If Sakhnin gets thrown out of first division, then they’ll be taking that away from us, too.’

“Beitar’s jerseys say ‘Stop Racism,’ but everyone knows that the slogan is there only because the team is trying to lighten the penalty imposed by the Israel Soccer Association for the constant anti-Arab chanting of Beitar’s hardcore fans, called ‘La Familia.’ (‘Muhammad is a homosexual’ is a favorite cheer.) The bad blood between the two teams has caused many of their matches to end in rock-­throwing brawls….”

of course!

previously: ‘sup with the canucks?!

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demokratia

how did the ancient athenians manage? to have a functioning democracy, that is — for as long as they did?

having a real, working democratic society seems to be at direct odds with being a clannish or tribalistic society. but the ancient greeks, including the athenians, were clannish|tribal — they had phylai (clans or tribes) and phratries (kin-groups or, maybe, sub-clans). and they definitely practiced inbreeding, frequently marrying cousins. in fact, fbd marriage was obligatory in the case of a female heiress — she had to marry one of her paternal cousins so that the estate would not go out of the extended family.

so how the h*ck did they manage to come up with a working demokratia?

cleisthenes’ reforms in 508/7 b.c.

in order to put a stop to the tyrannies that were continually popping up in athens (or, more likely, to quash the powers of clans other than his own — some of his family members had been tyrants, after all), cleisthenes devised a new system whereby athenian society would be organized.

the countryside surrounding athens, attica, had been politically arranged into demes, or regions or neighborhoods. to be a citizen, though, you had to be a member of a long-standing athenian phratry (kin-group). the demes were probably dominated by the phratries that happened to live in them.

cleisthenes rearranged all the demes in a brilliant sort-of reverse-gerrymandering scheme. the new political regions (trittyes) each consisted of three different, non-contiguous areas: from the coast, from the city, and from a rural area. everyone eligible to vote would now cast their vote as a member of a trittys, not (so much anymore) as a member of a phratry.

heh. brilliant!:

“After this victory Cleisthenes began to reform the government of Athens. In order to forestall strife between the traditional clans, which had led to the tyranny in the first place, he changed the political organization from the four traditional tribes, which were based on family relations, into ten tribes according to their area of residence (their deme). Most modern historians suppose there were 139 demes (this is still a matter of debate), organized into thirty groups called trittyes (‘thirds’), with ten demes divided among three regions in each trittys (a city region, asty; a coastal region, paralia; and an inland region, mesogeia). Cleisthenes also abolished patronymics in favour of demonymics (a name given according to the deme to which one belongs), thus increasing Athenians’ sense of belonging to a deme.” [wikip]

this system worked, with a few short interruptions and some changes, for more than a couple hundred years. cool.

cheryl anne cox goes into a lot of detail about athenian marriage patterns. i’ve read some of her book, but not all, so i still don’t have a good overview of how it all worked and what sort of changes in how athenians mated, if any, might have happened over time. she does mention that cousin marriage occurred not infrequently, but that arranged marriages (most of the marriages of vips in athens|attica were arranged) also happened between neighbors in a deme — you know, to create alliances between important families, join up big farms, etc., etc. she also notes that marriage in the city was more heterogamous.

the phratries (kin-groups) did, apprarently, loose their significance during the classical period in athens. did this have to do with increasing marriages across the artifically created trittyes (i.e. outbreeding) with a concomitant decrease in marriages within the phratry (i.e. inbreeding)? dunno, but i’d put money on it.

also, had the phratries, which had been powerful during the greek dark ages, already been weakened by the time of cleisthenes’ reforms by the outbreeding in the demes that cox describes? i think it likely.

maybe athenian society was already primed for demokratia by the time cleisthenes got there.

edit: boilerplate and boilerplate 2.0

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st. augustine and st. thomas aquinas

smart guys!

from jack goody’s “The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe” [pgs. 56-8]:

“What were the grounds for these extensive prohibitions on consanguineous marriages? The ‘Dictionnaire de Droit Canonique’ (1949) gives three general reasons that have been proposed:

“1. The moral reason, that marriage would threaten the respect and shame due to near ones.
“2. The social reason, that distant marriages enlarge the range of social relations. This common ‘anthropological’ notion was put forward by those great theologians, St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, who recognised that out-marriage multiplied the ties of kinship and thus prevented villages from becoming ‘closed communities’, that is, solidary ones.
“3. The physiological reason, that the fertility of the mother or the health of the children might be endangered.

“The statements of Thomas Aquinas, which appeared in his ‘Summa Theologica‘ and was highly influential during the Middle Ages, raised a number of possible objections to consanguineous marriage…. Third, such unions would ‘prevent people widening their circle of friends’ (2 above)….

“In Thomas Gilby’s translation of the Summa, the passage reads as follows [this is St. Thomas Aquinas]:

“‘The third reason is that incest would prevent people widening their circle of friends. When a man takes a wife from another family he is joined in special friendship with her relations; they are to him as his own. And so Augustine writes, “The demands of charity are fulfilled by people coming together in the bonds that the various ties of friendship require, so that they may live together in a profitable and becoming amity; nor should one man have many relationships restricted to one other, but each single should go to many singly.”‘“

so, i’ve been writing in previous posts (and reading in various sources) that the church tried to limit consanguineous marriages for financial reasons, i.e. to fiddle with the social structures of european society so that more legacies would be left to the church and not so much to people’s families.

i still think there is something to that, but — whoa! — clearly the church fathers were also just interested in social engineering for social engineering’s sake. and both augustine and thomas a. clearly understood how social relationships operate (altho prolly not the biological underpinnings).

they went for some serious reconstruction of european society — and it worked! consider me impressed.

edit: boilerplate and boilerplate 2.0

previously: whatever happened to european tribes? and inbreeding amongst germanic tribes

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