poly: primitive harems

My anthropology teacher:

On Feb 11, 1:29pm, Ted Scudder wrote:

> Damien, we have been gatherers, hunters and fishers for well over 90% of our
> career as Homo sapiens. Though we know little about the social organization
> of such people in prehistoric times, gather-hunters studied over the past
> two centuries were remarkably egaletarian (in comparison with more
> technologically developed societies), including relations between the sexes.
> To the best of my knowledge, plural wives as a preferred marriage pattern
> came in only with agriculture.

Note that "preferred marriage pattern" covers what the society approves
of, and what the women agree or assent to. Men would still like extra
wives, but generally couldn't get it, as Brin later clarified.

And a lot of societies we'd call primitive actually had some sort of
agriculture. HFG is an abbreviation Posner or Stock used for 'hunter
fisher gatherer' (Scudder puts gathering first, he says its shown that
women's gathering accounted for most of the calories) which may be
convenient in future discussion. We generally find HFG's in pretty icky
climates, having been driven out by the more numerous, if less healthy,
farmers.

-xx- ROU Bibliovore X-)

"Chinese? _Chinese?_ Can't the flaming idiots recognize a flight of
UFOs when they see one?"
  -- Julian May, _Intervention_
Received on Wed Feb 11 21:42:51 1998