Why Some Societies Intensify: Agricultural Transitions Compared
Multiple causes, divergent pathways, and no single script for the transition to farming
Negative Reciprocity: The Moral Economy of Raiding and Trade
How every society calibrates generosity, fairness, and predation by social distance—and manipulates the boundaries between them
The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity Among Hunter-Gatherers
From egalitarian bands to hereditary chiefdoms—hunter-gatherers reveal that social complexity never required agriculture
Ceremonial Exchange Systems: Kula, Potlatch, and Beyond
How competitive generosity—not accumulation—builds prestige, alliances, and regional order across human societies
Totemism Revisited: What Symbolic Species Classification Reveals
How societies use animal classifications not for worship but as sophisticated cognitive tools for organizing human social distinctions
Gift Exchange as Social Architecture: Building Relationships Through Objects
How the objects we give create the obligations that build society's invisible architecture
How Societies Without States Maintain Order
Examining the sophisticated mechanisms through which societies organize collective life without centralized political authority
Why Dowry Exists: Competition and Hypergamy
When families compete for grooms rather than brides, the economics of marriage invert—with sometimes lethal consequences
Polyandry's Rare Logic: The Conditions for Wife-Sharing
Why some societies evolved wife-sharing as the only rational response to altitude, scarcity, and the need to keep brothers together.
Age-Set Systems: Organizing Society by Generation
How formal generational cohorts create solidarity, mobilize military force, and crosscut kinship in East African societies
The Puzzle of Avuncular Authority: When Mother's Brothers Rule
Why do some societies place authority over children in maternal uncles rather than fathers?
The Logic of Polygyny: When and Why Men Marry Multiple Wives
Why 85% of human societies permit multiple wives—and what material conditions make it work.
Why Chiefs Fail: The Unstable Dynamics of Ranked Societies
Chiefdoms don't collapse from crisis—they cycle through contradictions built into ranked society itself.
The Political Economy of Bride Price
Understanding how marriage payments allocate reproductive rights, compensate labor transfers, and create kinship alliances across economic systems
The Puzzle of Unilineal Descent: Why Societies Pick Sides
Understanding why societies trace kinship through one parent reveals the organizational logic underlying human social structure across cultures.
The Universal Grammar of Kinship Terminology
Why humanity's thousands of cultures classify relatives in only six fundamental ways—and what the missing systems reveal about social cognition.
Moiety Systems: Why Divide Society in Two?
Understanding why human societies independently developed binary division reveals deep connections between social organization, marriage regulation, and how we classify the cosmos itself.
Slavery's Many Forms: A Comparative Anatomy
Cross-cultural analysis reveals how economic systems, kinship ideologies, and incorporation pathways create radically different experiences under the same label of slavery.
How Residence Rules Transform Family Power
Post-marital residence determines which sex keeps siblings together and which scatters—establishing the structural foundation of family authority across human societies.
Why Marriage Rules Shape Everything: The Hidden Logic of Alliance Systems
How spouse exchange rules create political coalitions and economic networks—from Australian Aboriginal sections to contemporary corporate dynasties.
The Emergence of Private Property: Cross-Cultural Patterns
Explores how ecology, population density, and cosmology combine to produce humanity's diverse systems of ownership and access across cultures.