Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

Preparing for Research 85
hypothesized that dowry should occur in societies where a woman’s role in
subsistence production is low. She was right, but many societies where women’s
productive effort is of low value do not have dowry.
Gaulin and Boster (1990) offered a sociobiological theory that predicts
dowry in stratified societies that have monogamous or polyandrous marriage.
They tested their theory on Murdock and White’s (1969) Standard Cross-Cultural
Sample of 186 societies. The Gaulin-Boster theory works better than
Boserup’s—it misclassifies fewer societies—but still makes some mistakes.
Fully 77% of dowry societies are, in fact, stratified and have monogamous
marriage, but 63% of all monogamous, stratified societies do not have dowry.
Marvin Harris (1980), building on Boserup’s model, hypothesized that
dowry should occur in societies where women’s role in subsistence production
is low and where their value in reproduction is also low. In other words, if
women are a liability in both their productive and reproductive roles, one
should expect dowry as a compensation to the groom’s family for taking on
the liability represented by a bride who marries into a groom’s family.
Kenneth Adams (1993) operationalized this idea. He reasoned that, since
women are less suited physically to handling a plow, societies with plow agriculture
and high-quality agricultural land should find women’s labor of low
value. If those societies have high population density, then women’s reproductive
role should be of low value. Finally, in societies with both these characteristics,
patrilocal residence would make accepting a bride a real liability and
would lead to demand for compensation—hence, dowry.
Adams tested his idea on the same sample of 186 societies. His theory
makes about 25% fewer errors than the Gaulin-Boster theory does in predicting
which societies have dowry. There has thus been a succession of theories
to account for dowry; each theory has done a bit better than the last; and each
has been based on reasoning from common-sense principles. That’s how nomothetic
theory grows.
A lot of comparative research is about testing nomothetic theory. If an idiographic
theory accounts for some data in say, India, Japan, or England, then
an obvious next step is to see how far the theory extends. Alice Schlegel and
Herbert Barry (1986), for example, looked at the consequences of female contribution
to subsistence. Their nomothetic theory predicts that women will be
more respected in societies where they contribute a lot to subsistence than in
societies where their contribution is low.
Whether their theory is supported depends crucially on how Schlegel and
Barry operationalize the concept of respect. In societies where women contribute
a lot to subsistence, say Schlegel and Barry, women will be spared
some of the burden of pregnancy ‘‘through the attempt to space children’’
more evenly (ibid.:146). In such societies, women will be subjected to rape