Response to the Review of Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach

ful reading and review (AA 82:177-179, 1980) of my book, Females, Males, Families: A Biosocial Approach. Unfortunately, this is something I cannot do. Her haphazard reading of my book is both distressing and easily demonstrated. I do not mind being castigated for inaccuracies, failures to include material, and faults in reasoning. I do, however, mind being misquoted and condemned for things I did not do. Among the things I did not do, for which I am condemned, is offer a theory which states that the "nuclear family is an adaptation to game scarcity and vegetable food scarcity in early man" (p. 178). In the book, as in several other publications (e.g., Leibowitz 1968, 1970), I explicitly attack this model of how things must have occurred among early humans since I regard this model as inaccurate and inadequate. Further, Lauer incorrectly cites me as discussing "nuclear" family arrangements among the Tiwi, though I examine the nonnuclear arrangements of the Tiwi in terms of their ecological adaptiveness to a rich foraging situation. Indeed, one of the major points of the book is that "family" isn't a nuclear group at its core, and must be defined in ways and explained as originating in ways that do not hook us into a nuclear model or to a simplistic ecological one. Since I provide narrative case histories that show how diversity in family arrangements is tied to cultural and ecological considerations, I am somewhat startled to find that Lauer says I have made "no attempt to relate family types to ecology or anything else" (p. 179). The remarks by the reviewer quoted above are not only incorrect characterizations of what the book contains, but also are contradictory. They demonstrate that a clearly labeled discussion of the origins of the sexual division of labor is confused with a separate and distinct discussion of the origins of family arrangements. The origins of a division of labor by sex are dealt with in terms of the adaptive consequences for foragers in various settings of the invention of projectile hunting tools (which appear in the archaeological record about 100,000 years ago) and the new and different modes of organizing hunting groups which these tools allowed. The origin of families is, by contrast, discussed in terms of exchange theory. That discussion begins by showing how the male-oriented L6viStraussian model of women-exchange is an inaccurate representation of the variety and kinds of marital exchanges and networks we actually find among recent foragers. The discussion then points out that L6vi-Strauss's model does not, in fact, account for the emergence of family. An analysis of the economic and political advantages to foragers of establishing networks of exchanges follows, and is used to show how family subunits are generated when loosely structured groups regularize "exchanging" or "moving" individuals through marriage contracts. As Lauer correctly notes, I refrain from giving a hard date for the emergence of family arrangements among early foragers, which I hold were presumably equally as varied, if not more varied, than those we find among foragers today. I note that since a division of labor by sex seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for ma riage exchanges, the institutionalization of family probably occurred at the same time or shortly after a sex division of labor became established. To give a firm figure for the date "family" originated, as the reviewer expects, seems foolhardy in the light of the archaeological evidence currently available. Lauer's casual contact with the context and