Socioeconomic aspects of human behavioral ecology Introduction Michael Alvard Large scale cooperation among Sungusungu vigilantes of Tanzania : conceptualizing micro economic and institutional approaches Brian Paciotti Craig Hadley Do women really need marital partners for support of their reproductive success The case of the matrilineal Khasi of N. E. India Donna L. Leonetti Dilip C. Nath Natabar S. Hemam Dawn B. Neill The behavioral ecology of female genital cutting in northern Ghana Letitia L. Reason Why do foragers share and sharers forage Explorations of social dimensions of foraging Michael Gurven Kim Hill Felipe Jakugi Height marriage and reproductive success in Gambian women Rebecca Sear Nadine Allal Ruth Mace Good Lamalera whale hunters accrue reproductive benefits Michael S. Alvard Allen Gillespie Burden transport : when how and how much Patricia Ann Kramer Risk perception and resource security for female agricultural workers Karen Snyder Maternal nutrition and sex ratio at birth in Ethiopia Ruth Mace Jennifer Eardley Embodied capital and heritable wealth in complex cultures : a class based analysis of parental investment in urban south India Mary K. Shenk Reconsidering the cost of childbearing : the timing of childrens helping behavior across the life cycle of Maya families Karen L. Kramer Maintaining the matriline : childrens birth order roles and educational attainment among Thai Khon Mang Lisa Rende Taylor Patterns of Shiwiar health insults indicate that provisioning during health crises reduces juvenile mortality Lawrence S. Sugiyama ( Giving scrounging hiding and selling : minimal food sharing among Mikea of Madagascar Bram Tucker What explains Hadza food sharing Frank W. Marlowe Ideology religion and the evolution of cooperation : field experiments on Israeli Kibbutzim Richard Sosis Bradley J. Ruffle. As a field anthropology brings an explicit evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior. Each of anthropologys four main subfields sociocultural biological archaeology and linguistic anthropology acknowledges that Homo sapiens has a long evolutionary history that must be acknowledged if one is to know what it means to be a human being (What is Anthropology). The papers in this volume embody the view of anthropology explicit in the above statement. Behavioral ecology explains human behavior through the application of evolutionary theory in ecological context. It focuses on how behavior is influenced by the constraints of reproduction and resources acquisition. As a result its purview is a wide swath of anthropology especially economic anthropology. Human behavior varies through the life course and humans make choices or exhibit behavioral variation depending on the costs benefits and constraints of local socioeconomic contexts. Pan human conscious and unconscious processes generate these decisions because over evolutionary time scales they produced on average behavior that increased the relative reproductive success of their bearers. Behavioral ecology examines these adaptive behavioral responses to local conditions. The volumes papers demonstrate behavioral ecologys maturation as a subfield of anthropology. They demonstrate the breadth of problems that can be gainfully addressed within the paradigm and the richness of specific hypotheses and data that this perspective can generate. The papers also show how behavioral ecology conceptually integrates the core of biological anthropology with the other subdisciplines by providing a common framework for investigating and understanding basic economic questions As a field anthropology brings an explicit evolutionary approach to the study of human behavior. Each of anthropologys four main subfields sociocultural biological archaeology and linguistic anthropology acknowledges that Homo sapiens has a long evolutionary history that must be acknowledged if one is to know what it means to be a human being (What is Anthropology). The papers in this volume embody the view of anthropology explicit in the above statement. Behavioral ecology explains human behavior through the application of evolutionary theory in ecological context. It focuses on how behavior is influenced by the constraints of reproduction and resources acquisition. As a result its purview is a wide swath of anthropology especially economic anthropology. Human behavior varies through the life course and humans make choices or exhibit behavioral variation depending on the costs benefits and constraints of local socioeconomic contexts. Pan human conscious and unconscious processes generate these decisions because over evolutionary time scales they produced on average behavior that increased the relative reproductive success of their bearers. Behavioral ecology examines these adaptive behavioral responses to local conditions. The volumes papers demonstrate behavioral ecologys maturation as a subfield of anthropology. They demonstrate the breadth of problems that can be gainfully addressed within the paradigm and the richness of specific hypotheses and data that this perspective can generate. The papers also show how behavioral ecology conceptually integrates the core of biological anthropology with the other subdisciplines by providing a common framework for investigating and understanding basic economic questions