Controlled Simulation of Marriage Systems

Abstract

© Copyright JASSS Douglas R. White (1999) Controlled Simulation of Marriage Systems Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 2, no. 3, To cite articles published in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, please reference the above information and include paragraph numbers if necessary Received: 7-Mar-99 Accepted: 5-Oct-99 Published: 31-Oct-99 Abstract This article presents and illustrates a new methodology for testing hypotheses about the departure of marriage choices from baseline models of random mating in an actual kinship and marriage network of a human population. The fact that demographic constraints can drastically affect the raw frequencies of different types of marriage suggests that we must reexamine or even throw out - as methodologically flawed - statistical conclusions regarding marriage rules from most of the existing empirical case studies. The development of the present methods, in contrast, enables researchers to decompose those behavioral tendencies that can be taken as agent-based social preferences, institutional rules or marriage structure from those behaviors whose divergent frequencies are merely a by-product or epiphenomena of demographic constraints on the availability of potential spouses. The family of random baseline models used here enables a researcher to identify overall global structures of marriage rules such as dual organization as well as more local of egocentric rules such as rules favoring marriage with certain kinds of relatives. Based on random permutations of the actual data in a manner that controls for the effects of demographic factors across different cases, the new methods are illustrated for three case studies: a village in Sri Lanka with a novel form of dual organization detected by this methodology, a cross-class analysis of a village in Indonesia, and an analysis of a farming village in Austria in which a structurally endogamous subset of villages is identified by the method and shown to form the backbone of a class-based landed property system. Keywords: Population studies, Marriage rules, Demographic constraints on choice behavior, Social class, Social anthropology Introduction One of the issues in the study of family systems is how to identify rules, structures, and strategies that give non-random inflections to mating systems. Probability models include (uniform) random partner selection, in which each person in a group has an equal opportunity of being selected, as distinguished from probabilistic partner selection, a process that takes place randomly with certain probabilities. One of the questions raised by anthropological studies is whether there are determined structures, related to marriage rules and/or strategies, within which random marriage choices occur, such as uniform random partner selection for any given pair of positions in the structure. This article proffers a quantitative strategy for examining such a question. To the extent that it is successful, it could help to explain certain of the ties between kinship, economics, and political structure in more empirical terms. A Network Approach The problem of evaluating marriage structures in relation to marriage rules is complex because we may need to specify positions within a network of kinship and marriage relations that exists prior to any given marriage. Adding to the complexity is the variety of mating and marriage behaviors, including sequential marriages or polygamy. This complexity is further augmented by the fact that language categories, verbal and normative statements and differential sanctions may exist for proper or improper marriage choices and these different aspects of marriage rules may not correspond. To deal with this complexity, an approach to random baseline models is proposed that establishes for each case study a partially ordered classification of potential marriage partners stemming from their position within a network of kinship and marriage relations, and specifying those classes within which uniform random partner selection occurs. This is done by a simulation of marriage choices that imposes constraints on marriagability by classificatory or positional network relationships, and then assigns spouses within marriagability classes by random permutations under uniform probability of assortment. The major hypothesis of the simulation is that once normalization is made against a random baseline suitable for each individual http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/2/3/5.html

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