Melissa J. Brown

The ethics of characterizing difference: guiding principles on using racial categories in human genetics

We are a multidisciplinary group of Stanford faculty who propose ten principles to guide the use of racial and ethnic categories when characterizing group differences in research into human genetic variation.

Sociocultural epistasis and cultural exaptation in footbinding, marriage form, and religious practices in early 20th-century Taiwan

Social theorists have long recognized that changes in social order have cultural consequences but have not been able to provide an individual-level mechanism of such effects. Explanations of human behavior have only just begun to explore the different evolutionary dynamics of social and cultural inheritance. Here we provide ethnographic evidence of how cultural evolution, at the level of individuals, can be influenced by social evolution. Sociocultural epistasis—association of cultural ideas with the hierarchical structure of social roles—influences cultural change in unexpected ways. We document the existence of cultural exaptation, where a customs origin was not due to acceptance of the later associated ideas. A cultural exaptation can develop in the absence of a cultural idea favoring it, or even in the presence of a cultural idea against it. Such associations indicate a potentially larger role for social evolutionary dynamics in explaining individual human behavior than previously anticipated.

The influence of social niche on cultural niche construction: modelling changes in belief about marriage form in Taiwan

With introduction of social niche effects into a model of cultural change, the frequency of a practice cannot predict the frequency of its underlying belief. The combination of a general model with empirical data from a specific case illustrates the importance of collaboration between modellers and field researchers, and identifies the type of quantitative data necessary for analysing case studies. Demographic data from colonial-period household registers in Taiwan document a shift in marriage form within 40 years, from a mixture of uxorilocal marriages and virilocal marriages to the latters dominance. Ethnographic data indicate marriage-related beliefs, costs, ethnic effects and colonial policies as well as the importance of horizontal cultural transmission. We present a formal model for the effects of moral beliefs about marriage and a population economic index on the decline of uxorilocal marriage. We integrate empirical marriage rates and an estimated economic index to produce five projections of the historical frequencies of one belief. These projections demonstrate how economic development may affect a cultural niche. They also indicate the need for future research on the relationship between wealth and cultural variability, the motivational force of cultural versus social factors, and the process of cultural niche construction.

Ethnic Identity, Cultural Variation, and Processes of Change Rethinking the Insights of Standardization and Orthopraxy

Watson’s view that culture held late imperial China together appears to be problematic with regard to standardization and insightful with regard to social theory. Ethnographic evidence about the assimilation of non-Han minority peoples to Han identity shows that orthopraxy led to many nonstandard cultural practices and beliefs. Theoretical implications include reassessment of the canonical interpretive assumption that cultural ideas are the primary motivations for human actions. Additionally, the concept of a culturally unified China appears to be an ideology that benefits the Chinese state.

Feet and fabrication: footbinding and early twentieth-century rural women's labor in Shaanxi.

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women’s work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women’s status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

Male Marriage Squeeze and Inter-provincial Marriage in Central China: evidence from Anhui

Since the 1990s, inter-provincial female migration for marriage has become important in central and eastern rural China. Using survey data from X County in rural Anhui Province, we explore the arrangement of inter-provincial marriages, as well as the characteristics of husbands and wives, marital satisfaction and marital stability for these marriages. We find that inter-provincial marriage is an important option for local men to respond to the marriage squeeze and the increasing expense of marriage. It helps to relieve the shortage of marriageable women in the local marriage market. Because this kind of marriage is based on economic exchange, but not affection, it is often subject to a higher risk of marriage instability, and can lead to such illegal behaviors as marriage fraud and mercenary marriage.

Adoption Does Not Increase the Risk of Mortality among Taiwanese Girls in a Longitudinal Analysis.

Adopted children often experience health and well-being disadvantages compared to biological children remaining in their natal households. The degree of genetic relatedness is thought to mediate the level of parental investment in children, leading to poorer outcomes of biologically unrelated children. We explore whether mortality is related to adoption in a historical Taiwanese population where adoption rarely occurred among kin. Using Cox proportional hazards models in which adoption is included as a time-dependent covariate, we show that adoption of girls does not increase the risk of mortality, as previously suggested; in fact, it is either protective or neutral with respect to mortality. These results suggest that socio-structural variables may produce positive outcomes for adopted children, even compared to biological children who remain in the care of their parents.

Economic correlates of footbinding: Implications for the importance of Chinese daughters’ labor

Background It is a wide-spread assumption about footbinding that footbound girls and women were more of an economic burden on their families than those never bound. It is often presumed that government policies and missionary campaigns ended footbinding. Methods/ Objectives We use regression and log-likelihood tests, with bootstrapping for confirmation, to analyze which of a series of ethnographically and historically hypothesized variables significantly correlate with footbinding. We also consider an indirect measure of government prohibitions. We analyze two large datasets based on oral surveys with elderly women of the last footbound generations from 12 inland Chinese provinces. Conclusions Handicraft production, particularly commercial handicraft production, correlates with whether Chinese girls were subjected to footbinding before 1950. Girlhood knowledge of government prohibitions against footbinding, an indirect measure of awareness by the adults who decided whether to bind a girl’s feet, did not correlate with whether women were ever footbound. Spinning cotton thread for commercial purposes (sale, wage, direct exchange) correlated with greater daily production, with great county-level variation in quantity produced. Moreover, Chinese commercial spinners labored more years before marriage than domestic spinners. Implications Chinese daughters—whether footbound or not—made important economic contributions to rural households, thus suggesting a need to revise our understanding of China’s gender and economic history. Further implications of our results are that research is warranted on the assumed efficacy of government prohibitions—in both rural and urban areas—and on the presumption that footbinding among elite Chinese women was unrelated to economic concerns, including handicraft production. The demonstrated economic correlates of footbinding in inland, rural China also suggest a need to reevaluate whether contemporary customs controlling and cloistering girls and women, such as female genital cutting in Africa and the threat of honor killings of girls and women in South Asia, might have economic correlates.