31st Annual Student Research Conference
Cold-Hearted or Just Cold? Correlations of Environment, Society, and Divorce.
Maria M. Remolina Gonzalez* and Lydia Bagnall
Dr. Amber Johnson, Faculty Mentor
The idea of marriage is universal, as well as the idea of divorce. But not all hunter-gatherer societies are accepting of divorce there are three types of divorce: easy to obtain, publically adjudicated, and not permitted or very difficult to obtain. The purpose of this project was to explore the relationship of divorce to the environment using six proxy variables. The dataset used includes 339 hunter-gatherer societies, studied through different dimensions by Binford (2001). We found out that societies that have an absence of social stratification nor real investment in marriage ceremonies; and whose subsistence strategy is hunting or gathering, with lower population densities, that are located in low effective temperatures and in higher latitudes, divorce is easy to obtain.
Works Cited:
Binford, Lewis R. 2001. Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Ethnographic and Environmental Data Sets. University of California Press, Berkeley.
Keywords: Divorce, Social Stratification, Investment in marriage ceremonies, Effective Temperature, Binford Dataset
Topic(s):Anthropology
Presentation Type: Oral Paper
Session: 411-1
Location: VH 1320
Time: 2:30