The authors of this study investigate both intimate partner violence (IPV) in Africa and tolerance towards it. Merging Demographic and Health Survey data with information from the Ethnographic Atlas, they take into account a wide range of ancestral characteristics that could influence domestic violence today, including precolonial economic roles and marriage traditions. Their findings indicate that societies in which men were dominant in subsistence and/or had androcentric marital practices have more IPV today, and more acceptance of it. They also find an interesting gender gap in acceptance of IPV, in which women are more likely than men to justify domestic violence.

This article tests differing theories of why a man's marriage of his mother's brother's daughter is often encouraged while marriage of the father's sister's daughter is discouraged. Maintenance of relationships between bride-givers and bride takers is considered, as are the role of childhood sentiments in choosing a spouse.

This paper examines the behavior between close kin and affines of the opposite sex. The authors "point to certain differences between continental areas that are related to specific social factors, including the structure of descent groups and the nature of marriage arrangements."

This paper seeks to explain the presence of the incest taboo, and its occasional extension to first cousins. After considering prevailing theories logically, the author conducts tests of the three prevailing theories, and concludes that inbreeding theory is both the most logically sound and is best supported by ethnographic evidence. The author subsequently addresses possible exceptions to this theory, and includes a mathematical model which suggests that early expanding agricultural populations may have been able to notice the deleterious effects of inbreeding.

The author hypothesizes that physical violence is strongly related to the deprivation of physical pleasure. The author tests this hypothesis by looking at the relationship between physical affection towards infants, as well as attitudes towards premarital sex, and several variables related to violence. Results support the hypothesis.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

This paper tests some of Levi-Strauss's pronouncements on Crow-Omaha kinship systems cross-culturally. The author tests the relationships between Crow-Omaha and Hawaiian kinship systems and cross-cousin marriage. Results suggest that both kinship systems will prohibit cross-cousin marriage.

This study investigates the thwarting disorientation theory of suicide, suggesting that the rate of suicide in a society can be predicted from thwarting disorientation traits such as men’s divorce freedom and defiant homicide.

The authors predict that fitness outcomes will be negatively associated with spousal relatedness among foragers but positively associated among non-foragers, due to the greater social benefits of intensive kinship systems among non-foragers. Support is found for this hypothesis; however, an interaction effect is discovered with inbreeding, which appears to account for the variability in these relationships independent of subsistence activity. The authors qualify this support in order to explain why the incidence of cousin-marriage in non-foraging societies is not higher.

This article investigates how superordinate justice (whereby officials can arbitrate disputes involving homicide) and superordinate punishment (whereby officials can punish perpetrators of homicide) affect the level of internal violence in preindustrial societies. Results suggest that these two types of superordinate power do deter violent fatalities but that overall, “in order to increase violence substantively, arbitration authority over killings must be backed up by the power to penalize” (395).