Clippings

…there’s an extremely interesting statistical study by the American social scientist James Prescott, in which he has looked at the compilation by Stanford anthropologist Robert Textor of hundreds of different societies, not all of them still extant. …Textor just puts the various categories down as a compilation. What Prescott has done is to do a multivariate analysis, statistical correlation—what goes with what. And the things that apparently go with each other are essentially the two sets of characteristics I just described [powerful social hierarchies and almost nonexistent social hierarchies]. It is Prescott’s view that there are causal relations. That, in fact, in his view the key distinction has to do with whether cultures hug their children and whether they permit premarital sexual activity among adolescents. In his view those are the keys. And he concludes that all cultures in which the children are hugged and the teenagers can have sex wind up without powerful social hierarchies and everybody’s happy. And those cultures in which the children are not permitted to be hugged because of some social ban and a premarital adolescent sexual taboo is strictly enforced wind up killing, hating, and having powerful dominance hierarchies.