The impact of market integration on arranged marriages in Matlab, Bangladesh.

Success in marriage markets has lasting impacts on women's wellbeing. By arranging marriages, parents exert financial and social powers to influence spouse characteristics and ensure optimal marriages. While arranging marriages is a major focus of parental investment, marriage decisions are also a source of conflict between parents and daughters in which parents often have more power. The process of market integration may alter parental investment strategies, however, increasing children's bargaining power and reducing parents' influence over children's marriage decisions. We use data from a market integrating region of Bangladesh to (a) describe temporal changes in marriage types, (b) identify which women enter arranged marriages and (c) determine how market integration affects patterns of arranged marriage. Most women's marriages were arranged, with love marriages more recent. We found few predictors of who entered arranged vs. love marriages, and family-level market integration did not predict marriage type at the individual level. However, based on descriptive findings, and findings relating women's and fathers' education to groom characteristics, we argue that at the society-level market integration has opened a novel path in which daughters use their own status, gained via parental investments, to facilitate good marriages under conditions of reduced parental assistance or control.

Religiosity is associated with greater size, kin density, and geographic dispersal of women's social networks in Bangladesh.

Human social relationships, often grounded in kinship, are being fundamentally altered by globalization as integration into geographically distant markets disrupts traditional kin based social networks. Religion plays a significant role in regulating social networks and may both stabilize extant networks as well as create new ones in ways that are under-recognized during the process of market integration. Here we use a detailed survey assessing the social networks of women in rural Bangladesh to examine whether religiosity preserves bonds among kin or broadens social networks to include fellow practitioners, thereby replacing genetic kin with unrelated co-religionists. Results show that the social networks of more religious women are larger and contain more kin but not more non-kin. More religious women's networks are also more geographically diffuse and differ from those of less religious women by providing more emotional support, but not helping more with childcare or offering more financial assistance. Overall, these results suggest that in some areas experiencing rapid social, economic, and demographic change, religion, in certain contexts, may not serve to broaden social networks to include non-kin, but may rather help to strengthen ties between relatives and promote family cohesion.

Sharing, consumption, and patch choice on Ifaluk atoll : Evaluating an explanatory hypothesis.

Anthropological tests of patch choice models from optimal foraging theory have primarily employed acquisition rates as the currency of the model. Where foragers share their returns, acquisition rates may not be similar to consumption rates and thus may not be an appropriate currency to use when modeling foraging decisions. Indeed, on Ifaluk Atoll the distribution patterns of fish vary by fishing method and location. Previous analyses of Ifaluk patch choice decisions suggested that if Ifaluk fishers are trying to maximize their production rates they should rarely torch fish for dogtoothed tuna. However, some men do spend considerable time and energy exploiting the dogtoothed tuna patch. To improve our understanding of the constraints and motivations influencing men's decisions to exploit this patch, here I use per capita consumption rates as a currency, rather than production rates, to evaluate predictions generated from a patch choice model. Results indicate that although fish caught in other patches are more widely distributed than fish caught in the dogtoothed tuna patch, the consumption rates of torch fishers and their kin are still considerably lower than the consumption rates of men pursuing fish in other patches. Although these results are unable to explain why Ifaluk men exploit the dogtoothed tuna patch, an important explanatory hypothesis is eliminated.

Costly signaling and torch fishing on Ifaluk atoll.

In this paper I evaluate the merit of costly signaling theory (CST) as a paradigm for understanding why men of Ifaluk atoll torch fish. I argue that torch fishing is a handicap that signals men's productivity. Consistent with CST, torch fishing is observed by the predicted audience (women), energetically costly to perform, and a reliable indicator of the frequency a man fishes during the trade wind season. Contrary to expectations of who should benefit from torch fishing and consequently participate, torch fishers are not primarily young and unmarried. Torch fishers, however, are predominately from the matriline that owns the canoe on which they fish, suggesting that torch fishing also signals the productivity of a matriline. Although these results support the possibility that torch fishing is a handicap, no data are presented which demonstrate that torch fishers achieve any gains from sending the costly signal. This shortcoming and other directions for future research on Ifaluk foraging decisions are discussed.

Bargaining theory and cooperative fishing participation on ifaluk atoll.

In this paper we examine the merit of bargaining theory, in its economic and ecological forms, as a model for understanding variation in the frequency of participation in cooperative fishing among men of Ifaluk atoll in Micronesia. Two determinants of bargaining power are considered: resource control and a bargainer's utility gain for his expected share of the negotiated resource. Several hypotheses which relte cultural and life-course parameters to bargaining power are tested against data on the frequency of cooperative sail-fishing participation. Consistent with predictions generated from bargaining theory, we show that (1) age is negatively correlated with cooperative fishing participation, (2) men of highranking clans and men with high levels of education fish less than men of low-ranking clans and less-educated men, (3) men with high expected utility gains from fishing returns fish more than men with low expected utility gains, (4) number of dependents is positively correlated with cooperative fishing participation, and (5) the number of young genetic offspring residing with a man is positively correlated with cooperative fishing participation, whereas the number of genetic offspring more than 13 years old who are residing with a man is negatively correlated with cooperative fishing participation.