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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andrey Korotayev | 4/7 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Korotayev | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:59:46.151712+00:00 | kb-cron |
From a complexity perspective Korotayev's establishes a key point, that of the bifurcations of social and kinship organisation that coalesced historically around the differential practices of the major world religions. It draws on the World Cultural database and the world religion as well as other variables. The Murdockian comparative approach, up to Korotayev, had developed to the point where the nonindependence of cultures was well-recognized, and ways of taking the larger configurations of cultural systems into account had been reckoned to lie, in the latest iteration, along lines of high-order proto-linguistic communities. Korotayev demonstrates the effects of breaking what might be seen as a ritual taboo of Murdockian comparison: Thou Shalt Not Code World Religion. By doing so, Korotayev releases the Murdockian spell that lingers over the comparative approach in anthropology, and goes on to demonstrate the powerful effects of world religious communities — dating from what Jaspers calls the "Axial Age" (800–200 BCE) – on the preservation and differentiation of distinctive social and political structures in Eurasia. His introduction and conclusion suggest that an objectivist natural history approach to human history, in which subjective factors are of local importance but fade out in terms of lasting effects over generations, is a valid approach to the "pre-Axial" condition of human societies, while a subjectivist history of consciousness is a necessary complement to the "post-Axial" condition. Korotayev succeeds in placing these two complementary approaches in context and showing their linkages in terms of how subjective and religious factors play out in human history alongside objective factors such as demography and ecology, each informing the other. He shows how it is impossible to arrive at valid inferential results from comparative approaches without an integration of the two, a situation he aptly calls "Galton's opportunity" for those are of century-old critiques of the comparative method. The reader will be surprised at the depth of empirical comparative findings in this short book. Following Murray Leaf's Man, Mind and Science (1974) this work is a major contribution to repair of the material/ideational rift in anthropology.
==== Matrilocal vs. patrilocal residence ====
One of his particular contributions in this field is connected with the classical anthropological issue of determinants of matrilocal versus patrilocal postmarital residence. Early theories explaining the determinants of postmarital residence (e.g., Lewis Henry Morgan, Edward Tylor, or George Peter Murdock) connected it with the sexual division of labour. However, to the moment when Korotayev's research in this field began, cross-cultural tests of this hypothesis using worldwide samples had failed to find any significant relationship between these two variables. Korotayev's tests have shown that the female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal residence in general; however, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor. Although an increase in the female contribution to subsistence tends to lead to matrilocal residence, it also tends simultaneously to lead to general non-sororal polygyny which effectively destroys matrilocality. If this polygyny factor is controlled (e. g., through a multiple regression model), division of labour turns out to be a significant predictor of postmarital residence. Thus, Murdock's hypotheses regarding the relationships between the sexual division of labour and postmarital residence were basically correct, though, as has been shown by Korotayev, the actual relationships between those two groups of variables are more complicated than he expected.
==== Myths, genes, and deep history ==== Korotayev was also one of the pioneers (together with his colleagues) of the study of correlation between spatial distributions of folklore-mythological motifs and genetic markers, as well as linguistic and sociostructural characteristics, and produced in this area significant results with respect to the deep history reconstruction. As is noticed by Julien d'Huy et al., "Korotayev and Khaltourina showed statistical correlation between spatial distributions of mythological motifs and genetic markers, considerably above the 4,000 km... Such correlations allow us to reconstruct in detail the mythology... brought to the New World from South Siberia by three Paleolithic migration waves".
==== Unilineal descent and Christianization ====
Korotayev studies variables that are usually regarded as the main causes of the decline of unilineal descent organisation (statehood, class stratification and commercialisation), along with a variable that had never been regarded as such a cause – deep Christianization. He postulates that the traditionally accepted causes of the decline of unilineal descent organisation (statehood, class stratification, commercialisation) are less significant than deep Christianization. He also theorises that the presence of unilineal descent groups correlates negatively with communal democracy and is especially strong for complex traditional societies. Korotayev concludes that, because the communal democracy correlates positively with the supracommunal one, the Christianization of Europe might have contributed to the development of modern democracy by helping to destroy unilineal descent organisation in this region.
=== Sociopolitical systems in the Middle East and Africa ===
==== Origins of parallel-cousin marriage and the Afrasian Instability Zone ==== Islamization, along with an area's inclusion in the 8th-century Arab-Islamic Khalifate (and its persistence within the Islamic world) has been demonstrated by Korotayev to be a strong and significant predictor of parallel cousin (Father's Brother's Daughter – FBD) marriage. He has shown that while there is a clear functional connection between Islam and FBD marriage, the prescription to marry a FBD does not appear to be sufficient to persuade people to actually marry thus, even if the marriage brings with it economic advantages. According to Korotayev, a systematic acceptance of parallel-cousin marriage took place when Islamization occurred together with Arabization. This research further led to the discovery of the so-called Afrasian Instability Zone.
==== Yemeni Studies ====