The fish is the friend of matriliny: Reef density and matrilineal inheritance☆
Introduction
The prevalence of matrilineal versus patrilineal inheritance – inheritance through the female or male line- has deep and far ranging consequences. The extent of female land ownership, which tends to prevail in matrilineal societies, affects the productivity of labour and economic efficiency (Goldstein and Udry, 2008), welfare (La Ferrara, 2007), in particular the relative welfare of women and men (Alesina et al., 2011, Alesina et al., 2013, Carranza, 2014), the effectiveness of land right reforms (Deininger et al., 2013), public good provision (Chattopadhyay and Duflo, 2004) as well as sex-biased mortality (Qian, 2008) and fertility (Alesina et al., 2011, Thomas, 1990). The prevalence of matrilineal kinship in itself is an important driver of behavioural differences between men and women (Gneezy et al., 2009, Hoffman et al., 2011) and affects household bargaining and children's welfare (Lowes, 2016). Yet, little is still known about the determinants of inheritance rules and how they evolve.
In this paper, we study how natural resources, and in particular marine resources, influence whether land will be transmitted through the male or female line. The past literature on this topic has observed that matrilineal inheritance – inheritance through the female line- is prevalent in horticultural societies, but it is rare in agricultural societies that rely on plough use and virtually absent in societies that have domesticated large animals (Aberle, 1961, Holden et al., 2003, Mace and Holden, 2005, Shenk et al., 2010), leading some to state that: “the cow is the enemy of matriliny” (Aberle, 1961, p. 680). While most existing studies have focused on how agricultural sources might affect kinship, inheritance, and gender norms in general,1 the influence of marine resources has been largely neglected in the literature, with the exception of Dalgaard et al. (2015). A particularly neglected hypothesis is that matriliny may be associated with reliance on fishing, as observed by Aberle (1961) among North-West American matrilineal fishing groups.
We provide the first systematic empirical test of the hypothesis that the quality of reef and pelagic offshore marine resources predicts the prevalence of matrilineal inheritance. We collected micro-level data in a sample of 79 fishing and horticultural villages in the Solomon Islands. The Solomon Islands is an ideal case study to examine the origins of matrilineal descent for a number of reasons. First, while Eurasia shows predominantly patrilocal residence and patrilineal inheritance, matrilineal descent is common among Austronesian-speaking societies of the Pacific (Burton et al., 1996), and the Solomon Islands in particular (Hviding, 1998). Moreover, in our sample, we observe variation between inheritance rules within small geographic areas (Fig. 1), and even within ethno-linguistic groups (Fig. 2).2 Last, our sample in the Solomon Islands is indicative of traditional ways of life. Villages in our study are small, remote, coastal lowland villages, protected from the deep sea by coral reefs (Fig. 1). Villagers rely exclusively on subsistence fishing and horticulture, without plough agriculture, large domestic livestock, or substantive access to markets, and far from the reach of central government.
As an exogenous measure of a society's surrounding marine environment, we consider the density of coral reefs in a 10-km radius. Coral reefs are globally important ecosystems and have a large impact on fisheries and the marine environment (NOAA, 2014). The particularly rich reefs of the Solomon Islands provides almost all the animal source to human diet (Albert et al., 2015). Moreover, reef density offers a stable measure, which reflects the long-term quality of pelagic marine resources and is not responsive to fishing intensity among the small horticultural societies we study. We thereby avoid the problem that the quality of marine resources themselves may be the result of societal norms of inheritance. A 10-km radius is a limit accessible on a regular fishing trip on a paddleboat or canoe, which is the available technology in the small-scale horticultural societies we study.
We find that reef density consistently predicts the prevalence of female land inheritance. Reef density explains as much as 10% of the variation in inheritance rules across villages in the Solomon Islands, and the effect is robust to the inclusion of a battery of controls, including soil quality, political structure, and religion. Moreover, this result holds within ethno-linguistic groups, which we measure by analyzing the phylogenesis of languages spoken in each village. We argue that the fact that we observe variation in inheritance rules within ethno-linguistic groups likely reflects that inheritance rules have adapted to ecological conditions. A noteworthy corollary of our results is that relatively small variations in ecological resources faced by societies can result in radical differences in the nature of institutions, in particular when such institutions are of a discrete nature, as is the choice of transmitting land either through the male or female line. Last, we document some of the demographic consequences of matrilineal inheritance, including smaller household and village population size.
We then show that our findings hold in wider samples of cultures around the world, thereby conferring external validity to our findings. As our first wider sample, we utilize the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (hereafter, SCCS) (Murdock and White, 1969). The SCCS contains detailed information on 186 cultural societies of the world that were originally selected from a list of 1,265 societies in the Ethnographic Atlas. We focus on the SCCS because the wealth of information in this dataset enables us to best replicate our Solomon Islands findings. Nevertheless, we check that our results also hold across the full sample of matrilineal and patrilineal societies in the Ethnographic Atlas.
We discuss three mechanisms that may be at work in explaining why and how marine endowments influence the prevalence of matrilineal inheritance. First, the sexual division of labour could lead men to specialize in fishing and women to specialize in horticulture. In these circumstances, having women own the land improves their effort and investment incentives (Shenk et al., 2010). Second, the evolutionary benefit in terms of reproductive fitness of transmitting land to sons may be smaller when economic production moves offshore. Moreover, the amount of wealth transmission to sons relative to daughters to maximise reproductive success depends on the degree of paternity certainty, the third determinant of the prevalence of matrilineal inheritance. Because fishing encourages prolonged male absence, it also lowers paternity certainty, encouraging wealth transmission to daughters.
Our results contribute to the literature that explores how geographic endowments shape institutions and social norms (Acemoglu et al., 2001, Alesina et al., 2011, Alesina et al., 2013, Apicella et al., 2014, Carranza, 2014, Engerman and Sokoloff, 1997, Gneezy et al., 2014). Institutions and rules governing inheritance play a crucial role for social organization and economic growth (Kotlikoff and Summers, 1981, De Nardi, 2004). Our results establish that ecological conditions play a vital role in the evolution of inheritance rules, and most particularly on the prevalence of matrilineal inheritance. Given the well-studied consequences of matrilineal inheritance on female behaviour and welfare discussed at the start of this introduction, our results speak more particularly to the literature that studies the deep-rooted determinants of female rights and gender roles. Most of the economic literature before us has focussed on land characteristics, such as suitability for plough agriculture (Alesina et al., 2011, Alesina et al., 2013), soil endowments (Carranza, 2014), or the timing of the Neolithic revolution (Hansen et al., 2015). Instead of studying land characteristics we investigate the role of marine resources. Further, to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use variation in inheritance rules within an ethno-linguistic group, when most of the previous literature relied on comparisons across ethnic groups in different regions (as in La Ferrara, 2007) or countries (as in Gneezy et al., 2009 and Hoffman et al., 2011), across which many other ecological and cultural factors may vary. Recent papers have shown that geographic endowments influence language, which, in turn, shapes culture and gender roles (Hicks et al., 2015, Galor et al., 2015). Therefore, relying on small-scale variation within an ethno-linguistic group may be crucial to cleanly isolate the role of ecological factors from the influence of cultural factors.
This paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we provide some background on matrilineal inheritance and the study setting for our Solomon Islands sample. In Section 3, we discuss the mechanisms through which marine resources lead societies to adapt their inheritance rules. We describe the data in Section 4. In Section 5, we present the results of the analysis in the Solomon Islands and across the world, as well as robustness checks. We explore the demographic consequences of matrilineal inheritance in Section 6, before concluding in Section 7.
Section snippets
Background and study context
In this section, we provide some background on matriliny, as well as our study setting in the Solomon Islands. We also document the ancestral character of matriliny in the Solomon Islands.
Conceptual framework
Ecological resources can explain gender-based inheritance rules through several channels, which we describe below. The first explanation relates to the sexual division of labour. Kaplan et al. (2009) argue that many features of human social organisation are the result of sex-specific economic specialisation, which itself responds to evolutionary and ecological imperatives. The authors argue that family structure, and pair-bonding in particular, are the result of male specialisation in hunting.
Balance of covariates across villages of the Solomon Islands
In Table 2, we present an analysis of the balance of covariates between matrilineal and patrilineal villages in our Solomon Islands sample. In line with the prediction that the number of offspring per family will be smaller under a matrilineal system (Holden et al., 2003), the total number of people in a village is significantly smaller in matrilineal villages. On average, matrilineal villages are nearly half as populous as patrilineal villages (mean of 293 people compared with 492 in
Analysis in the Solomon Islands
To test the hypothesis that greater reef density leads to matrilineal inheritance, we estimate the following specification in our Solomon Islands sample:where is a dummy variable that captures the prevalence of matrilineal inheritance in village i from language group j. measures the density of reef surrounding the village (number of shallow reef in a 10-km radius). is a vector of language group fixed effects. In our main specification, we consider 5
Consequences of matrilineal inheritance
In this section, we investigate some of the demographic consequences of inheritance rules, as well as other potential consequences of matrilineal inheritance on the political and economic agency of women and on schooling decision of girls and boys.
Conclusion
This paper uses a sample of 79 small-scale horticultural fishing communities in Melanesia and samples of 186 to 1,265 societies across the world to study how a society's surrounding marine ecology shapes social institutions. We establish that reef density, our proxy for the quality of the marine environment, systematically predicts the prevalence of female land inheritance in the Solomon Islands and across the world. Although several authors had informally hypothesized that reliance on fishing
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This work benefited from the collaboration of the Solomon Islands Ministry of Development, Planning and Aid Coordination (SIMDPAC) and the World Bank. Grosjean acknowledges financial support from the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP160100459) and from the University of New South Wales. Vecci acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (New Forms of Development Cooperation. Project no. 348-2014-4030). Excellent fieldwork was conducted by Heather Belfor, Alpana Modi, Ananta Neelim, Tom Sackman, Patrick Schneider, Juliana Silva Goncalves, Erin Steffen and Mark Walsh. The project was supported by a grant from UNSW. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of SIMDPAC or the World Bank. We are grateful to the editor and three anonymous referees, as well as Ingela Alger, Marcella Alsan, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, Rob Brooks, Mike Gurven, Michael Kasumovic, Pushkar Maitra, Lionel Page, Tomas Zelinsky and audiences at UNSW, ANU, the 2015 Australasian Development Economics Workshop and the Washington Economic History & Development Workshop for insightful comments and suggestions.