1.5.1 Society as an Integrated Whole

Throughout the 2010s, infant death rates in certain rural areas in Africa decreased dramatically. While thrilled with this positive trend, researchers did not initially know how to explain it. Were mothers and fathers doing something different to promote the health of their babies? Were African governments providing better health services for infants? Were aid agencies providing more resources? None of these things seemed to be true in any significant way.

The one thing that had changed in the areas with lower infant mortality was the spread of mobile phones. Could that have something to do with lower infant mortality? And if so, how? Researchers hypothesize that it wasn’t just the possession or use of mobile phones that was making the difference—it was the capability to use mobile money transfers and other fintech. If a baby had a fever in the middle of the night, the mother could now immediately text members of her extended family to organize the necessary funds to take the baby to a hospital for treatment. Quicker treatment meant a better chance for recovery. Something that does not appear to be directly related to infant health may in fact have a great impact on it.

Recall from the beginning of this chapter our discussion of the very broad scope of anthropology. While other disciplines focus on one realm of society, such as medicine or technology, anthropology ranges across all realms of human thought and activity. Using the technique of holism, anthropologists ask how seemingly disparate elements of social life might be related in unexpected ways.

In American and European cultures, the most common form of marriage is a union of two people. In the United States, many marriages end in divorce and most people then remarry, resulting in a cycle of marriage-divorce-remarriage called serial monogamy. In other cultures, however, a man may have more than one wife. It might be tempting to think that the dominant form of marriage in a culture is related to morality or gender relations. It turns out, however, that one very significant influence on marriage patterns is the food-getting strategy of a particular culture. In small-scale farming cultures, the marriage of one man to two or more women provides an abundance of children to help out with the work of weeding, watering, fertilizing, and guarding the crops (Boserup [1970] 2007; Goody 1976). In cultures where children contribute to food production, the marriage of one man to multiple women is more prevalent. This isn’t always the case, of course, as there are other factors that influence the form of marriage practiced in a culture, but the useful work of children does contribute to the popularity of this form of marriage.

In the contemporary United States, by contrast, most people work not on farms but in offices, shops, and factories. Children are not valued as sources of household labor, and they are not legally permitted to work for wages. In fact, children can be viewed as a drain on the household, each one requiring a massive investment of resources in the form of health care, childcare, special equipment, educational opportunities, and expensive toys. In this context, the increased fertility of multiple wives might impoverish the household. Moreover, our fast-paced, capitalist economy requires a flexible and highly mobile work force. American workers can lose their jobs, and they must be prepared to move and retrain in order to find further work. Many Americans experience periods of uncertainty and precarity in their work lives, conditions that affect the livelihood of their households as well as their relationships with their marriage partners and children. Such a context contributes to smaller family size and fragile marriage bonds. The cycles of stability and disruption in American work life are mirrored in the cycles of marriage and divorce involved in serial monogamy.

These are just two examples of why anthropologists are committed to taking such a broad view of the cultures they study. Often, the various realms of society are related in ways that are not at first apparent to the researcher. By specializing too narrowly on only one realm, the researcher might miss the wider forces that shape the object of study.