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Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- 1 Politics and Reproduction: A Window on Social Change -- 2 The Politics of Reproductive Biology: Exclusionary Policies in the United States -- 3 The Politics of Obstetric Care: The Inuit Experience -- 4 The Politics of Birth: Cultural Dimensions of Pain, Virtue, and Control Among the Bariba of Benin -- 5 The Politics of Children: Fosterage and the Social Management of Fertility Among the Mende of Sierra Leone -- 6 The Politics of Below-Replacement Fertility: Policy and Power in Hungary -- 7 The Politics ot Parenthood: Fairness, Freedom, and Responsibility in American Reproductive Choices -- 8 The Politics of Choice: Abortion as Insurrection -- 9 The Politics of Adolescent Pregnancy: Turf and Teens in Louisiana -- 10 The Politics of Family Planning: Sterilization and Human Rights in Bangladesh -- 11 The Politics of AIDS, Condoms, and Heterosexual Relations in Africa: Recent Evidence from the Local Print Media -- About the Contributors.

If we distinguish culture (embodied in individuals) from cultures (embodied in the superorganic properties of groups), we make it possible to accommodate the observation that individuals vary, make choices, and exert control over their lives with the observation that those same individuals find themselves constrained by recurrent patterns with properties of things. This shift in perspective makes the central problem for ethnography the identification and description of the evolving configurations of cognition, emotion, and behavior at the intersection of evolving, individually unique cultural sets. Principal components analysis of similarities among informants identifies and describes this intersection and its important variations precisely. Ordinary least squares and logistic multiple regressions test for plausible antecedents of intracultural and intercultural variation, respectively. I illustrate with data on cultural diversity in the relative importance of components that make up a partnership between parents and teachers in the United States and in how to organize these components effectively. I demonstrate the existence of a single model of the importance of these components, with intracultural variation. I demonstrate the existence of two cultural models of how to organize these components into effective parent‐ teacher partnerships (Separate but Equal and Mutual Decision Makers). Discordance between these cultures and the social identities of the cultural participants validates Keesing's claim that culture is not bounded in ways many people have long assumed. The shift in perspective that reconciles Sapir and Kroeber points past culture theory to a theory of culture. As we work out the details, it will also help us make ethnographic sense out of the contemporary world and give us a better grasp of the past one. [Key words: cultural diversity, culture theory, ethnographic methods, ethnology]

Freedom from violence stands as an important candidate for a universal human right. By definition, however, such rights apply only to phenomena that are universally perceived and experienced and take predictable expression, a possibility that many contemporary interpretations of cultural theory reject. Yet people who live dramatically different lives—on tourist islands in the West Indies or as hunter‐gatherers and reindeer herders in Arctic regions—agree about components that comprise a unitary phenomenon legitimately called "violence." This is consistent with findings from cognitive and neruological science and with a more Geertzian theory that culture understood as meaning is not a thing, cultural variability occurs between individuals, and cultural consensus emerges as a necessary consequence of social interaction among people who participate in common social fields, who engage in common social discourse.

This article outlines a deductive theory that creates a new way to think about the origins and evolution of culture. It is Darwinian in the sense that it posits that novel concepts and behavior, like novel genes, appear randomly and are subject to selection on the basis of specific criteria that are established by the properties of living things. The theory permits us to hypothesize properties of the genome that generate culture and to infer the conditions under which selection would favor the origins of culture. Theoretical deductions lead to the conclusion that the organisms that create culture actively participate in the creation of descendants who exhibit increasing cultural abilities and who generate increases in productivity and more reliable flows of resources. Culture is not something that has evolved solely and relatively recently in the hominid line of evolution. Fossil evidence suggests that culture may have existed at least 50 million years ago, and may have originated more than 200 million years ago.

This paper argues that fertility transition comes about when personal material well‐being is determined less by personal relationships than by formal education and skill training. This transformation occurs when changes in opportunity structure and the labor market increasingly reward educationally acquired skills and perspectives, for these changes have the effect of sharply limiting or eliminating the expected intergenerational income flows from or through children. This modification and extension of Caldwell's wealth flows model permits us to account for historical‐, regional‐, and social‐class‐specific differences in the onset and pace of fertility transition, and points to new, macro‐level socioeconomic indicators whose ability to account for historical variation infertility is validated by a preliminary test.