The Politics of Birth Practices: A Strategic Analysis

Abstract

of women and men. We suggest that the restriction of women during childbirth and the husband's ritual involvement in birth are both strategies for asserting or defending paternity rights. When paternity rights are established by agreements based on property transfers and enforced by organized kin groups, women will be restricted to insure that nothing upsets the agreements. When such agreements cannot be made and enforced, paternity claims will be asserted by the husband's ritual involvement in the birth. These hypotheses were tested in a sample of 114 societies based on Murdock and White's Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. The data confirm the hypotheses for the birth practices of both sexes. We suggest that birth practices represent a special case of bargaining mechanisms in societies without centralized authority.