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The social modes of men

Toward an ecological model of human male relationships

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Abstract

Here we attempt to define a specifically human ecology within which male reproductive strategies are formulated. By treating the domestic and public spheres of social life as "ecological niches" that men have been forced to compete within or to avoid as best they can, we generate a typology of four "social modes" of human male behavior. We then attempt to explain the broad distribution of social modes within and between human groups based on the relative intensity of scramble and contest competition.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, 270 South 1400 East, Rm 102, 84112-0060, Salt Lake City, UT

    Lars Rodseth

  2. Indiana State University, USA

    Shannon A. Novak

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  1. Lars Rodseth
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Correspondence to Lars Rodseth.

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This research was completed with the help of a Lowell M. Durham, Jr. Fellowship at the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah.

Lars Rodseth (Ph.D., University of Michigan 1993) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He has conducted fieldwork in Nepal and Micronesia and is the author of "Distributive Models of Culture: A Sapirian Alternative to Essentialism," American Anthropologist (1998) 100:55–69.

Shannon A. Novak (Ph.D., University of Utah 1999) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana State University. She has conducted fieldwork in Croatia and the United Kingdom and is the author of "Perimortem Processing of Human Remains among the Great Basin Fremont," International Journal of Osteoachaeology (2000) 10:65–75.

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Rodseth, L., Novak, S.A. The social modes of men. Hum Nat 11, 335–366 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-000-1007-1

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