¹ Arensberg, C. M., The Irish Countryman (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; Arensberg, C. M. and Kimball, S. T., Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1940, 2d ed. 1968)Google Scholar; Connell, K. H., “Peasant Marriage in Ireland: Its Structure and Development since the Famine”, Economic History Review, 14:3 (1962), 502–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem“Catholicism and Marriage in the Century Following the Famine”, in his Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Oxford, 1968) 113–61.Google Scholar

² Goody, J. R., “Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia”, in Bridewealth and Dowry, Goody, J. R. and Tambiah, S. J., eds. (Cambridge, 1973), 1–58Google Scholar; idem.Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar

³ Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 23.Google Scholar

⁴ Goody, , Production, 20.Google Scholar

⁵ Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 23.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., 25.

⁷ Ibid., 11.

⁸ Ibid., 1.

⁹ Ibid., 17.

¹⁰ Goody, , Production, 51.Google Scholar

¹¹ Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 21.Google Scholar

¹² Sabean's, David essay, “Aspects of Kinship Behaviour and Property in Rural Western Europe before 1800”, in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, Goody, J. R., Thirsk, J., and Thompson, E. P., eds. (Cambridge, 1976), 96–111, suggests that the JCF as Goody intends it represents only one pole of a continuum of possible forms of rights in peasant conjugal households, the other pole being represented by a system where “neither spouse ever inherits from the other, for what each spouse brings to the marriage remains his own personal property however it is administered during the marriage”, (p. 105).Google Scholar

¹³ Arensberg, , Irish CountrymanGoogle Scholar; Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community.Google Scholar

¹⁴ The move from early to late marriage and from partible to impartible inheritance is thought to have had broader demographic consequences. Cousens, S. H., “Emigration and Demographic Change in Ireland 1851–1861”, Economic History Review, 14:2 (1961), 275–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Regional Variations in Population Change in Ireland, 1861–1881”, Economic History Review, 17:4 (1964), 301–21, has identified two demographic patterns in Ireland following the famine. One was the continuation of prefamine trends—high rates of marriage and of natural increase—the other was the typical postfamine pattern of falling marriage rates and population decline. The former persisted in the west of Ireland until about 1880, when this area began to adopt the postfamine pattern already evident elsewhere in the country.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ The main sources on which this account is based are Connell, “Catholicism and Marriage”, 114–17; Crotty, R. D., Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure (Cork, 1966)Google Scholar, chs. 2, 3; Lyons, F. S. L., Ireland since the Famine (London, 1979), 34–49.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Lee, J., The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, (Dublin, 1973), 4.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Lyons, , Ireland, 51–52.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Beaufort is a rural area which covers about twelve square miles and forms part of the Catholic Parish of Tuogh. Its population has declined from 1,375 in 1901 to 852 in 1978. Of its 220 households, roughly half are directly dependent, wholly or in part, on agriculture.

¹⁹ This, of course, applied only in the case of marriage to the heir to a farm or a business. Nonheirs could occasionally contract local dowryless marriages—for they were themselves propertyless—but usually these men and women either remained unmarried or emigrated.

²⁰ However, although a suitable dowry was necessary, it was not generally a sufficient condition for a match. Considerations of the social status and reputation of the family of the prospective son- or daughter-in-law also played an important role in assessing his or her acceptability. On this point, see Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 367.Google Scholar

²¹ Lee, , Modernisation, 5.Google Scholar

²² This disappearance is also noted by Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106.Google Scholar

²³ Compare this account with that found in Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 107–8Google Scholar, and the quotation from Lee, , Modernisation, 5, that the Irish peasant “takes unto himself a mate with as clear a head, as placid a heart and as steady a nerve as if he were buying a cow at Ballinasloe Fair”.Google Scholar

²⁴ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106, 369, claim that in the cases of women marrying into farms or into shops, the dowry had to be of a value equivalent to that of the farm or shop.Google Scholar

²⁵ For example, writing of the village, Greek of Vasilika, , Friedl, E., Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York, 1962), 56, notes that the bride's health, attractiveness, personal qualities, and virtue all can have a bearing on the size of the dowry she requires in order to marry.Google Scholar

²⁶ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106.Google Scholar

²⁷ Ibid., 106–7; see also ibid., 368, for reference to “walking the shop”, the equivalent custom in the towns.

²⁸ See Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 108–9, 368, for examples.Google Scholar

²⁹ See, for example, the descriptions in ibid, 290–92, and Harris, R., Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster (Manchester, 1972), 3–5.Google Scholar

³⁰ Kane, E., “The Changing Role of the Family in a Rural Irish Community”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 10:2 (1979), 153.Google Scholar

³¹ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 111, 141, 143.Google Scholar

³² Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 507–9.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 508–9.

³⁴ Breen, R., “Farm Servanthood in Ireland, 1900–40”, Economic History Review, 36:1 (1983), 87–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁵ Examples of this are given by Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 110.Google Scholar

³⁶ Davis, J., People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology (London, 1977), 181–82.Google Scholar

³⁷ Friedl, , Vasilika, 49.Google Scholar

³⁸ Banfield, Edward C. and Banfield, L. F., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York, 1958), 55.Google Scholar

³⁹ Ladurie, E. LeRoy, “Family Structure and Inheritance Customs in Sixteenth-Century France”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, , Thirsk, , AND Thompson, , eds., 37–70, gives comparable examples of areas of western France, Brie and Flanders, where lineage ties took precedence over marriage in the disposition of rights to property, and thus no JCF in Goody's sense could be said to exist.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 511.Google Scholar

⁴¹ See, for example, Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 77Google Scholar, and also Brody, H., lnishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (Harmondsworth, 1973), 110–11.Google Scholar

⁴² This ideal is reported in virtually every ethnography of rural Ireland; some examples will be found in Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135Google Scholar, and Brody, , lnishkillane, 132.Google Scholar

⁴³ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 131Google Scholar; also, Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 517–18.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135Google Scholar. As Goody, J. R., “Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, eds., 12, notes, the marriageability of a farm widow was a cause of concern throughout European peasant society.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 133–34.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Goody, , Production, 25.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 514.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ In these cases, ownership of the land was often transferred to the in-marrying son-in-law, and as a consequence these dowries tended to be larger than those paid by women. See ibid., 109–10.

⁵⁰ I think it fair to say that there is a tendency within anthropology to reject general theories because of a small number of discrepant cases. The arguments advanced by Comaroff, J. L., “Introduction”, in The Meaning of Marriage Payments, Comaroff, J. L., ed. (London, 1980), 1–47, against schemes like Goody's provide an example of this. On the basis of evidence from the Tswana, the Wiru and Melpa, and the Macedonian village of Skopska, Comaroff disputes the association between particular social characteristics and particular forms of dowry payment and claims they show “much greater ethnographic diversity than is often supposed in 'paradigmatic conceptions' of dowry”, (p. 14). Such an approach, which argues that explanation can be forthcoming only if we pay more attention to particular aspects of dowry-paying societies (i.e., to context), manifests an extreme empiricism. The desire for an exact matching of model to data, which, in this context, almost seems to imply a model or theory of dowry for every society in which it is found, offers no scope for a comparative anthropology. My argument has been that one should attempt to determine what seem to be cross-cultural constants; my criticism of Goody is that he failed to distinguish the general from the particular. We should not suppose, however, that there will be no discrepant cases to our theory; the statements of anthropological theory are at best, probabilistic, and not deterministic. This is not to say that we should treat ethnographic evidence in a cavalier fashion, but rather that we should, in assessing the importance of any piece of such evidence for a general theory, see it in the context of the accumulated ethnographic evidence for and against that theory.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Spufford, M., “Peasant Inheritance Customs and Land Distribution in Cambridgeshire from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, , Thirsk, , AND Thompson, , eds., 156–76.Google Scholar

⁵² Friedl, , Vasilika, 51–52.Google Scholar

⁵³ Ladurie, , “Family Structure”, 41.Google Scholar

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⁵⁵ Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 141–43.Google Scholar

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⁵⁸ Goody, , “Inheritance”, 20–21.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Friedl, , Vasilika, 58–59.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 26–47, has noted that dowry systems in general will, in contrast to bridewealth, tend to place greater emphasis on affinal or alliance relationships.Google Scholar