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Cross-Cultural Research
2000; 34; 152
Cross-Cultural Research 
Dmitri Bondarenko and Andrey Korotayev
Family Size and Community Organization: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
http://ccr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/34/2/152
 
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 at EMORY UNIV on January 6, 2008http://ccr.sagepub.comDownloaded from 
 
Cross-Cultural Research/May 2000Bondarenko, Korotayev /FAMILYSIZE
Family Size and CommunityOrganization: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
Dmitri Bondarenko
 Russian Academy of Sciences
Andrey Korotayev
 Russian State University for Humanities
The communal democracy is shown to be significantly and nega-tively correlated with the family size. The correlation between thesetwovariables cannot becompletely explained by thefact that both of them have a similar curvilinear relationship with cultural com- plexity (measured hereby thenumber of supracommunal levels and the community/ settlement size). Hence, family size has some inde- pendent influence on communal democracy.
Evolutionists compare social and biological evolution. But anothergreat discovery in the field ofbiology offers an interesting analogy:homologous series (Vavilov, 1921, 1927, 1967). It is possible thatan equal level of sociopolitical (and cultural) complexity, which al-lows societies tosolve equally difficult problems,can be achieved insystems that not only have various forms but also are on essen-tially different evolutionary pathways that appeared simultane-
152Authors’Note:
Our research has been supported by the Ministry of Educa-tion of theRussian Federation Research Program Language,Culture,Soci-ety (project No. 01.0100.99.F). It is also the authors’pleasure to acknowl-edge Dr. Carol R. Ember at the Human Relations Area Files, New Haven,
Cross-Cultural Research, Vol. 34 No. 2, May 2000 152-189© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
 
 © 2000 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
 at EMORY UNIV on January 6, 2008http://ccr.sagepub.comDownloaded from 
 
ously in human society (and even prior toits origins;Butovskaja &Feinberg, 1993) and increased in quantity with sociocultural de-velopment (Pavlenko, 1996, pp. 229-251). Hence, human associa-tions may be compared not only vertically but also horizontally,evolving along the same or different evolutionary axes but compa-rable with each other by the principle called the law ofhomologousseries in biology.On the first level of analysis, the variability of evolutionarypathways may be reduced to two principal groups of homologousseries, as any society may be considered to have either a hierarchi-cal or nonhierarchical background.Take,for example,the famous Sahlins/Service typology (Service1962/1971; its outline is, however, already contained in Sahlins,1960, p. 37):band—tribe—chiefdom—state. This seems tobe a jus-tifiably unilineal scheme, as it considers the political dimension of social evolution. As is well-known, it was further suggested (withapparently reasonable justification) to substitute the sovereignvillage community for the tribe in this scheme (Carneiro, 1987,p. 760; Townsend, 1985, p. 146). Consequently, the tribe has founditselfon the brink ofbeing evicted from the model. However, politi-cal forms identical with what Service described as the tribe couldbe found in the medieval and modern Middle East (up to the pres-ent):These tribal systems often comprise several communities andoften have precisely the type of political leadership Servicedescribes as typical of the tribe (thus compare, e.g., Service, 1962/ 1971, p. 103, and Dresch, 1984a, p. 41; see also Abu: Gha:nim,1985, 1990, pp. 229-251; Chelhod, 1970, 1979, 1985, pp. 39-54;Dostal, 1974, 1985, 1990, pp. 47-58, 175-223; Dresch, 1984b, 1989;Obermeyer, 1982).The point is that we are dealing here with a type of polity thatcannot be identified as either bands or village communities(because such tribes normally comprise more than one commu-nity) or with chiefdoms (because they have an entirely differenttype ofpolitical leadership), or, naturally, with states. These tribal
Bondarenko, Korotayev / FAMILY SIZE 153
Connecticut,as well as thosepresent at theRussian Contributions toQuan-titative Cross-Cultural Research panel held within the Annual Meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico, February1999), William T. Divale, Melvin Ember, and R. Lee Munroe, for extremely fruitful and provocative discussions on the topic of this article. We thank them and referees for 
Cross-Cultural Research
for their comments. We wishto emphasize that they cannot be blamed for the article’s imperfections.
 
 © 2000 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
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