Reproduction and Succession: Studies in Anthropology, Law, and Society

The basis of this extraordinary effort is that all history is the history of reproduction and succession -- in other words, of kinship. Fox claims that anthropology seems to have forgotten this, while sociology never did grasp it, getting bogged down in something called the family. Economics and psychology, for their part, were never much help in the pursuit of cultural universals. Reproduction and Succession is an attempt at a constructive approach from social and evolutionary science to law. Fox tackles Mormon polygamy, the Baby M trials, Sophocle's Antigone, and the problem of the avunculate. It is a search for the universals that connect the rational search for law and the empirical search for anthropology.