A Conversation With Joan Vincent

A Conversation with Joan VincentAuthor(s): David NugentSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (August/October 1999), pp. 531-541Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/200050 .

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Reports

A Conversation withJoan Vincent1

david nugentDepartment of Anthropology, Colby College,Waterville, Me. 04901-8847, U.S.A. 25 ix 98

DN: From conversations we have had in the past, Iknow that experiences in your early life gave you a keensense of the importance of national boundaries, na-tional identities, and also of landscape and space.

JV: Yes. I was raised in England, but my father’s familycame from Alsace[-Lorraine], which is between Ger-many and France. And therefore the question of identi-ties has always been very critical for me. My father wasan antiquarian, and when I was a child he would takeme out in the car when he had long trips to Big Housesto look at their furniture, talking about the history bur-ied in the landscape. I was born in 1928 and grew upduring the depression and the war. My father workedfor the Free French, and my mother was a firefighter andair-raid warden. I remember shrapnel coming throughthe front door and my father picking it up, not realizingit would be hot. After the war only the vets got placesin university, so instead I went to teacher training col-lege and then taught secondary school.

DN: And then you went to Africa?

JV: Yes. I had begun to write fiction, and a journal calledThe Guide paid me 98 pounds for a story—enough foran ocean voyage. I ended up in Northern Rhodesia,where I realized that I would get as much time as Iwanted to travel and see the country by becoming aschoolteacher.

DN: Was the traveling and teaching enlightening, eye-opening, about events that were happening at the time?

JV: Not really. I was very simple-minded. When I lookback at my diary, life was full of bridge parties and cin-ema and boyfriends and tennis and the bush. A very co-lonial life in that respect. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Theother thing I did during my year there was sit the exam

1. 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4004-0005$1.00. This in-terview has been extracted from the transcript of a significantlylonger conversation between Joan Vincent and David Nugent thattook place on June 5, 1997, in Vincent’s New York City apartment.

531

Joan Vincent.

for a university correspondence course at LSE [LondonSchool of Economics] in what was called B.Sc. (Econ.)Part 1. To prepare for this I had to drive down to Cape-town, because I didn’t have a library. And there was oneexperience I’ll never, never forget. I was having to readpolitical philosophy, which meant I had to read Marx,and in the University of Capetown library, in a littleroom, the Communist Manifesto was chained to a read-ing desk!

DN: No! That’s astonishing.

JV: I swear it! And in spite of Bob Murphy’s teasing methat it was only after ’68 I became a Marxist, that wasa very formative experience—that any book could beseen to be that important! But most of my swotting wason 13th-century English castle building, and Marxdidn’t fit awfully well. I passed the exam, which meantthat I could go to LSE to pursue economic history or so-cial anthropology. Nobody in my family had a univer-sity education, so I didn’t know what I was doing. Iwent to LSE and said to the porter at the door, ‘‘I havepassed B.Sc. (Econ.) Part 1. Whom should I see?’’ Andhe said, ‘‘Well, Maurice Freedman’s in today. Why don’tyou go up and see him?’’ So I went up to the fourthfloor, and Maurice Freedman welcomed me to anthro-pology. The next day, in my first session, I walked into



532 current anthropology

a seminar about Jinghpaw terminology. And I think mypreference for process over structure was born that day!

DN: Indeed.

JV: I was at LSE for nine months. When I got my degree Istill wasn’t career [-oriented]. Someone offered me a jobdoing consumer interviewing—that was the way theysaw graduating women students. So instead I applied forand got a job teaching school for the sultan of Zanzibar.

DN: Nothing closer to home than Zanzibar?

JV: Oh, no. I wanted to travel. All of my family havetraveled. My mother was born in India. All my mother’ssisters were in the Indian Army Education Corps, but avery lower-middle-class or upper-working-class/subal-tern teaching. I have an imperial thread, then, but sohave 80% of the world’s population born when I was.And all the time I wasn’t resistant at all to this way oflife. I was having a whale of a time.

DN: Who were your students in Zanzibar?

JV: I had four and a half years lecturing in history at theTeacher Training College. My students were all Zanzi-baris, of all races. And I got them going out into the is-land doing oral history. All the time I was there the is-land was on the verge of independence. There were verytense elections and also preelection riots [in June 1961]and horrible massacres, mainly of the Manga Arabs outin the bush by the mainland African workers on theclove plantations. That spread into violence in thetowns. For me, it meant two things. First, my friendsthere (who were all Zanzibaris) got split between theparties not by race but by politics. Second, as a Euro-pean I had to join the B Specials,2 and I was asked to doresearch into the relationships between those whokilled and those who were killed—a type of Arensber-gian inquiry (i.e., who does what to whom and why).

DN: Did that inform your later interests as an anthro-pologist?

JV: Definitely! It was the sort of research I’ve loved todo ever since—first to see what is really going on andthen to look behind the event, to ‘‘deconstruct’’ it. Mydays were spent doing that, and in the evenings I hadthe horrible experience of working in the hospital. Itwas there I learned what panga [machete] savagery is,because the typical way of bringing somebody downwas first to strike across the legs, just below the knees,and when the victim had fallen attack the head. It wasa pretty ghastly nursing experience. Most of the peoplewho reached the hospital did so too late.

DN: After this experience in Zanzibar, you went to theUniversity of Chicago for graduate work?

2. A reserve police unit.

JV: Yes. I was accepted by the anthropology department,but at registration I suddenly had qualms over thecourse offerings, which seemed like what I’d been doingat LSE. I just remember Durkheim standing out like aguard in front of me, so I moved to political science.After those four years in Africa and on the eve of inde-pendence, comparative politics was much more mything than reading Durkheim all over again.

DN: When you look back at Chicago, what stands out?

JV: Hannah Arendt and Victor Turner. Hannah Arendtcame and gave a series of guest lectures, and I was inthe crowd.

DN: It doesn’t sound as if you had a great deal of contactwith anthropology.

JV: But I did. The problem with Chicago was that the pro-fessors one most wanted to work with were away, but Isat in oneverything I could. Ididn’t disown anthropology;I just put it into comparative politics. You see, because Igot to know Africa before receiving my degree I was very,very critical of how Africa was represented in anthropol-ogy. Studies of kinship and lineages were instructive, be-cause they were constraining on people, but there weremore important things, like the use of military force andlabor migration. That linked very much with the workthe Manchester school was doing in Central Africa. TheMancunians were really in the 20th century, and theiranthropology was way ahead of the game. If you think ofwhat they were actually reporting, you can reanalyze; Icould rework their anthropology, unlike the studies of so-cial structure, in terms of my own experience.

DN: By the fall of 1964 you’d finished your Master’s[1964] at Chicago and had started in the ColumbiaPh.D. program in anthropology.

JV: Yes. My first year was entirely four-fields, and onthe exam at year’s end I was asked to justify the fourfields. I could justify three quite easily. Linguistics, forme, was very important, because languages are. Arche-ology was, because it was history. But the physical an-thropology I did have problems with.

DN: They weren’t doing work on race?

JV: Not that I remember.

DN: Was it a shock to encounter the kind of racism thatone found and finds here?

JV: I hate to say it, but I wasn’t very sensitive to it untilthe ‘‘long, hot summers.’’ It was when Newark burned[1967] that it hit me and I saw racism as a national prob-lem. I didn’t see it as a personal problem. I didn’t see itas a university problem, though I probably should have.Class, not race, was then uppermost for me. Growing



Volume 40, Number 4, August–October 1999 533

up there had always been class. And always nationality,because of my French father.

DN: Did you get some fieldwork training at Columbia?

JV: I learned about fieldwork from the Wednesday Semi-nar, when Joan Mencher, fresh from India, gave a beau-tiful talk, with beautiful maps and diagrams. I learnedmost from the substantial analysis that somebody did.One didn’t get training in it.

DN: That’s interesting, because you have a very strongemphasis on fieldwork.

JV: Well, as you know, with my own students what Ihave done is simply get out a whole batch of my fieldmaterials, and we go through them together. It’s ahands-on thing for me.

DN: What is distinctive about the way you approachfieldwork?

JV: The Mancunian word for it is ‘‘nitty-gritty’’—‘‘down to earth,’’ really. But there is also a gendered di-mension to this. Women academics are marginalized agreat deal. They have generally read themselves as amargin in narratives conceived and written by thosewho have discursive power. This also relates to field-work. Women in the field, especially women alone inthe field, are very vulnerable. You rarely see yourself ascontrolling situations in the way fieldwork is generallyrepresented.

DN: To what extent did your doctoral committee at Co-lumbia influence the research program that you weredeveloping in Uganda?

JV: Very little. I don’t remember going to see anyoneabout anything. I did appreciate [Andrew] Vayda’s train-ing in ecology. It’s just that I could never close ‘‘my peo-ple’’ off; they were moving too much to mess up thekind of systems analysis he wanted to talk about. Buthis actual involvement in Indonesia, the applied side,comes out of Columbia. I also got reinforcement therefor wanting my anthropology to be engaged with thereal world, so that when the ethnicity article [1974b]got written, it wasn’t wholly academic. It was becausethose blue-collar racists were saying, ‘‘We all have thesame chances.’’ But in my graduate training Connie[Arensberg] had more influence than anyone else, inthe sense that he was always saying things like, ‘‘Whatdo you really mean by structure?’’—making one defineterms clearly. Also, I liked his sense of needing dia-grams, place, space, needing movement of people. Iliked what he was doing very much.

DN: Let’s talk about your fieldwork in Uganda.

JV: It came about because in 1966 I got a letter from Co-lin Leys asking if I would teach political sociology atMakerere [University College, Kampala], be a fellow atits East African Institute of Social Research, and do

fieldwork at the same time.3 Makerere was very excit-ing back in those days. Very small groups of students,all African, but from East Africa, generally. It was theelite university of East Africa. I planned to work southof Lake Victoria in Tanzania, in a multiracial, Euro-pean-African-Asian community. But when I got toMakerere I realized that that [project] was impractical,so I went to Teso district.

DN: You had gone to the field with a multiracial re-search problem to begin with?

JV: Yes. My Africa as opposed to anthropology’s Africa.

DN: And the problem that you worked on in Teso wasvery similar—not polyracial but certainly polyethnic.

JV: Yes. In fact, having come from Zanzibar, the prob-lem as I perceived it was, ‘‘Why aren’t these people ateach other’s throats?’’ I wrote a very harmony-orienteddissertation. It was only when George [Bond] knew I’dhad it accepted for publication that he suggested a chap-ter on competition or conflict. George has been a goodfriend. But the interesting thing about the actual disser-tation I wrote is that it had a very large historical com-ponent. I did no additional research between my disser-tation [1968], published as African Elite [1971], andTeso [1982]. In the dissertation it was just [Robert] Mur-phy saying, ‘‘What you don’t want is this’’—he cut outthe historical material.

DN: The distinctiveness of your approach really comesout here. You consciously located your field site on anindustrial frontier of colonial capitalism, you were do-ing quite detailed historical work, and you were lookingat local, regional, and national contexts.

JV: This was the Mancunian influence. The world isthere in their work. The Africans in their monographsare members of the Catholic church, of the Communistparty, of industrial workforces.

DN: Let’s turn to your years as an assistant professor,from ’68 to ’72. This was when your first publishedwork on Uganda began to come out, some of whichdeals with cooperatives and issues of economic develop-ment [1969, 1970, 1976d, 1988a].

JV: Once you were a fellow at the East African Instituteof Social Research you got involved in all the researchproblems being addressed there, including this one. ButI have always thought that cooperation hasn’t been ap-preciated enough as a form of politics and had made thecotton marketing co-op in Gondo part of my field re-search from the beginning. I was also able to link as-

3. Leys had been a visiting professor at the University of Chicagowhen Vincent was earning her Master’s degree in political sciencethere.




pects of the cooperative organization with the instru-mental activity of its key figures [1974c].

DN: Let me ask you about African Elite, in which youfocus on polyethnicity and the emergence of a ruralelite in Teso. In reading this book one is struck by thefact that its content is strongly historical materialistbut at the same time there are no references to worksof an explicitly historical materialistic nature. Within acouple of years of the publication of African Elite, how-ever, in your published work [1974b, 1977b] you refer topeople like E. P. Thompson [1963], Lenin [1964 (1899)],Engels [1958], and others who are clearly in the Marxiantradition. Furthermore, when I was in graduate schoolI heard a story about interactions that you had as a grad-uate student with Marvin Harris when he was preparingThe Rise of Anthropological Theory [1968]. Accordingto this bit of Columbia folklore you were insisting onthe importance of the Scottish political economists inmaking sense of Marx. All this suggests a deep familiaritywith political economy from an early date. In light of this,it seems as if African Elite could have been more explic-itly historical materialist than it was. Considering the ar-guments that youmakelater on, inworks likeAnthropol-ogy and Politics [1990a] and ‘‘Engaging Historicism’’[1991b], about thevarious conditions that affect what canand cannot be written and what is and is not said at anyparticular point in time, what were some of the condi-tions that affected how African Elite was written?

JV: It was written as a doctoral thesis, and very quickly,when I first came back from the field. Given Murphy’scutting out of anything historical, what was publishedas African Elite was a synchronic account of the social,political, and economic relationships where I had donemy fieldwork. I defended in May of 1968, so the thesiswas written prior to the key political developments ofthat year. And ’68 was a very, very important time. Justas the feminist movement hit me a few years later, sodid ’68. It certainly made me read a whole set of differ-ent things, in part because the people around me were.It also embodied the critical things that were being ex-posed at the time with respect to the department, theuniversity, the country, the lot. The exposes had a di-rect appeal for me because this is the way I’ve alwaystried to understand something—by looking behind andby diagramming and showing this connection with this.So why the E. P. Thompson and the rest? I think all ofus—Bill Roseberry, certainly—were moving towardthis. My knowledge of historical materialism came outof reading Ramparts, from reading what came out in’68, and linking up with the MARHO group,4 and read-ing the Review of Political Economy.

DN: That must have been a very exciting time. Thatwas also the period when the Columbia department got

4. The Mid-Atlantic Radical History Organization, a collective ofcritical social scientists in the New York City area that was formedin the 1960s. MARHO originally published the MARHO Newslet-ter and since 1975 has published the Radical History Review.

involved in the antiwar movement, and there was a bigconfrontation on campus.

JV: That’s right! Once again [as in Zanzibar], I wasseeing people I highly respected torn between two fac-tions.

DN: Let’s talk about ‘‘The Structuring of Ethnicity’’[1974b]. This piece has had a significant impact on thefield, and it is novel and important in a number of ways.You take a very highly original approach to the wholetopic. You stress the need to make the study of eth-nicity part of the comparative study of different formsof inequality, like caste and class and race. You focus onthe centrality of boundary-making mechanisms, whichmay or may not come from the state, but you reallystress the pivotal role of the state in different construc-tions of inequality. You talk about the relevance of ide-ology, about who controls ways of understanding andwhat is considered true, and you also stress the contin-gent and contextual nature of ethnicity as a whole. Canyou talk about who your major influences were? I thinkwe’ve already heard about some of them.

JV: I think, with respect to ‘‘ethnicity,’’ my own mar-ginality. I had a very clear sense of being a very Englishwoman in America. This notion of being a ‘‘residentalien’’ anthropologist in the United States was certainlythere when I wrote ‘‘In the Shadow of the Armory’’[1989a]. But I really wrote the ethnicity article out of akind of anger that people could say that it was equallyeasy for anyone to get to the top in a society like this—ignoring color, class, capitalism, ignoring everything. Iam very impressed by what you saw in the article; Imust read it sometime. I think it was timely, probably.

DN: Yes. I think it was both timely and . . .

JV: Don’t you dare say ‘‘ahead of its time’’ [laughing].5

In the New York Times there were letters galore aboutethnicity, and the whole situation seemed so impossi-bly unjust. So I wrote it as a political statement.

DN: You started your research project on Ireland atabout the same time that you wrote ‘‘The Structuringof Ethnicity,’’ in ’73. Why Ireland?

JV: Because Amin had taken over in Uganda. It tookfriends who worked in Uganda five or six years to feelthey could go back without absolute distress, and I justdidn’t want to get involved in that. I got a Guggenheim6

to investigate the roots of the ongoing political conflict[see 1989c, 1991a]. With my Uganda work I thought Iwas going to the most peaceful, harmonious country in

5. The allusion here is to her review of the work of AlexanderLesser (1988b), where her emphasis is on showing how Lesser wasa man of his time although today he is frequently regarded as hav-ing been ‘‘ahead of’’ it.6. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship forfieldwork in Northern Ireland (1973–74).




East Africa. When that went sour, with Amin, I feltkind of qualified to work in Northern Ireland. WithUganda I felt I couldn’t be critical, whereas in NorthernIreland, given its present status as part of the UnitedKingdom, I can be as critical as I want to be.

DN: Why County Fermanagh?

JV: Because it was on the border—because, given the1922 treaty, it should have been in the south. It had avery large Catholic population, and the Boundary Com-mission proposed dividing Ireland on the basis of reli-gion, but the whole of Fermanagh got placed into thenorth. Once I started researching the roots of the pres-ent condition it was fascinating, because the IRA hadactually fought against British troops in Fermanagh.They invaded it in May 1922 and again in the 1950s. Itwas contested space.

DN: In many of your works, past and present, you makeit clear that while the great European social theorists ofpast times have a great deal to contribute to our field,the unique contribution that we can make comesfrom fieldwork-based analysis, which drives innovativenew theory and at least has the potential to contributeto comparative understandings in the present. Youdevelop this argument in Anthropology and Politics[1990a], in ‘‘System and Process’’ [1986], and in ‘‘Engag-ing Historicism’’ [1991b]. Furthermore, in ‘‘EngagingHistoricism,’’ you make a distinction between ethnog-raphies that empower the reader and those that don’t.Those that empower the reader—you call them ‘‘richmultivocal analyses’’—give the reader ‘‘something tofight back with.’’ And these ethnographies, you argue,are based on fieldwork. Why does new theory followfrom innovative fieldwork and not vice versa?

JV: I’m very concerned about the term ‘‘theory.’’ I don’tthink anthropology is a theoretical discipline. This ismy problem. I am very unhappy with constructedknowledge, whether it’s state statistics—the categoriesthat the state forms—or academic constructivism, and Isuppose my emphasis on fieldwork is a kind of resistance.There’s somebody out there talking, and one is capturingsomething that is not in the systems one comes out of.My feeling for pacificism, globalism, and anticapitalismdoesn’t allow for constructed knowledge.

DN: This sounds, in many ways, like an argumentagainst hegemony.

JV: Yes, and that’s a fairly new word in our discipline.It’s very important to take into account the meaning ofa word in the time it is used.

DN: By the mid-seventies one senses in your work anincreasingly direct engagement with issues of social dif-ferentiation, colonialism, capitalism, and class. Onecan see this change in, for example, ‘‘Colonial Chiefsand the Making of Class: A Case Study from Teso,

Uganda’’ [1977a], ‘‘Teso in Transformation: ColonialPenetration in Teso District and its Contemporary Sig-nificance’’ [1978b], and ‘‘Political Consciousness andStruggle among an African Peasantry’’ [1983]. It is mostclearly reflected, however, in Teso, where you talkabout the formation of a peasantry, a rural proletariat,a chiefly ‘‘class,’’ and the development of underdevelop-ment. If one compares African Elite with Teso, the shiftin focus from polyethnicity to class formation is prettyclear. You’ve already explained that you did not consultany new sources for Teso and that you originally hada chapter on history in your dissertation that Murphydiscouraged you from including.

JV: I’m not sure it was a chapter—it was a third of themanuscript.

DN: Can you talk about your intellectual developmentduring the seventies in relationship to the new kinds ofquestions you address in Teso?

JV: Much of the reading that I did during this period wasin connection with a course I taught at Barnard. I inher-ited it from Joan Mencher, a visiting lecturer, whocalled it ‘‘Societies in Transition.’’ I focused on the‘‘transformation’’ of agrarian society, the developmentof agrarian capitalism and its concomitant socialchanges. This led me to read much more on peasantries,pure and simple. I read the Latin American material forthe first time, because I needed to know more aboutsmallholding as a notion and more about haciendas orestates or whatever you’re going to call them. Lenin hadalways been there, as a need, from the point of view ofsimply where the manure comes from. So had the reallybasic things, like Slicher van Bath [1963]. So by then Iwas reading pretty broadly on agrarian society.

DN: In what ways did your conceptual frame of refer-ence shift between African Elite and Teso?

JV: Things were coming together analytically in the1970s, partly because of the Latin American material.This was a period when the development/underdevel-opment argument was being mounted—consider the re-thinking that took place along these lines in the seven-ties. Teso came out in ’82, so I probably finished it in1980. The fact that I was reviewing European work wasalso important.

DN: You’re definitely reviewing European work [1974a,1976a, b, c, 1978a, 1980a, b, c]. There is clearly an en-gagement between what you’re doing in Ireland and inAfrica and Latin America as well.

JV: The next turning point there comes in ’85, when Iwas asked to produce a review essay on anthropologyand Marxism [1985]. I remember talking to Shirley [Lin-denbaum]7 in the corridor at a party and saying to her,‘‘Do you realize what it will do for my reputation if I

7. Lindenbaum was editor of the American Ethnologist at the time.




do it?’’ And this is when I got labeled as a Marxist—having always taught Weber and Durkheim and Paretoand Marx, I’d suddenly become a Marxist.

DN: You began publishing articles based on your re-search in Ireland in the early to mid-eighties, and in anumber of these works you critically address represen-tations of religion as the primordial, polarizing force ofcontemporary Ireland. Could you briefly explain yourviews on the limitations of religious-based argumentsto explain the contemporary problems in Ireland?

JV: Yes. Allow me another five hours! It’s not a generalstatement but a statement about Northern Ireland,where when you say ‘‘religion’’ you really mean ‘‘right-wing Protestantism’’ as expressed in the Orange Orderand when you say ‘‘Catholicism’’ you mean ‘‘all whorebel.’’ And once you adopt that Establishment view ofa religious rightness (and right in both senses of theterm) and a Catholic revolutionary mob, the wholething becomes characterized in those terms. When youlook underneath, you go back to the 17th century to co-lonial domination and the penal code and a whole sys-tem of political, economic, and legal constraints onCatholics [see 1990b]. One of my contributions, I think,is the fact that I’m working in a county which was dom-inated by an aristocracy which was Orange-oriented butalso anti-Whig, so I’ve got this lovely contradiction.When the famine comes along the British won’t take fullresponsibility for therelief, so theoldestablishmentstepsin, and then the question of sectarian discriminationcomes in. Out of these developments emerges a nonsec-tarian, more class-based type of politics.

DN: Fascinating. You have a book in progress on theculture and politics of the Irish Famine [n.d.a].

JV: That’s coming out this summer. When I say ‘‘com-ing out,’’ I mean out of my gut.

DN: What are you doing in the book?

JV: I’m historicizing and contextualizing and politiciz-ing the Great Irish Famine in a particular time andplace. I begin in the 19th century, when the British hadintroduced an Irish Poor Law that was really intendedto cut away at Irish local government, which in Ferma-nagh was in the hands of a Protestant minority of land-owners. Ostensibly, the Poor Law was meant to relievepoverty, but the Fermanagh workhouse held only a fewhundred people and something like 8,000 needed assis-tance. It was very clearly said that the ‘‘workhouse sys-tem’’ wasn’t intended to relieve the famine; it was sim-ply a new form of taxation. At the height of the faminethe British withdrew completely from famine relief,which meant that the whole cost had to be borne by thelocal people. Private correspondence between leadingpoliticians shows that from the beginning their goalwas to create a ‘‘transitional period’’ between tradi-tional and capitalist agriculture—and they’re con-

stantly using the term ‘‘capitalist agriculture.’’ I providea very detailed account of what happened in Fermanaghduring the famine. I describe the county in terms of acarrying trade during which even potatoes were beingexported (those that were grown on the estates). And Ihave a final chapter, ‘‘Aftermath,’’ in which I cut rightto the bone of who profited. In this I draw on anthropo-logical critiques of ‘‘development’’ and comparativework on famines [see also 1995, 1997b,c].

DN: In 1986 you published ‘‘System and Process’’ in theAnnual Review of Anthropology. In this piece you distin-guish two broad approaches to anthropology, systems-and process-oriented, and you suggest that they may beunderstoodas integral to ‘‘the internal conceptualcontra-diction that lies at the heart of theory in general.’’

JV: Did I say that?

DN: Yes. You go on to say that a shift from system toprocess, process to system, is likely to occur when ‘‘thesecond source of conceptualization in anthropology, itsempirical base, the fieldwork situation, changes.’’ Andyou suggest that the systems thinking of the 1950s andthe early sixties gave way to process thinking in the six-ties and seventies, partly in response to postindepen-dence changes in the Third World. Since the mid-sev-enties, global changes in the organization of power andeconomy of the kind that Harvey [1989], Mandel [1975],and others have talked about have resulted in signifi-cant shifts in the fieldwork situation and in the prob-lems posed by many anthropologists. In light of your ar-gument about the centrality of the fieldwork situationin general and considering the global shifts that be-gan in the early seventies, how would you characterizethe postcolonial movement in anthropology? Are wewitnessing a kind of a ‘‘hyperprocessuality’’ that hasemerged in relation to radical shifts in the empiricalbase of our discipline?

JV: There we are. The answer is yes. First, I think I needto specify the postcolonial fieldwork situation, becausereally, the fieldwork situation is the fieldworker’s situa-tion. Having said that, it’s very hard to recognize a dis-tinct ‘‘Third World’’ (or a North distinct from South).I’m not sure whether it was out of ignorance that wedidn’t include global shifts and hyperprocessuality ear-lier, but certainly they’re much more dominant in ourthinking now. Consider the drugs and arms trades, par-ticularly. Second is the issue of representations of thepostcolonial world—particularly that of a floating dias-pora. I’m with Gayatri Spivak on this one [see Spivak1993, 1994]. I think it’s a rather elitist view of the post-colonial world. By far the great mass of people are stillbeing pinned down and oppressed as they’ve alwaysbeen, for example, in Timor. There is great value in thenotion that we should see where we ourselves are com-ing from—that we should position ourselves within ourperception of the Third World and seek to get behindand beyond it.




DN: In 1985–86, you were a fellow at the Institute forAdvanced Study at Princeton, and the following yearyou were a fellow at the National Humanities Centerin North Carolina.

JV: I receivedboth fellowships in thesame year. NHCwaswilling to wait the year. That was marvelous of them.

DN: Can you talk about your intellectual developmentduring this period? What were you reading? What wereyou finding particularly influential?

JV: The Princeton year was great because Joan Scott wasthere. I learned a lot from the gender and feminist histo-rians. The year at NHC was equally valuable. I readJameson [1984] for the first time, I read literary criti-cism and everything that came out of the Duke EnglishDepartment, I read in what one would call culturalstudies. By then, anthropology had seen the text, and Iwas reading a social history that saw the text as rele-vant. I was crossing every line possible in my reading,which was great.

DN: Do you feel that your work shifted directly as a re-sult of being exposed to this literature?

JV: No doubt about it. Stylistically, I loosened up in mywriting. I also got invited to write on law around thistime, which was nice, because June Starr asked me towrite about colonial law in Uganda [1989b].

DN: In a number of your published works you offer acritique of cultural explanations and a focus on culturalartifacts like texts to the extent that they are disembod-ied from the social and political contexts in which theyare embedded and from which they emerge. One can seethis very clearly in Anthropology and Politics, whichwill certainly stand for decades as the seminal work onthe history not only of anthropology and politics but ofthe field. In fact, it is already being used as such.

JV: So it seems. This, again, relates to my ignoranceabout how to write books. Today I would retarget thatbook completely.

DN: What would you do now?

JV: I’d treat it more as an intellectual history of a disci-pline which happened to look at politics. The work orig-inated in my having taught political anthropology forseveral years. These rubrics are damning. They’veclosed my mind. What you say about Anthropology andPolitics is very flattering, but I hope that it’s not thecase. Sally Falk Moore’s review of the book is excellent.She brings out that it is an Africanist’s view, an Englishperson’s view, a social anthropological view, and reallyan LSE/Mancunian view.

DN: One of the very interesting things about the bookis that you use the insights and the methodologies that

anthropologists usually apply to other societies andturn them back on the history of the discipline. And onething that emerges is really a quite fundamental chal-lenge to the way in which the history of the field is usu-ally understood. In the process, you recover hidden his-tories and alternative, possible trajectories for thediscipline that might have been—almost were, were onthe verge of becoming—but ultimately never were. Yourposition and your evidence seriously undermine intellec-tualhistoriesof thedisciplinethatfocusonlinearprogres-sion of ideas or theories. And of course, these are the mostpopular, the ones that seem never to go away.

JV: This is, again, the ‘‘System and Process’’ argument.

DN: How did Anthropology and Politics come intobeing?

JV: In terms of influences, if you go back to somebodylike [J. G. A.] Pocock [1975] in intellectual history, thisis what it’s all about, which is contextualizing. What Itry to do is point to a counterfactual history. There’s anelement of historical imagination in all of this, and Ifind that exciting—but, essentially, the old idea of con-textualizing, sociologizing. I’ve always loved detectivenovels, and it shows in African Elite. No one has everfollowed up on that list of people who are suspects tosee who gets to the top, and I must do an essay ex-plaining why so-and-so got to the top.8 But in the sameway, the detective aspect of Anthropology and Politicslooks at footnotes, acknowledgments, reads the marginarea, and sees even more in them than in the explicittext, which is a very self-conscious, finished produc-tion. There are little hints of this methodology, but ithasn’t been systematized within anthropology—andthis is exactly what people in literary criticism and phi-losophy are doing. So this purely came out of my read-ing at North Carolina.

DN: So you’re doing the ‘‘systematizing’’?

JV: [laughing] Sure. I didn’t realize I’d used that term.You’re quite right.

DN: One of the interesting concepts that you developedin Anthropology and Politics is the idea of the ‘‘movingfrontier,’’ which you had used in Teso as well but nowdefined somewhat more broadly.

JV: Of course, it comes from F. G. Bailey’s [1957] refer-ence to a moving frontier in colonial India. I then tracethis frontier historically across the United States, andalso the moving frontier of knowledge, which I linkwith the capitalist, colonialist picture.

DN: In Anthropology and Politics you have three differ-ent meanings for the moving frontier. One is the expan-

8. The reference here is to the individuals listed on p. 13 of AfricanElite, all of whom were competing for political influence duringVincent’s fieldwork.




sive frontier of industrial capitalism. Another is whatyou call an ‘‘internal frontier’’ as first electoral repre-sentation and then public education were introducedinto British and American society. And then there’s athird meaning—the frontiers of science.

JV: I am most interested in the second. British anthro-pology was first funded by the British Association forthe Advancement of Science, in the form of studies ofScotland, Ireland, and Wales. You can see the link be-tween capitalism and imperialism in the need to knowabout these ‘‘dangerous’’ people who were being up-rooted from their villages with industrial advance.

DN: One senses in your work a growing engagementwith questions of hegemony [see 1994a].

JV: But ‘‘hegemony’’ understood as subtlety and nuance.If you grew up in a class society this is what you lookfor. The Gramsci I really like is [his work on] South It-aly [1971].

DN: Considering the importance of the broader politi-cal environment in your formulation and in light of theposition advanced by Jameson [1984], Harvey [1989],and Mandel [1975] that capitalism has entered a newphase of organization as of the early 1970s (which hascorresponding influence in the realm of culture and intel-lectual movements), how would you characterize yourposition with respect to the debate within anthropologyconcerning postmodernism as qualitative rupture?

JV: I always have this problem of looking at my book-shelf and seeing these 50 definitions of postmodernismand asking what exactly anyone is really talking about.But for me the question goes back to the old distinctionbetween colonialism and capitalism—not seeing themas the same thing. And here postmodernism fits verynicely in terms of intellectual and European history,whereas what [Mandel and Harvey] are talking aboutcan be completely divorced from imperial history andalso from European roots. If only people would look fora few more postmodernisms somewhere else. David,you work a lot in this area of noncapitalist societies in acapitalist world, and I feel that that’s the emphasis thatallows you to penetrate this type of question. I’m hope-less on abstractions; I really do not like abstractions. It’sa limitation, and I’m sticking with it.

DN: In recent years there has been some very importantwork done in our field about the relationship betweenculture and place, focusing on the idea that what mightbe called the postmodern condition has allowed anthro-pologists to recognize long-standing hidden assump-tions regarding culture as tied to place. Do you see anearlier genealogy within the discipline with which toconnect this more recent work?

JV: I thought it had long been generally understood thatculture was something that people construct and is

changing. So any association with place isn’t at all auto-matic when you talk culture. I find social fields, arenas,and activity fields to be more useful concepts.

DN: Practice theory has emerged in the past decade orso as an important new theoretical approach.

JV:Yes. Asyouknow, I tend todisagreewith thatchronol-ogy. I think it’s been around much longer than that. Bour-dieu took a great deal from my dear old Mancunians.

DN: And the discussion in practice theory of structureand agency?

JV: It’s funny, because some Irish historians are still using‘‘agency’’ to mean the institution. I used the word at Dub-lin Castle9 andrealizedthatwhattheymeantby ‘‘agency’’was ‘‘the relief agency.’’ The use of ‘‘agency’’ has had un-fortunate masking effects. That’s a problem. When youtalked ‘‘activity’’ or ‘‘action’’ or even ‘‘behavior’’ therewas substance attached to it, whereas now ‘‘agency’’ . . .

DN: Is an abstraction.

JV: Yes.

DN: Dual abstractions [structure and agency].

JV: Yes! I like Bourdieu’s work very much, but essen-tially the work which isn’t in the practice-theory vol-ume. Anything on Algeria per se really needs to be readand taken aboard in postcolonial anthropology. And hislater work on Distinction [1984] I just love.

DN: In much of your published material you stress theimportance of carefully detailed fieldwork and a com-prehensive review of the ‘‘archive in the field.’’ This ap-proach to fieldwork has come under attack in manyquarters in recent years, especially by people who areinterested in what they call nontraditional researchproblems. To what extent do you feel that fieldworkmethods and fieldwork as you have done it and appreci-ate it are ill-suited to what some people are regardingnow as the unique research problems and concerns ofthe post-Fordist or postmodern era?

JV: I wish you’d stop that last sort of characterizationand just tell me precisely what you mean. I’ve neverseen observation as simple. And I don’t think fieldworkis a method. It’s a situation that one is in, and other peo-ple are in, and you are trying to understand the resolu-tions that they come to with respect to the human con-ditions they face. And I can’t see how that can ever beout-of-date. In my work on AIDS with George [Bond] inUganda [see Vincent and Bond 1988, 1991, 1997a, b;Bond et al. 1997; Vincent, Bond, and Rijal 1991], I thinkit was our training in old-fashioned, traditional fieldwork

9. At the conference ‘‘International Perspectives on the Great IrishFamine,’’ Dublin, May 9–10, 1997 (see Vincent 1997b). A revisedand expanded version of this paper was published as Vincent 1997c.




that allowed us to be attuned to things going on that weotherwisecouldnothaveseen. Idon’tseehowanyanthro-pologist can not study interactions and interrelation-ships. Otherwise, you’re not studying human beings.

DN: Let’s talk about your AIDS project. In the lateeighties, you began working on a project focusing onAIDS in Africa, and you’ve written several articles, co-authored with George Bond, based on your research[Vincent and Bond 1991, 1997a, b], one of which was areport for UNDP [Vincent, Bond, and Rijal 1991]. Youhave also coedited a book on AIDS in Africa and the Ca-ribbean with George Bond, John Kreniske, and Ida Sus-ser [Bond et al. 1997]. Here we see a return to a themethat you pursued early in your published work and prob-lematized in Anthropology and Politics—the relation-ship between applied and academic work. How did youget involved in this project, and where is it going?

JV: The Columbia Presbyterian Hospital was organizingAIDS relief in Uganda, and they wanted somebody towrite a critical report of their program. I was asked be-cause I was from Uganda, as it were. I accepted becauseI wanted to get back to Uganda. George was also in-vited. We hoped that one day there would be anotherconsultancy request in Zambia so I could go back there,but it never came off.

DN: How are you approaching AIDS in this work?

JV: As we would approach anything else. The AIDS epi-demic could as well be a messianic movement. It couldbe a new form of currency. It has happened to hit a groupof people in a place at a time, and one wants to understandits impact and the reaction to it—understand its meaningto the people. But here there is the added dimension ofhaving to understand the role of American intervention.So it’s very much the actual understanding of the societythat has been hit by the HIV virus. We haven’t gone inas medical anthropologists but as anthropologists into acommunity that has been hit by crisis.

DN: Do you plan on continuing research in this area?

JV: Yes. George and I have got so many unpublished pa-pers that we ought to continue, but he’s terribly busy.I think for both of us our careers are constantly over-taken by what else we have to do all the time. I haveseveral times put all of our AIDS articles, unpublishedand published, under chapters, one to ten, and an intro-duction could be written and we could get it out, but itwould be very out-of-date. And that means that we needto go back.

DN: In one of your articles on AIDS, ‘‘Living on theEdge: Changing Social Structures in the Context ofAIDS’’ [Vincent and Bond 1991], you emphasize ‘‘theneed to recognize, as an historical and social condition,the effects of war and its aftermath on a population andregion, even if it means setting aside for the short termthe concepts and the constructs of an earlier academic

era’’ [see also Vincent n.d.c; Vincent and Bond n.d.]. Doyou remember which concepts and constructs you hadin mind here?

JV: I don’t, offhand. It’s one of my favorite points, andit’s antistructuralist, or anti- the Africa that I wastaught, with its emphasis on kinship, community, so-cial order, and stability. I see far more need for recogni-tion of ‘‘men in motion,’’ social fields, power, violence,and global relations. You think of labor migration. Andmy example is usually from Fortes [1945], where yousuddenly learn that four-fifths of the young men of theTallensi village are not there. And actually, that wassomething with the AIDS inquiry as well; we found thatone entire questionnaire was given out in one districtwhen most of the young men weren’t there. Obviously,it has been the Uganda experience which has forced onme the need to focus on war.10 Once you find somethingin people’s lives as prominent as labor migration or war,then you begin to critique the way a monograph was notwritten, permitting a counterfactual intellectual his-tory of our discipline.

DN: When I was reading several articles you’ve done re-cently on war, ‘‘Hostilities on the Margin of Knowledge,Northeast Uganda, 1991’’ [n.d.b], and ‘‘War in Uganda,North and South’’ [1994b], my impression was that youwere beginning to conceptualize war as more centrallyand regularly involved in contemporary social processesthan you had in the past.

JV: Certainly.

DN: This awareness would also be suggested by a vol-ume that you’ve coedited with George Bond on violencein African states [Bond and Vincent n.d.], which I be-lieve is forthcoming this year.

JV: Yes. It’s interesting,because I saw violence differentlyin Northern Ireland. In Northern Ireland you can seefighting between interest groups and factions, ‘‘neigh-borly killings,’’ Seamus Heaney calls it, even if it is also‘‘them’’ versus ‘‘the state,’’ whereas with the civil war inTeso it’s been the impact of war on people who weren’tthemselves fighting. I think that difference has hit home[with me] a lot more. It’s that impact of war that is captur-ing me rather more than the politics of war.

DN: In ‘‘Hostilities on the Margin of Knowledge’’ youshow how the experience of war can leave populationswith powerful lingering memories of abuse and atroci-ties. And, furthermore, that these memories can act asa counter to state rhetoric that seeks to sanitize or ratio-nalize the atrocities into a totalizing official historythat legitimizes state power. Is this an example?

JV: Yes. I think you need to speak of regime powerrather than state. The civil war in Teso is not denial of

10. See Vincent 1989c, d and 1990b on hostilities in Ireland and1994b and n.d.c on war in Uganda.




state at all. At the time of the conflict human rightscommissioners were going around inquiring about thepast atrocities while electoral commissioners weretouring the countryside organizing the next election. Soit isn’t the state. It’s the regime that could be held re-sponsible for allowing the abuses to occur. One of thegreat fears in Uganda was that after the Commission ofInquiries encouraged the population to itemize theatrocities there would be no follow-up. It was catharsisbut nothing more. Being behind the scenes as I waswhen I accompanied a Columbia University humanrights team to Kampala in 1991, I heard the humanrights commissioner saying, ‘‘But I only have one type-writer!’’ You get a sense of realism about what’s goingon. I’m not sure who is served by the inquiry.

DN: Let’s talk about reviews. You’ve done over 40 re-views, and over 5 review essays. Why so many?

JV: I think when you’re busy teaching and giving mostof your energies to teaching and administration in a col-lege, which one has to, it’s a way of having the worldreach out to you that allows you to reach out to theworld. And I’ve reviewed some great books in my time.I also love reading reviews. I like analyzing reviews. Ilike writing an intellectual history using reviews, be-cause I think many of people’s best ideas come in re-views—ideas that they never have time to develop. If Icould get a job reviewing for the rest of my life, I’d loveit. (current anthropology, please note . . .) Have youseen the Geertz review I did [1996a]? I’m trying now toanalyze the whole context of a writer’s work. One edi-tor for whom I did this wrote back, particularly, to saywhy he liked it [see also 1994c, d ].

DN: I have one closing question. What do you like bestof your own work?

JV: My teaching! Only in teaching do I present myselfas a whole person. But you meant to refer to my writtenwork, and I honestly don’t think I can say. For onething, I forget half the things I write. I’m not kiddingabout that. If you mean what do I enjoy writing, the an-swer is nothing, because I find it very hard work. I prefergiving talks to writing. I did find the encyclopedia arti-cles [1996b] strangely challenging, simply because itseemed such a ludicrous task to have to write 3,000words on the subject of American anthropology or fac-tions or the Ghost Dance. I can tell you paragraphs Ilike. I like the opening of ‘‘On Law and Hegemonic Mo-ments’’ [1994a]. I liked doing the review of [Geertz’s]After the Fact [1996a] because of what I become awareof in writing it—for example, how very important theChicago Committee on New Nations was for Geertzfrom a networking point of view and how he was neveralone in the field but was always with family, students,or colleagues. That really struck me. It is so alien to myexperience of fieldwork. But I hadn’t realized that untilI started writing the review. This is why, for me, re-viewing is analysis. ‘‘Ahead of His Time?’’ [1988b] I

liked because I had a book to review and yet had spaceto research the background. Also, it was the first timeI had tried to bring in the textual analysis that I waslearning at NHC. In ‘‘System and Process’’ I like the oneparagraph where I set up a binary opposition betweensystems and process vocabularies. I like the kind of pas-sion that lay behind ‘‘Structuring of Ethnicity.’’

DN: Those are the questions that I wanted to ask you,unless you’d like to add anything . . .

JV: I don’t think so. I think you’ve probed as far as Icould think. It’s a funny exercise that we’re involved in,I must say.

DN: How did it seem to you?

JV: You’ve constructed a self that I hadn’t recognized asbeing as consistent as you’ve exposed, because mywhole sense is of very diverse sets of specialist readingaudiences. And yet, somehow, you’ve connected themquite a bit. The word ‘‘career’’ throws me. I think ‘‘tra-jectory’’ is more appropriate to describe what I havedone. I don’t know who launches it and where it ends,but that’s what it is. With your questions you’re doingwhat I’m trying to do with my reviews. You’re trying todo the analysis. This is what I like about it. I think thisis the only way we can have a history of anthropology.

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———. 1997b. ‘‘Community-based organization in Uganda: Ayouth initiative,’’ in AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean: Casestudies of an epidemic. Edited by G. Bond, J. Kreniske, I. Sus-ser, and J. Vincent. Boulder: Westview Press.

v incent, joan, george c. bond, and a. ri jal. 1991.Issues report: HIV/AIDS in African development. Report tothe United Nations Development Program, January.

Painted Slabs fromSteenbokfontein Cave:The Oldest Known Parietal Artin Southern Africa1

antonieta jerardino and natalieswanepoelDepartment of Archaeology, University of CapeTown, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa/209 MaxwellHall, Anthropology Department, Syracuse University,Syracuse, N.Y. 13244-1090, U.S.A. 12 x 98

In recent years there has been increasing interest in thepossibility of dating rock art. The age of cave paintings

1. 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4004-0009$1.00. Fundingfor the excavation and dating of Steenbokfontein Cave materialwas received from the Swan Fund, Wenner-Gren Foundation (GrantNumber 5699), and from a Council for Science Development grantto the Spatial Archaeology Research Unit at the University of CapeTown. The assistance of all these institutions is gratefully ac-knowledged. We are particularly grateful to Herman and KittaBurger of Steenbokfontein farm for their assistance, friendship, andhospitality. We are also in debt to Royden Yates for his consider-able support in the field and subsequent discussion of the signifi-cance of the painted slabs. Thanks are due to Suzanne Behan,Megan Bryan, Grant Hall, Lee Manning, Jason Orton, and AndrewWard for their dedicated work during the recovery of the paintedslabs, as well as to John Parkington, Judy Sealy, and Janette Deaconfor their support. We thank Tony Manhire for helping during theprocess of consulting the Spatial Archaeology Research Unit DataBase and discussion of the painted slab findings and Anne Solomonand Judy Sealy for commenting on the text.

and rock engravings has always been of concern to ar-chaeologists but has rarely dominated research ques-tions in rock art studies, largely because of our inabilityto date the art accurately. Relative dates for painted im-ages have recently been obtained through the analysisof superimposed images, stylistic changes, and changein imagery content (Chippindale and Tacon 1993,Mguni 1997, Russel 1997, Thackeray 1983, Yates,Manhire, and Parkington 1994). AMS radiocarbon dat-ing has the potential of providing absolute dates forpainted images; because of the small samples required,it allows carbon-rich pigment samples from rock paint-ings to be dated directly with minimal impact on theimages (Watchman 1993).

Over the past ten years, AMS dating of parietal art hasbeen improved and widely employed. As a result of thiseffort, painted rock art now appears to be considerablyolder than was previously thought. For instance, someof the oldest rock art imagery in Australia has beendated, though not without controversy, to betweenabout 9,000 and 30,000 years ago (Loy et al. 1990,Watchman and Hatte 1996), whilst the oldest paintingsfound in European Palaeolithic caves have been datedto between approximately 12,000 and 28,000 years b.p.(Clottes 1997, Clottes et al. 1997). By comparison, veryfew AMS dates have been obtained from rock paintingsin southern Africa. A sample from Sonia’s Cave in thewestern Cape (fig. 1) was dated to 500 6 140 b.p. (Vander Merwe, Sealy, and Yates 1987), and more recently adate of 330 b.p. was established for a sample obtainedfrom Esikolweni Shelter in Kwa-Zulu Natal (Mazel andWatchman 1997). Additional samples obtained frompaintings in Kwa-Zulu Natal are being processed (Ma-zel, personal communication).

Dating pigments directly remains problematic, how-ever, in that samples are very easily contaminated (e.g.,Loy 1994, Nelson 1993, Rosenfeld and Smith 1997,Watchman 1993) and the method is contingent on theextraction of organic material, which may not survive.In view of these problems and the lack of accuracy asso-ciated with relative dating methods, the most reliableinformation about the age of parietal art may come fromsites where the remains of rock paintings have been in-corporated into archaeological deposits and dating ofthose deposits can provide minimum dates for the epi-sodes of painting (Thackeray 1983).

In southern Africa, spalls containing traces of painthave been found in deposits dating as far back as 10,000years b.p. (Thackeray 1983), and mobiliary art is re-ported from Apollo 11 Cave, Boomplaas Cave, and Kla-sies River Mouth Cave 5. Such portable pieces havecome from deposits dating, respectively, to at least26,000 b.p., 6,400 b.p., and about 3,900 b.p. (Binnemanand Hall 1993, Deacon, Deacon, and Brooker 1976,Thackeray 1983, Wendt 1976). The most recent find ofmobiliary art in southern Africa was recovered from de-posits of Collingham Shelter, and its minimum age hasbeen established at 1,800 years b.p. (Mazel 1993, 1994).

Clearly discernible images derived from collapsedcave walls and buried in adjacent archaeological depos-its are even more rarely discovered. In this article, we




Fig. 1. Location of sites mentioned in the text. A11,Apollo 11; SC, Sonia’s Cave; BP, Boomplaas; KR5,Klasies River Mouth 5; CM, Collingham Shelter; EW,Esikolweni; SBF, Steenbokfontein Cave.

report on one such case encountered at SteenbokfonteinCave in the western Cape. The evidence presented heresuggests that a portion of the cave wall containingpaintings and bare surface cracked and fell from thecave wall onto the site floor. Subsequently, these rockslabs became buried and incorporated in the strati-graphic sequence of Steenbokfontein Cave with succes-sive occupations. According to the radiocarbon datesobtained from the associated archaeological remains,these painted slabs represent the oldest known exam-ples of parietal art in southern Africa.

the site and the painted rock slabs

Steenbokfontein Cave is located on the coastal marginof the western Cape (32°09′42′′S, 18°20′E). It is situated

in a prominent sandstone outcrop facing west-north-west and overlooks reefs and beaches 1.8 km distant.The rock paintings on the walls of SteenbokfonteinCave consist mostly of handprints and human figures,along with two images of fat-tailed sheep and very re-cent graffiti. With the exception of the sheep these im-ages are common at other sites in the western Cape(Manhire, Parkington, and Van Ruijssen 1983, Yates,Manhire, and Parkington 1994).

Rock art surveys in the western Cape (Manhire 1981:57–58; Manhire, Parkington, and Van Ruijssen 1983)classify Steenbokfontein Cave as a ‘‘coastal site’’ be-cause of the substantial amounts of marine shell it con-tains. Distributional maps show that coastal sites arelocated within about 5 km from the present coastline,which became established by 6,500 years ago (Miller etal. 1995). Sites located between 5 and about 25 km fromthe shoreline are labeled ‘‘interior Sandveld sites’’(Manhire, Parkington, and Van Ruijssen 1983). Preser-vation of rock paintings at coastal sites is generallypoorer than at interior Sandveld sites (Manhire, per-sonal communication).

Excavations at Steenbokfontein Cave commenced in1992, and by 1997 7 m2 had been excavated to differentdepths (fig. 2) without reaching bedrock. Seven majorstratigraphic layers have been recognized, and the totalvolume of material removed amounts to approximately8.0 m3. Fourteen radiocarbon dates are available fromthis sequence, all of which fall within the past 8,500years (table 1). However, judging by the size of the talusand the estimated depth of archaeological residue, occu-pation of this large cave is expected to have spannedmany more thousands of years. In the context of previ-ous archaeological work (Parkington et al. 1988), thefirst set of observations from Steenbokfontein Cave hasalready proved significant for the reconstruction of pre-colonial settlement and subsistence patterns in thewestern Cape coast area (Jerardino 1996, Jerardino andYates 1996).

Immediately above squares I3, J3, and K3 and along therear wall of the cave, the morphology and contrast of pati-nation on the rock surface indicate extensive and rela-tively recent exfoliation. A set of ten matching rock slabswas recovered from layer 4a in squares I3, J3, and I4 (fig.2) at depths of 0.2 to 0.5 mbelow the surface of the deposit(figs. 3 and 4). It seems likely that these matching slabscollapsed from the exfoliated area of the wall surfaceabove and were then covered with archaeological mate-rial resulting from subsequent occupations of the site.

During the excavations it became clear that the ar-chaeological strata above the rock slabs were intact, andno signs of a pit excavated in the past with the purposeof placing the slabs within it were recognized. We con-clude that the rock slabs were found in situ. The depos-its in layer 4a are burnt throughout, with textures rang-ing from extremely consolidated to loose but crustysand and ash. Combustion of organic material wasnearly total, as all bone and shell are calcined and char-coal is very scarce (Jerardino and Yates 1996). The in-tensely burnt deposits of this layer seem to be the resultof fires originating outside the cave or slow-burning un-




Fig. 2. Site plan of Steenbokfontein Cave.

attended fires left behind after visits were completed(Jerardino 1996:53–54). On the basis of the colour of theburnt bones in layer 4a, combustion of the organic re-mains must have reached temperatures as high as 600–800°C (Brain and Sillen 1988). It is very likely that thesehigh temperatures exerted significant structural stresson the nearby cave wall, leading to the formation ofcracks and the subsequent separation of large paintedfragments from the wall surface.

Three radiocarbon dates based on marine shell sam-ples establish a minimum age of around 3,600 years agofor the collapse of the rock slabs (fig. 4, table 1): 3,510 6

table 1Radiocarbon Dates for Steenbokfontein Cave

Layer Unit Square Material Date δ13C Lab. No.

1 TWIG K4 Charcoal 2,200 6 60 220.7 Pta-61361 HAST K3 Charcoal 2,200 6 50 222.5 Pta-64242 HK23 K3 Bone 2,360 6 45 219.9 Pta-64983a MT01 I3 Wood 2,510 6 50 219.1 Pta-70153b KTL2 K4 Wood 2,490 6 50 220.7 Pta-65053b OCLE K4 Charcoal 2,690 6 60 223.0 Pta-61344a GRFR J3 Marine shell 3,510 6 50 21.9 Pta-67944a AMRK I3 Marine shell 3,635 6 30 20.03 Pta-70204a LFSX J3 Marine shell 3,640 6 60 21.0 Pta-68054b SHN1 K3 Charcoal 3,990 6 60 220.9 Pta-64205 MS02 J3 Charcoal 4,620 6 70 222.0 Pta-73235 OMTS K3 Charcoal 6,070 6 80 221.0 Pta-68085 SYBS J3 Charcoal 7,950 6 80 219.9 Pta-73265 SYSH J3 Charcoal 8,370 6 80 221.0 Pta-7327

note: Marine shell dates are corrected for the apparent age of sea water (2400 years). Namesof units are acronyms.

50 b.p. from a sample immediately above the collapsedpile of slabs, 3,635 6 30 b.p. from a sample retrievedfrom amongst three rock slabs (one of which waspainted) and small spalls, and 3,640 6 60 b.p. from asample recovered from one of the bottommost strati-graphic units of layer 4a. A charcoal date of 3,990 6 60b.p. has also been obtained for the underlying layer 4b.These dates are consistent with one another and thestratigraphic sequence from which they were obtained(fig. 3, table 1). Parietal rock art at SteenbokfonteinCave thus dates to at least 3,600 years ago, the oldestyet known for southern Africa.




Fig. 3. Section drawing of excavations at Steenbokfontein Cave. Not all radiocarbon dates obtained havebeen included in this figure. Excavations at the bottom of square J3 extend over 0.9 m2.

The surfaces of two of the collapsed slabs are clearlypainted, whereas the surfaces of the remaining eightpieces show extensive fire damage, making it impossi-ble to identify any painted images (fig. 5). The survivingimages on the slabs are, however, better preserved thanthe ones currently observable on the cave walls.

Three human figures painted in red can be distin-guished on one painted slab (fig. 6, left). The figure inthe middle appears to be clad in a white kaross, a typeof cloak. The other two figures are mostly representedby pairs of legs and hips. On the second painted slab,the imagery consists of the legs and hips of four humanfigures painted in red (fig. 6, right). The second figurefrom the right shows details in white pigment: lines al-ternating with rows of dots around knees and ankles.The upper portion of these human figures cannot beseen on the above matching rock slab (fig. 5), as damageresulting from fires has obliterated them. The surfacesof both of these slabs have an unevenly spread film ofred paint different from that used in the images. Thissmeared paint is particularly dense around and belowthe figure to the far left of the left slab. Stylistically, theslab images clearly belong to the rest of the rock paint-ing tradition of the western Cape.

discussion and conclusions

The painted slabs recovered from Steenbokfontein Caveare interesting in three respects: with regard to the dat-ing of southern African rock art, in relation to both their

preservation and that of rock art imagery generally atcoastal and interior Sandveld sites, and in terms of theircontent and how it relates to the body of rock art foundin the Sandveld area in general. The last two aspects areinterrelated.

On the basis of dated contexts in which mobiliary arthas been found, archaeologists have known for sometime that rock art was being produced in southern Af-rica as early as 26,000 years ago. More recently, AMSdates have helped to establish the age for parietal artmore accurately without having to assume contempora-neity with mobiliary art. These studies have yieldeddates around 300 and 500 years b.p. for parietal art. Thedates obtained for the painted slabs from Steenbokfon-tein Cave push the age of parietal art in southern Africaback to at least 3,600 years b.p. As further AMS datesare obtained and excavation programmes at paintedcave sites are continued in southern Africa, we can ex-pect that the difference in age between parietal and mo-biliary art may be narrowed.

The date of 3,600 b.p. represents the minimum age ofthe wall paintings at Steenbokfontein Cave, as it indi-cates when the slabs fell off the wall as opposed to whenthe imagery was painted. It is difficult to advance an es-timated date for the episode of painting. However, theimagery present on the slabs could not have beenpainted very long before they collapsed from the cavewall. The presence of white paint is an indication ofthis, as this colour is well known to be fugitive withinthe greater corpus of western Cape rock art and else-




Fig. 4. Photograph (left) and drawing (right) of J3/I3 section, including dates. The surface above the rocks isnot the original cave floor. The string appearing in the photograph was placed during excavation of square I3in order to avoid a section collapse. The dark portion of the ranging rod represents 50 cm.

where (Pager 1971:322; Vinnicombe 1976:139, 164;Yates, Golson, and Hall 1985:70; Yates, Manhire, andParkington 1994:38).

As described above, the rock paintings surviving inthe cave today are dominated by handprints, other ab-stract finger paintings (finger dots and grids), and a fewblurred human figures. This set of images bears littleresemblance to the imagery present in the buried rockslabs, and its content appears less diverse when com-pared with the variety of motifs present in interior Sand-veld sites (Manhire 1981). This has two important im-plications. First, the fact that handprints are not part ofthe imagery present in the ca. 3,600-year-old paintedslabs but are the most frequent motif in the cave todaymay support the suggestion that handprints are a lateaddition to the rock painting tradition of the westernCape (Yates, Manhire, and Parkington 1994). Secondly,an impoverished rock art assemblage is not unique toSteenbokfontein Cave but characteristic of coastal sitesin general compared with the interior Sandveld sites(Manhire 1981). With the recovery of the painted slabs

there is reason to suspect that this contrast may havebeen absent in the past or, if present, less marked. Thisdifference could well be the result of the harsher envi-ronmental conditions (a combination of wind, sun, andsalt-rich mist) prevailing year-round on the coast.

Differential preservation of rock art imagery as a re-sult of environmental degradation could well be impli-cated as a causative factor in some of the perceived dif-ferences in the content of rock art imagery between thecoast and the interior Sandveld (Manhire, Parkington,and Van Rijssen 1983). Whilst lines of 15 or more hu-man figures are present in the parietal art of a number ofinterior Sandveld sites (Manhire, Parkington, and VanRijssen 1983:31), only 4 of the 32 coastal sites whererock art is present have lines of human figures, and 4figures, barely distinguishable, is the maximum at anysuch site (Spatial Archaeology Research Unit Data Base,University of Cape Town). In contrast, a line of at least7 human figures can be distinguished where imageryhas been preserved on the fallen rock slabs from Steen-bokfontein Cave (fig. 6), suggesting that in the past long




Fig. 5. Visual reconstruction of matching slabs.Shaded fragments indicate slabs with paintingspreserved on the surface.

Fig. 6. Drawing of two of the matching slabs from Steenbokfontein Cave where paintings were preserved. Allfigures were painted in red except that the second figure from the left has a white cloak and the ankles andknees of the second figure from the far right have rows of white lines and dots. Wavy line along top margin ofright slab and island depicted on same slab show extent of visible encrusting precipitate. Dashed line showsarea where smeared red paint is most dense. Scale in centimetres.

lines of human figures may not have been so uncom-mon on the coast.

Kaross-clad figures are recorded at coastal sites, al-though none of them are represented with white paint.Two sites within a range of 3.5 km show karosses inyellow or red, and 6 sites about 4.5 km inland showthem faded away, as evidenced by the remaining and ad-jacent red paint that defines the rest of the human fig-ures (so-called kaross-absent figures). Kaross-clad fig-ures in general are, however, represented in at least 12sites of the interior Sandveld (Spatial Archaeology Re-search Unit Data Base, University of Cape Town). Thus,there seems to be a gradient of increasing number ofrock art sites containing kaross-clad figures as the dis-tance from the coast increases. The existence of thisgradient and the presence of a kaross-clad figure on oneof the painted slabs seems to suggest that kaross figuresmay well have been more common at coastal sites inthe past. We thus suspect that the reason kaross-cladfigures are so rare in coastal sites and more common inthe interior Sandveld today is the harsher environmen-tal conditions prevalent on the coast and the resultingdeterioration of paintings and pigments.

Interest in the dating of rock art can be expected tocontinue. The establishment of a chronological contextfor rock art will allow us to link it with the historicalprocesses reconstructed as a result of excavations(Campbell and Mardaga-Campbell 1993; Mazel 1993,1996; Mazel and Watchman 1997; Russel 1997; Walker1994; Watchman and Hatte 1996; Yates, Manhire, andParkington 1994). Our ongoing excavation programmeat Steenbokfontein Cave is aimed in that direction.




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The Accuracy of Attractive-Body-Size Judgment1

alexandra a. brewisDepartment of Anthropology, University of Georgia,Athens, Ga. 30602-1619, U.S.A. ([email protected]). 12 x 98

Young women in contemporary industrialized societiesoften or even characteristically engage in potentiallydangerous behaviors designed to attain and maintain(extreme) slimness, including restrained eating and re-

1. 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4004-0006$1.00. The roleof Steven T. McGarvey and the students who have assisted withdata collection and entry on the Samoan body-image project overthe past several years is gratefully acknowledged. Joan Lawrenceprepared the illustrations. I thank John S. Allen and Ben Blount forfeedback and helpful conversations.




fusal to eat, induced vomiting, overexercising, and us-ing drugs for appetite suppression (Walsh and Devlin1998). Many studies have shown that idealization ofslim bodies and motivation to achieve them is associ-ated with low self-esteem and distorted perceptions ofindividuals’ own body images. The conventional wis-dom is that these body-image distortions are encour-aged or perpetuated by thinness-depicting and thinness-promoting (and fat-stigmatizing) media (e.g., Harrisonand Cantor 1997, Monteath and McCabe 1997, Raphaeland Lacey 1992, Stephens, Hill, and Hanson 1994, Shawand Waller 1995). Certainly, individual-level studies ofwomen in industrialized societies have demonstratedthat greater exposure to thinness-depicting media is as-sociated with greater body-image distortion (Harrisonand Cantor 1997, Tiggemann and Pickering 1996, Sticeet al. 1994).

This pattern of body-image distortion is considerablymore pronounced and more common in women than inmen, to the point that it is considered a characteristi-cally female phenomenon.2 Young women are inaccu-rate in their estimates of their current size, on averageimagining themselves to be larger than they are andmore distant from an identified ideal.3 Men are more ac-curate in their own body-size estimates. Women arealso less accurate than men in predicting the body sizesfound most attractive by their opposite-sex peers. Thispattern was first observed in publication in 1985, whenFallon and Rozin demonstrated that American under-graduate women could not accurately predict the bodyshape that their male peers found most attractive, in-stead selecting an exaggeratedly slimmer figure, therebydecreasing satisfaction with their own bodies. In con-trast, men on average selected a body image that corre-sponded more closely to women’s ideals and an idealsize that reinforced their own body self-satisfac-tion (Fallon and Rozin 1985). This pattern has sincebeen replicated with further samples of undergraduatewomen, parents of students, partners, adolescents,and older women4 (Cohn and Adler 1992, Cohn et al.1987, Furnham and Radley 1989, Huon, Morris, andBrown 1990, Lamb et al. 1993, Rozin and Fallon 1988;see also Dwyer et al. 1964; cf. Furnham, Hester, andWeir 1990).

This widely cited finding has been used to demon-strate two distinct and contrary propositions about thecauses and context of the body-image distortion. First,

2. In the United States, women are exposed to and internalize thecultural value of slimness more than men (Garner et al. 1980) andfind cultural ideals of beauty more crucial in developing and main-taining self-esteem. They are more motivated than men to conformto body-size ideals and less satisfied with their bodies, weigh them-selves more, perceive weight gain and largeness more negatively,and experience higher levels of low body self-esteem and exerciseand eating disorders (Dwyer et al. 1969, Parker et al. 1995, Polivy,Garner, and Garfinkel 1986).3. The vast majority of this research has been conducted with U.S.undergraduates, and therefore the conclusions are generally rele-vant only to populations of young, predominantly white, educatedmiddle-class women.4. Body ideals (and body sizes) become larger with age, but the dis-tortion persists (Stevens and Tiggemann 1998).

it is cited as evidence of the way in which popular me-dia misinform women about their bodies; media imagesof ultraslim women are internalized by women and re-sult in distorted self-images and conceptions of others’judgments of their bodies5 (e.g., Martin and Gentry1997, Ogden and Mundray 1996, Shaw and Waller1995). Second, in the context of evolutionary ap-proaches to human behavior, the pattern is interpretedto represent evolved sex differences in reproductivestrategy. For example, it has been used as evidence thatmen and women have different evolved notions of theideal female figure (Singh 1993), that it is each sex’sown evolved preferences rather than the preferences ofthe other sex that is guiding mating strategy (Ridley1993:302), and that men have an evolved propensity todesire curvaceous women (Buss 1994:56).

These contrary propositions have yet to be tested ade-quately against data. The implication of the first propo-sition is that groups exposed to increased media distor-tion of female figures should demonstrate greaterdistortion of women’s estimates of male preferences.The implication of the evolutionary proposition is thatthe relative female propensity for distorting male pref-erences should be consistent across socioecological con-texts whatever the local notion of ideal body size.6 Todate, only one set of data from a ‘‘non-Western’’ settinghas been published, so it is difficult to discern whetherthe pattern of female misjudgment shows significantsocioecological variation or is consistent across popula-tions. A study of Arab women shows that they accu-rately predict the (slim) figure size that male peers judgethe most attractive, even though the women prefer onaverage to be smaller than they consider themselves tobe (Ford, Dolan, and Evans 1990).7 There are no exam-ples from traditionally fat-positive societies to comparewith the slim-valuing Arab case, and there are no stud-ies of the relative accuracy of male versus female per-ceptions in nonindustrial settings.

Here I report the results of a study of the accuracy ofattractive-body-size judgment in Samoans in two coun-tries. The Samoan case allows comparison of geneti-cally similar Samoans living in distinct environments(e.g., Baker, Hanna, and Baker 1986), one richer in mediaexposure than the other. It provides a counterpoint tothe U.S. and Arab data because Samoan society has tra-ditionally placed high social value on big bodies. Sa-moan populations have some of the largest average bodysizes yet recorded for human groups (McGarvey 1994).

5. Fallon and Rozin (1985) also initially suggested that womencould actually be accurately judging male preferences but judgingthe preferences of their ideal men rather than their peers. This wasnot supported by subsequent tests (Huon, Morris, and Brown 1990).6. Ideal or attractive body build is one of the most highly ecologi-cally and culturally varied aspects of female attractiveness (Brownand Konner 1987, Buss 1994, Sobal and Stunkard 1989). Thoughhighly variable between groups, cultural values about attractivebodies tend to be strongly, consistently, and widely held withinthem.7. A Nigerian study seems to suggest that women accurately judgedbody sizes preferred by their spouses but unfortunately does notdescribe the relevant data (Akande 1993).




Fig. 1. Portions of women’s and men’s body-image rating scales.

design and data collection

The data presented here are derived from samples of Sa-moans living in two ecologically distinct environ-ments—the more traditional and rural island setting ofSamoa (formerly Western Samoa) and the migrant set-ting of urban Auckland, New Zealand. There are closegenetic, kin, and social relationships between these twopopulations. Samoans in Auckland constitute a minor-ity group within a large, urban, media-rich environmentthat—like other industrialized societies—generally ide-alizes and socially and economically rewards slim bod-ies. Exposure to thinness-depicting media is consid-erably greater in Auckland than in Samoa. Samoanwomen express slimmer body ideals in Auckland thanSamoa, despite having larger bodies (Brewis et al. 1998).Measures of perception of attractive bodies were madefor 84 women and 77 men in both rural and periurbanvillages in Samoa and 41 female and 24 male Samoansliving in urban Auckland. All participants were be-tween 25 and 55 years of age, and the two field siteswere similar in average age.8

To measure the accuracy of judgments of attractivebodies, this study used separate drawn scales of maleand female body outlines. The instrument depicted a se-ries of ten figures increasing in size on a continuousscale (see fig. 1). The tool was adapted from that usedby Fallon and Rozin (1985) and Ford, Dolan, and Evans(1990), but the figures were made to represent recogniz-ably Samoan body proportions and hairstyles.9 On the

8. The data reported here are part of a larger study on the ecologyof body image in Samoans in three countries, and the samplingstrategy is described by Brewis et al. (1998).9. Using this tool, sex differences in accuracy of judgment were evi-dent in samples of anthropology undergraduates at the Universityof Georgia and the University of Auckland collected in 1997–98

scale depicting their own sex, participants were askedto locate their own current size, the size they wouldmost like to be (‘‘ideal’’), the average size for their age-group, the size most attractive to the opposite sex, andthe upper and lower limits of acceptable body size foropposite-sex peers seeking mates. On the scale de-picting the opposite sex, participants identified the av-erage size for their age-group, the size they found mostattractive, and the upper and lower limits of body sizeacceptable to them in a mate. One-tailed and matched-pair t-tests were used to compare means by sex andfieldsite, and sex-fieldsite interactions were assessed byanalysis of variance. Testing for age association wasdone on the basis of age-groups 25–39 and 40–55 years.

results

The average values of body perceptions reported by eachsex at each field site are shown in figures 2 and 3. Samo-ans of both sexes in both countries identified on averagebody ideals significantly smaller than the sizes they per-ceived themselves to be. However, in all cases Samoansaccurately predicted the size the opposite sex found at-tractive, both in general and in their own age-groups (allp . 0.05). Further, men and women were very accuratein predicting average size of bodies in their age-groupsas perceived by their own and the other sex. The onlynotable sex difference emerged in views of the accept-ability of larger bodies in Auckland, where body size isalso on average significantly larger than in Samoa. In anestimate of the largest acceptable body size, women

(N 5 258). Women predicted that men would prefer a slimmer fig-ure than they would (p , 0.05), while men did not make the corre-sponding prediction.




Fig. 2. Average body-image responses for women’s bodies in Auckland and Samoa.

showed a tendency to tolerate a larger men’s body thanmen thought they did, whereas men set a lower limitfor tolerable body size than women anticipated theywould.

A misjudgment measure was calculated for each indi-vidual by subtracting that individual’s own estimate ofthe size preferred by the other sex from the mean valueof most attractive body size reported by that other sex.Both men and women in Auckland had higher averagemisjudgment values (11.9 downward for women, 13.8upward for men) than in Samoa (1.8 downward for men,2.5 downward for women), but this difference was notstatistically significant.

conclusion

Samoan men and women identify an ideal body that issignificantly smaller than their perceived current size.However, Samoans both in more traditional, ruralSamoa and in urban, media-exposed Auckland accu-rately judge both male and female body-size preferences.This observation is in contrast to the pattern observedin U.S. samples and in concord with the Arab case.

The U.S., Samoan, and Arab cases taken together

demonstrate no monolithic pattern of women’s consis-tently misjudging male preferences or of men’s consis-tently being more accurate than women. Rather, a morecomplex socioecology of sex and population differencesin attractive-body misjudgment is suggested. Some ac-counting for this cross-population variation can be sug-gested with reference to the proximal contexts of Sa-moan social life and marriage and Samoan views of thevalue of bodies. Body form is less important as a vehiclefor social, economic, conjugal, or reproductive successfor Samoan women than it is, for example, for femaleundergraduates in the United States. Further, in rela-tively collectivistic Samoan society, where status andfamily are vital social themes and therefore importantconsiderations in marriage decisions, attractiveness hasless salience in these decisions. Further, almost all Sa-moan women marry, and they expect to marry regard-less of their physical attributes and to marry well be-cause of family advantages and opportunities ratherthan because of those attributes.

Samoan women and men in more media-exposedAuckland and in less media-exposed Samoa are equallyaccurate in their assessments of their peers’ attractive-body preferences. This suggests that the media model is




Fig. 3. Average body-image responses for men’s bodies in Auckland and Samoa.

insufficient to explain population variation in pat-terning in women’s ability to estimate men’s ideals ofwomen’s bodies. While media imagery and reinforce-ment of popular cultural ideas must play a role in pro-moting and exaggerating women’s ‘‘misconceptions’’about male preferences, this role may be a product or aco-result rather than a single necessary causative factorin the patterning of body-attractiveness misjudgment insamples of Western women.

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First Estimates of Heritability inthe Age of Menopause1

jocelyn scott pecceiDepartment of Anthropology, University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall, 405 HilgardAve., Los Angeles, Calif. 90095-1553, U.S.A.([email protected]). 23 xi 98

Two independent and complementary studies have re-cently produced the first estimates of heritability (h2) inthe age of menopause (Peccei 1998, Snieder, MacGregor,and Spector 1998). Snieder, MacGregor, and Spector(1998), using recall data from a large British twin sam-ple, have suggested that 63% of the variation is genetic,and the study reported here, using prospectively col-lected data from American mothers and daughters par-ticipating in the Tremin Trust Menstrual ReproductiveHistory (TTMRH) project, indicates that 40–50% ofvariation in the age of menopause may be genetic. Inthe absence of conclusive evidence of an upward shiftin the mean age of menopause (McKinlay, Bifano, andMcKinlay 1985; Flint 1978; Gray 1976; Amundsen andDiers 1973, 1970; Post 1971), these heritability esti-mates suggest that the mean age is maintained at itscontemporary value by some degree of stabilizing selec-tion and therefore that there must be some cost to pro-longed reproduction in human females even now. Inparticular, these heritability estimates are interestingbecause they change the terms of the menopause de-bate. Whereas previous work has focused on the repro-ductive ecology of hunter-gatherers in an effort to un-derstand the environment of evolutionary adaptednessand the origin of menopause, the discovery of such sub-stantial positive heritabilities in contemporary popula-tions strongly suggests that there must have been a costto prolonged reproduction even in agricultural societiesover the past 10,000 years. These heritability estimatesmay also have clinical value. Here I describe my statis-tical analyses, discuss the reliability of my results, andexplore the evolutionary implications of these findings.

Although there is a strong central tendency in the ageof menopause, with medians clustering around 50 yearsin developed countries, considerable variation existsboth within and between populations (see Wood 1994).Medians range from 43 years in Central Africa to 51.4years among Caucasian Americans. Several studieshave examined the contribution of various environmen-

1. 1999 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Re-search. All rights reserved 0011-3204/99/4004-0007$1.00. I thankR. Boyd for guidance during this project. I also thank J. K. H. Lu,T. Plummer, D. Read, R. Gould, and R. D. Peccei for helpful discus-sions and suggestions and an anonymous referee for useful com-ments. I thank A. Voda for permitting me access to the TreminTrust Menstrual Reproductive History dataset and B. LaSalle andK. Smith for their assistance. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge thefinancial support of the American Federation for Aging Research.




tal and life-history factors to variation in the age ofmenopause (Treloar 1974, Torgerson et al. 1994, Paraz-zini, Negri, and LaVecchia 1992, Whelan et al. 1990,Brambilla and McKinlay 1989, Stanford et al. 1987,McKinlay, Bifano, and McKinlay 1985). As with menar-che, nutritional status has been a prime suspect. How-ever, the large-scale multivariate studies which have at-tempted to control for confounding variables such associoeconomic status, ethnicity, marital status, andparity have failed to show a nutritional effect (Wood1994). The only well-established risk factors are ciga-rette smoking, which lowers the median age of meno-pause by approximately 1.5 years (Torgerson et al. 1994,McKinlay, Bifano, and McKinlay 1985), and a familyhistory of premature ovarian failure (,40 years)(Cramer and Xu 1996, Cramer, Xu, and Harlow 1995,Mattison et al. 1984, Coulam, Stringfellow, and Hoefna-gel 1983, Smith, Fraser, and Noel 1979).

As a life-history trait long considered virtually uniqueto human females (Pavelka and Fedigan 1991, Caro etal. 1995), menopause constitutes an evolutionary puz-zle posing two distinct questions: how it originated andwhat is maintaining it. Although a gradual decline inage-specific fertility is associated with the generalizedprocess of aging in almost all mammals, including allnonhuman primates, only human females and one spe-cies of toothed whales experience a total cessation ofreproductive capacity well before the end of their maxi-mum or average life span (Caro et al. 1995, Marsh andKasuya 1984). Evolutionary theory predicts that meno-pause originated because women with premature repro-ductive senescence enjoyed an inclusive-fitness advan-tage from increasing the fitness of existing progeny. Yet,despite much theoretical and empirical investigation,the inclusive-fitness value of menopause remains diffi-cult to establish in contemporary populations (Hill andHurtado 1991, Rogers 1993, Hawkes, O’Connell, andBlurton Jones 1997). This suggests that whatever is re-sponsible for the origin of menopause may have little todo with the maintenance of the trait and underlines thenecessity of separating the origin and maintenancequestions (Peccei 1995).

Furthermore, the first step to understanding themaintenance of menopause is not to try to establish theinclusive-fitness advantage of the trait itself but ratherto establish the nature of the selection working on theage of menopause in a contemporary population. To dothis, it is necessary to estimate the magnitude of the ge-netic component contributing to the range of variationin the age of menopause—its heritability. Althoughover the past two decades several researchers have in-vestigated the genetic basis of very early menopause(Cramer and Xu 1996, Cramer, Xu, and Harlow 1995,Mattison et al. 1984, Coulam, Stringfellow, and Hoefna-gel 1983, Smith, Fraser, and Noel 1979), only one studyhas considered, among other factors, the hereditary con-tribution to the range of variation in the age of meno-pause, finding a strong intergenerational associationbased on daughters’ recall of mothers’ ages at meno-

pause (Torgerson et al. 1994). The complementary stud-ies of Peccei (1998) and Snieder, MacGregor, and Spec-tor (1998) were the first designed specifically toestimate heritability in the age of menopause. A largelyretrospective twin study, the latter benefited from alarge sample size. In contrast, the intergenerationalstudy reported here benefited from the precision and re-liability of prospective data.

Although such a study may seem long overdue, it hasproved difficult to find prospectively recorded men-strual histories from a sufficiently large number of re-lated individuals. In sharp contrast to menarche, the oc-currence of menopause is an unrecognized event,verifiable only in retrospect by some arbitrary but well-defined criterion.2 For both intergenerational and sibstudies, maintaining sufficient subject participationand compliance to produce an adequate sample of pro-spective data represents a considerable challenge.Thanks to the dedication of Alan E. Treloar and his as-sociates and successors in the TTMRH program, pro-spective data on the menstrual histories and completedreproductive careers of two generations of relatedwomen now exist (Treloar 1974, 1981). The data for theheritability estimates presented here come from 117 dy-ads made up of mothers among the first recruits of themid-1930s and their daughters.

An estimate of heritability is obtained from the ratioof the phenotypic correlation between two variablesand the genetic correlation that would result if the traitwere totally inherited, which is equivalent to the coef-ficient of relationship between the individuals con-cerned (Falconer 1989). For mother/daughter dyads,h2 5 rP/1/2. The simplest way to obtain the phenotypiccorrelation is through standard regression analysis,where r is calculated from the slope of the regressionand the two variances [r 5 β(σ2

x/σ2y)1/2]. To qualify for

this, all subjects must have experienced the event inquestion. Here this means that both mother and daugh-ter must have gone through natural menopause—thatis, menopause not mediated by use of exogenous hor-mones during the perimenopause or resulting from hys-terectomy. At present there are 21 natural-menopausedyads in the TTMRH database. The mother/daughtercorrelation from standard regression is rDM 5 0.250 60.22, where the interval estimate is based on the as-sumption of normality. This yields a heritability esti-mate of h2 5 0.5 6 0.44 (p 5 0.127). To check the stan-dard errors of the correlation coefficient, I employedbootstrap analysis (Efron and Tibshrani 1986). With2,000 random samples of 21 dyads, the median correla-

2. The current World Health Organization criterion for menopauseis 12 months without a menstrual bleeding. The TTMRH projectuses a more conservative standard whereby the occurrence ofmenopause is established only after a subject has recorded nobleeding during the entire year covered by her latest calendar card.Menopause the event—as opposed to the period of transitionknown as the climacteric, which typically lasts about five years(Soules and Bremner 1982)—is then designated as the first day ofterminal amenorrhea (Treloar 1981).




table 1Estimates of Heritability in the Age of Menopause from Standard Regression Analysis of Uncensored Dyadsand SA/MLE and Linear Regression Analysis with Censored Data

Mother Daughter

Slope Correlation Heritability SignificanceMethod N Mean (Variance) Mean (Variance) (β) (rDM) (h2) (p)

Standard regression 21 51.49 (9.28) 48.19 (11.43) 0.277 6 0.25 0.250 6 0.22 0.50 6 0.44 0.127SA/MLE 117 51.91 (9.46) 53.94 (22.79) 0.287 1 0.202 0.185 1 0.123/20.136 0.370 1 0.246/20.272 0.078Censored regression 117 51.91 (9.46) — — 0.548 6 0.505 0.353 6 0.325 0.706 6 0.650 0.140

tion was rDM 5 0.250 and the mean was µr 5 0.23 60.273, suggesting that the standard regression estimateis reasonable.

There are an additional 96 censored dyads, in whichall of the mothers experienced natural menopause butthe daughters were still pre- or perimenopausal at theend of the period of observation or, alternatively, begantaking hormones at some recorded time prior to the cut-off date. Not only is there a good deal of valuable infor-mation in these censored dyads, but neglecting themcould bias the results and thus weaken any conclu-sions (Elandt-Johnson and Johnson 1980; Barlow 1996:86). Survival-analysis/maximum-likelihood-estimation(SA/MLE) procedures were adopted to analyze the com-bined dataset including the uncensored and censoreddyads (N 5 117).

In MLE, some parametric failure distribution is se-lected which appears to fit the uncorrelated uncensoreddata (Elandt-Johnson and Johnson 1980, Miller 1981).One then finds the parameter values which maximizethe data’s fit to the model. The reliability of the MLEprocedure depends on how well the chosen model fitsthe real data. The advantage with MLE is that one canestimate the probability that the event in question hasnot occurred and write the likelihood function as theprobability of failure and survival (SA/MLE), thereby in-corporating censored data. One can also use SA/MLE tofind the best fit for multivariate data (Johnson and Kotz1972). For this analysis, a bivariate Gaussian was cho-sen for the joint probability function, with the correla-tion coefficient r being one of the model’s parameters.3

The SA/MLE correlation rDM 5 0.185 1 0.123/20.136is lower than the standard regression correlation, but—with smaller errors—the resulting heritability estimateof h2 5 0.370 1 0.246/20.272 has a higher level of sig-nificance (p 5 0.078) (Elandt-Johnson and Johnson 1980,Miller 1981, Barlow 1996).

The 117 uncensored and censored dyads were also an-alyzed by a linear regression model extended to includedata singly censored on the right. In this model the

3. A bivariate Gaussian is appropriate if regression of one variableon the other is linear and the two variables singly or together arenormally distributed. With the uncensored data, both conditionsare satisfied.

slope and the intercept estimators are weighted linearcombinations of the uncensored data points, theweights being derived from Miller’s (1976) modified ver-sion of the nonparametric Kaplan-Meier maximumlikelihood estimator of a distribution function F. Asstated earlier, with standard linear regression, the corre-lation coefficient r is calculated from the slope and thetwo variances, r 5 β (σ2

x/σ2y)1/2. This is not possible with

linear regression extended to include censored data, be-cause the variance of the censored variable is unknown,and in contrast to the situation with SA/MLE, estimat-ing this variance is not part of the process because themaximum likelihood estimator is nonparametric. How-ever, one can use the variance for the censored variablefrom the SA/MLE analysis to estimate r from the slopeof the censored regression model. The slope of the re-gression using Miller’s modified Kaplan-Meier estima-tor to derive the weights of the uncensored points is β 50.548 6 0.505. With the variance of 9.46 for mothersand the SA/MLE variance of 22.79 for daughters, rDM 50.353 6 0.325, yielding a heritability estimate of h2 50.706 6 0.650 (p 5 0.140).4

The results of all analyses are summarized in table 1and figure 1. The hypothesis I am testing is that the trueheritability is zero, against the alternative that it is pos-itive, calling for a one-sided test. The SA/MLE is withinthe 90% confidence limit (p 5 0.078), while both regres-sion estimates, because of their relatively larger errors,are not. Still, the results of all three analyses are consis-tent, with positive heritabilities close to the lower 90%confidence limit and central values which suggest thatheritability in the age of menopause is relatively largefor a life-history trait (Stearns 1992, Roff 1997).

My results are also consistent with those of Snieder,MacGregor, and Spector (1998), who estimate heritabil-ity in the age of menopause to be 0.63, with a 95% con-fidence interval of 0.53–0.71. Differing from my pro-spective mother/daughter study with a relatively smallsample (21 uncensored plus 96 censored-daughter dy-

4. Although the extended regression results are consistent withthose obtained by standard regression and SA/MLE, they are lesstrustworthy, because the weighting approximation adopted and theuse of the borrowed censored variance contribute a systematic er-ror that is difficult to estimate.




Fig. 1. Correlation coefficients with standard errors estimated by standard regression, SA/MLE, and censoredregression. Arrows point to lower confidence limit at α 5 0.1.

ads), the maximum likelihood model of Snieder and hiscolleagues is based on present status and recalled agesof menopause from a large twin sample (265 uncensoredplus 260 singly censored twin pairs).5

With the heritabilities reported here and the observedamount of phenotypic variation in the age of meno-pause, there is the potential for directional selection ifit led to an increase in fitness. For example, assumingthat prolonged fertility involves only a fitness benefitand that the rate of fertility increase is constant, witha mean of 52 years, variance of 9.5, and h2 5 0.4, themean age of menopause could increase 0.07 years in onegeneration (the response to selection R 5 h2[σ2

M/µM]). In2,000 years, the mean age of menopause could increase7 years. Yet the evidence, though not conclusive, sug-gests that no secular trend of any kind has occurred overthe past 150 years (McKinlay, Bifano, and McKinlay1985, Gray 1976, Flint 1978). Indeed, it seems plausiblethat the mean age of menopause has not experienced di-rectional selection for at least the past 2,000 years(Amundsen and Diers 1973, 1970; Post 1971).

There are three possible explanations for the apparentlack of a secular trend: (1) The age of menopause is un-der stabilizing selection, which means that in contem-porary populations there must be some cost to pro-longed fertility functioning in the presence of a positivecorrelation between age of menopause and fitness.(2) There is no selection on the mean age of menopause.(3) There is an upward trend, but the available data arenot good enough to show it.

With regard to stabilizing selection, at present we donot know the cost of prolonging fertility or whether theonset of menopause and fitness are positively corre-lated. In looking for the positive correlation, researchers

5. The larger heritability estimate of Snieder, MacGregor, and Spec-tor (1998) would usually be attributable in part to the nonadditivegenetic effects of dominance and epistasis and/or the confoundingeffects of shared environment, all of which are expected in sib anal-yses. However, according to Snieder et al. (p. 877), ‘‘shared environ-ment and dominance genetic effects did not contribute signifi-cantly to the explanation of the data.’’

often use parity as a proxy for fitness when what is re-ally required is number of children who survive to re-productive age or—better yet—number of grandchil-dren. Even so, the data are ambiguous with regard to theexistence and meaning of a positive association be-tween age of menopause and parity in contraceptingpopulations (Parazzini, Negri, and LaVecchia 1992,Whelan et al. 1990, Brambilla and McKinlay 1989, Stan-ford et al. 1987, McKinlay, Bifano, and McKinlay 1985).It is unlikely that a positive correlation would be easierto find in natural-fertility populations, there being a re-markable similarity in female reproductive physiologyamong widely differing populations both historical andextant (Wood 1989, Bongaarts 1980). This typical repro-ductive pattern includes rapidly declining fertility priorto menopause, such that a downward shift in the age ofmenopause does not substantially reduce the probabil-ity of childbearing (Wood and Weinstein 1988). It ap-pears that any potential fitness advantage from greaterparity is disassociated from the age of menopause, be-cause it stems primarily from adjustments to interbirthintervals during the peak reproductive years.

If parity per se is not a good proxy for fitness, it is alsoclear that the cost of prolonging reproductive life spanis not some dose-related phenomenon associated withparity such as worsening maternal depletion. In extantand historical natural-fertility populations, total fertil-ity rates (TFR) vary enormously, as do nutritional statusand mortality rates (Wood 1994). For the well-nourishedHutterites TFR is 10, for the Gainj and the !Kung TFRsare slightly over 4, and for a poorly nourished mid-19th-century English population TFR is about 7 (Wood 1994).Yet mean age at last birth is around 40 years (Wood1994). The large cross-populational differences in TFRare the result of significantly differing mean interbirthintervals, which are mandated by considerable socio-ecological and survivorship differences (Wood 1994). Inaddition, in empirical tests of the inclusive-fitness ad-vantage of menopause, investigators have found thatneither increased maternal and offspring mortality northe opportunity costs of prolonged fertility to existing




Fig. 2. Daughter’s predicted age of menopause andone-sigma confidence limits, based on mother’s ageat menopause and SA/MLE h2 5 0.185 6 0.130 (solidlines) and mean age and one-sigma interval (dashedlines).

progeny are sufficient to maintain menopause (Hill andHurtado 1991, Hawkes, O’Connell, and Blurton Jones1997).

Still, the heritability estimates presented here suggestthat the mean age of menopause is under some degreeof stabilizing selection, which means that there is a costto prolonging menstruating life span even now. More-over, this cost—whatever it may be—can logically beassumed to have existed at least since the beginning ofagriculture and animal husbandry, which suggests thatthere is nothing peculiar to the foraging lifestyle nowor in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness thatmakes premature reproductive senescence adaptive forhuman females. If this is true, we need to look at femalereproductive physiology and the history of survivorshipprobabilities rather than specific subsistence behaviors.

Clearly, at present the most useful area of investiga-tion is verifying or discounting the existence of an up-ward secular trend in the mean age of menopause. Theabsence of any significant trend would be reasonable ev-idence of stabilizing selection, although there remainsthe alternative possibility that the age of menopause isand has been under no selection at all, implying that thetiming of menstrual cessation is a nonissue. However,recalling the asynchrony between the sharp fertility de-cline and the termination of menstruation in human fe-males, I suggest that premature termination of fertilitycould be an adaptation even without stabilizing selec-tion on the mean age of menopause.

Another function of a heritability estimate is its pre-dictive value (Falconer 1989) and hence its clinical po-tential. Indeed, most of the multivariate studies of thefactors influencing the age of menopause claim to havegeneralizable clinical value relevant to family planningand risk of diseases associated with estrogen with-drawal (e.g., osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, andovarian cancer) or prolonged estrogen exposure (e.g., en-dometrial and breast cancer) (Cramer and Xu 1996,Cramer, Xu, and Harlow 1995, Torgerson et al. 1994,

Coulam, Stringfellow, and Hoefnagel 1983, Mattison etal. 1984). Despite the usual caveats that heritability es-timates pertain only to the sample population, I believethat a heritability estimate with confidence limits suchas are reported here has better predictive potential thanthe multivariate studies with respect to informingwomen when they may expect to undergo menopause.Figure 2 shows daughters’ expected age of menopausebased on mothers’ age at menopause and the SA/MLEheritability estimate.

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