Interview with Laura Fortunato, Winner of the 2011 Gabriel W. Lasker Prize

An international jury composed of Michael Crawford (University of Kansas, USA), Dennis O’Rourke (University of Utah, USA), and Stephen Shennan (University College London, UK) has awarded the Gabriel Ward Lasker Prize 2011 to Dr. Laura Fortunato for her articles entitled “Reconstructing the History of Residence Strategies in Indo-European–Speaking Societies” and “Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European–Speaking Societies” considered as the best contribution to the 83rd volume of Human Biology (2011).

Laura Fortunato is an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from University College London in 2009; her doctoral research focused on the evolution of kinship and marriage systems (Fortunato 2009). In particular, she has investigated the evolution of marriage strategies (Fortunato and Archetti 2010; Fortunato 2011a), wealth transfers at marriage (Fortunato et al. 2006; Fortunato and Mace 2009), residence strategies (Fortunato and Jordan 2010; Fortunato 2011b), and inheritance strategies (Fortunato, in review). Laura’s current research activities apply conceptual and methodological tools developed in evolutionary biology to a diverse range of topics in anthropology, from matrilineal kinship organization to cultural evolution.

Evelyne Heyer:

Dear Dr. Fortunato, we are pleased that the Gabriel Ward Lasker award for the best article in the 2011 volume of Human Biology is attributed to you for the article “Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European-Speaking Societies: Monogamy and Polygyny” (Fortunato 2011a). This paper was published together with a sister article, having very similar methods and aims, titled “Reconstructing the History of Residence Strategies in Indo-European-Speaking Societies: Neo-, Uxori-, and Virilocality” (Fortunato 2011b), and they both perfectly match the editorial focus of the journal. Would you mind summarizing the research question you address, the methodology you adopt as well as the major results?

Figure 1.

Dr. Laura Fortunato (photo courtesy by Kate Russell Photography).

Laura Fortunato

Thank you, I am delighted at the award! The two papers aim to reconstruct past modes of social organization for societies speaking Indo-European (IE) languages. The focus is on marriage and residence strategies. Marriage strategies specify how many spouses an individual may be married to at any one time: the analysis looks at monogamy (marriage allowed to only one spouse at any one time) and polygyny (marriage allowed to multiple wives simultaneously). Residence strategies regulate the pattern of sex-biased dispersal of individuals at marriage: the analysis looks at neolocality (residence of the married couple apart from the kin of either spouse), uxorilocality (residence of the married couple with or near the wife’s kin), and virilocality (residence of the married couple with or near the husband’s kin).

Methodologically, the papers use ancestral state reconstruction, within a phylogenetic framework, applied to cross-cultural data (Fortunato 2011c; see Fortunato 2008 for a nontechnical introduction to the approach). The analyses reconstruct early IE society as practicing monogamy and prevailing virilocality with alternative neolocality. Overall, the results are largely consistent with previous inferences from linguistic and ethnographic data; however, as I discuss extensively in the papers, previous work is beset by substantial methodological flaws and bias in interpretation. I like to think that my results provide an independent line of evidence against which to evaluate previous inferences about early IE social structure.

EH

For those readers willing to better review such research questions, is there any article you would recommend reading?

LF

Your recent review paper “Sex-Specific Demographic Behaviours That Shape Human Genomic Variation” (Heyer et al. 2012) provides an interesting complementary perspective, with its focus on the genetic side of the story.

EH

You find that both Proto-Indo-Hittite and Proto-Indo-European had monogamous habits and were neo-/virilocal. Do you think these patterns of social organization arose because of the emergence of agriculture?

LF

Together with previous analyses (Fortunato et al. 2006; Fortunato and Mace 2009), the reconstructions of early IE social organization in the two papers point to a society practicing monogamy, virilocality with neolocality...