Property control and social strategies in settlers in a Middle Eastern plain

Dr. Aswad's monograph clarifies the chaotic history of the Hatay district of southeastern Turkey. She uses both ecological and ethnohistorical tools to order portantly, her time depth, structural and contrastive study of two kinds of nomadic pastoral societies who were pressured to sedentarize in the Hatay argues convincingly the adaptive functions of Middle Eastern institutions which have never been understood in the West: parallel cousin marriage, polygamy and fission/fusion processes of lineage structure. The process of stratification by which poverty stricken slum dwellers are created as sedentarization, mechanization, and cashcropping displace the old economies is also amply indicated. -- From http://www.jstor.org (Dec. 5, 2016).