This book investigates individual and group responses to death and the problems that death can create in a society. Several hypotheses regarding grief and mourning, as well as their variation with other societal variables, are supported with cross-cultural tests.

This paper examines death customs meant to break ties with a deceased spouse. The authors propose that remarriage rates are higher where these tie-breaking customs are practiced and that this association is stronger where sororate or levirate remarriage is practiced. Empirical support is found for these hypotheses.

Authors explore the relationship between privacy among newlywed couples and romantic love as a basis for marriage. Authors also consider the relationship between newlywed privacy and kin avoidence. Both associations are found to be statistically significant.

The relationships of aggression and crime to variables of childhood experience, adult behavior, and social structure are cross-culturally analyzed.

Based on work by Rosenblatt (1966), this article tests a hypothesis relating sexual freedom to romantic love. Findings suggest a relationship between premarital and extramarital sexual permissiveness equality for women and men and romantic love.

This study tests predictions of homosexuality. Results suggest that homosexuality is significantly associated with father-son contact.

This article examines three theories regarding the existence of pollution rules. Results show support for a psychological theory put forward by Freud that predicts a relationship between father-child contact, post-partum sex taboos, and menstrual taboos.

This study examines the consequences of birth order; results suggest that the firstborn child is more likely to have social authority as they grow older (they have siblings’ respect, they control property or head kin groups, etc.). The authors suggest that this authority may be legitimated by extra attention firstborns receive though elaborate birth ceremonies and teknonymy.

Using multilevel modeling and society-level regressions as well as mediational path modeling, the authors test two alternative models that consider how resource stress, religious beliefs, and beyond-household food and labor sharing may be related. The resource stress model suggests that high resource stress has two consequences: 1) that such stress may lead to beliefs that gods and spirits are associated with weather and 2) that resource stress leads to more sharing. Furthermore, this model suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is not mediated by god beliefs. The alternative model considered, the moralizing high god model, suggests that resource stress will lead to more sharing but it is mediated by moralizing high gods. Before testing the path models, the authors first consider the relationships between resource stress and beliefs about high gods, superior gods, and minor spirits involvement with weather. Since the results were strongest for high gods, the path models focused on high gods. The results largely support the resource stress model rather than the high god moralizing model.

Authors suggest that in a majority of studied societies, kin of the deceased tend to engage ritually in risky prolonged and intimate preparation behaviors with corpses. This occurs namely in visual exposure and tactile interaction. Authors hypothesize that this extended contact not only allows true confirmation of death (through exposure to many cues), but also facilitates acceleration of a grieving process that returns the bereaved to a normal state of social functioning.