The economic basis of social organization

Cereal production as an origin of class societies and dowry as a factor of disintegration of parental authority are, among others, some of the specific results of this study. Beyond these partial conclusions the processing, through multiple correspondence analysis, of the ethnographic data collected in Murdock's Atlas makes it possible to weigh the decisive factors in the formation of human societies, to indicate their role in the functioning of collective life, and to rough out a typology of the modes of social organization.