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Book Review
Comanche Society: Before the Reservation. By Gerald Betty.
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. 239 pp. Illustrations,
appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.)
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This book is explicitly not a narrative history (p. 9). In the same way that an ethnohistory has sometimes been defined as the application of anthropological concepts to the analysis of historical documents, this book may be called an "historical evolutionary psychology": it is the application of the concepts of evolutionary psychology to the analysis of historical materials. The particular evolutionary psychology concept central to this book is "kinship," and the chapters explore the kinship factor in several arenas of Comanche society: Comanche kinship itself; kinship as a factor in the Comanches' southward migration; kinship in respect to horse pastorialism, particularly in the receipt of horses and horse culture from other kinsmen; kinship as a factor in trade; and kinship as a factor in hostilities. To illustrate these factors, Betty has mined the recent historical syntheses of Comanche history for examples. To his credit, he has given those proximate sources, and has also examined the original sources cited in those sources; moreover, he has noted where he could not find the original, and has also uncovered a number of sources not noted by the synthesizers. |
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