What Is Marriage?
A nonethnocentric definition of marriage is a culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. Although most marriages around the world involve unions between one woman and one man, numerous other arrangements exist. For example, many cultures not only permit but encourage marriage of one man to multiple wives. The specific form marriage takes is related to who has rights and obligations to offspring that may result from the marital union, as well as how property is distributed. In contrast to mating—the sexual bonding that all animal species do— marriage is a cultural institution, backed by economic, social, legal, and ideological forces.
What Is the Family?
Although the idea of family means different things to different people, in anthropological terms it is a group of two or more people related by blood, marriage, or adoption. The family may take many forms, ranging from a single parent with one or more children, to a married couple or polygamous spouses with offspring, to several generations of parents and their children. The particular form family takes within a society is related to distinct social, historical, and ecological circumstances.
What Is the Difference Between Family and Household?
Households are task-oriented residential units within which economic production, consumption, inheritance, childrearing, and shelter are organized and accomplished. In the vast majority of human societies, a household consists of a family or part of a family or their core members, even though some household members may not be relatives of the family around which it is built. In some societies, families may be less important to people than the households in which they live.
In contrast to individuals raised in traditional Shinto Japanese families featured in this chapter’s opening photo, young people in the Trobriand Islands of the southern Pacific are traditionally unconstrained in premarital sexual explorations. By age 7 or 8, they begin playing erotic games and imitating adult seductive attitudes. Within another four or five years they start pursuing sexual partners in earnest—experimenting erotically with a variety of individuals.
Since attracting sexual partners is an important matter among young Trobrianders, they spend a great deal of time making themselves look attractive and seductive. Their daily conversations are loaded with sexual hints, and magical spells as well as small gifts are employed to entice a prospective sex partner to the beach at night or to the house in which boys sleep apart from their parents. Because girls, too, sleep apart from their parents, youths and adolescents have considerable freedom in arranging their erotic escapades. Boys and girls play this game as equals, with neither having an advantage over the other.
By the time Trobrianders are in their mid-teens, meetings between lovers may take up most of the night, and affairs are apt to last for several months. Ultimately, a young islander begins to meet the same partner again and again, rejecting the advances of others. When the couple is ready, they appear together one morning outside the young man’s house as a way of announcing their intention to be married.
Until the latter part of the 20th century, the Trobriand attitude toward adolescent sexuality was in marked contrast to that of most Western cultures in Europe and North America where individuals were not supposed to have sexual relations before or outside of marriage. Since then, practices in much of Europe and North America have converged toward those of the Trobrianders, even though the traditional ideal of premarital abstinence has not been abandoned entirely.
Control of Sexual Relations
In the absence of effective birth control, the usual outcome of sexual activity between fertile individuals of the opposite sex is that, sooner or later, the woman becomes pregnant. Given the intricate array of social responsibilities involved in rearing the children that are born of sexual relations—and the potential for violent conflict resulting from unregulated sexual competition—it is not surprising that all societies have cultural rules that seek to regulate those relations.
However, the rules concerning when, how, and between whom sex takes place vary across cultures. For instance, in some societies, sexual intercourse during pregnancy is taboo, while in others it is looked upon positively as something that promotes the growth of the fetus. And while some cultures sharply condemn same-sex acts or relations, many others are indifferent and do not even have a special term to distinguish homosexuality as significant in its own right. In several cultures same-sex acts are not only accepted but even prescribed. Such is the case in some Papua societies in New Guinea, for example, where certain prescribed male-to-male sexual acts are part of initiation rituals required of all boys to become respected adult men.1 In those cultures, people traditionally see the transmission of semen from older to younger boys, through oral sex, as vital for building up the strength needed to protect against the supposedly debilitating effects of adult heterosexual intercourse.2
Despite longstanding culture-based opposition to homosexuality in many areas of the world, this sexual orientation exists within the wider range of human sexual relations, emotional attractions, and social identities, and it is far from uncommon. Homosexuality is found in diverse contexts—from lifelong loving relationships to casual sexual encounters, and from being fully open to being utterly private and secretive. During the past few decades, public denigration and condemnation of homosexuality have diminished in numerous countries, and same-sex relationships have become a publicly accepted part of the cosmopolitan lifestyle in metropolitan centers such as Amsterdam, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and San Francisco. As recently as 2009, India decriminalized homosexuality.3 Clearly, the social rules and cultural meanings of all sexual behavior are subject to great variability not only across cultures but also across time.
Marriage and the Regulation of Sexual Relations
In much of Europe and North America, the traditional ideal was (and in some communities still is) that all sexual activity outside of marriage was taboo. Individuals were expected to establish a family through marriage, by which one gains an exclusive right of sexual access to another person. And while forbidding or disapproving of premarital sexual relations, these societies often criminalized
extramarital affairs as adultery. According to strict Judeo-Christian law, as prescribed in the Book of Leviticus (20:10), adultery was punishable by death: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife . . . , the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Deuteronomy (22:24) adds: “Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die.”
Many centuries later, among Christian fundamentalist colonists in 17th- and 18th-century New England, adultery by women remained a serious crime. While it did not lead to stoning, women so accused were shunned by the community and could even be imprisoned. As recounted in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the adulteress was forced to have the letter “A” stitched on her dress, publicly signifying her transgression.
Such restrictions exist today in many traditional Muslim societies in northern Africa and western Asia, where age old Shariah law continues or has been reinstated to regulate social behavior in strict accordance with religious standards of morality. Under this law, women found guilty of having sexual relations outside marriage can be sentenced to death by stoning. In northern Nigeria, for example, a Muslim woman who committed adultery and had a child outside marriage was sentenced to death in 2002. Her sentence was ultimately overturned by an Islamic appeals court, but it nonetheless drove home the rule of Shariah law. Turning legal transgressions into a public spectacle, authorities reinforce public awareness of the rules of social conduct.
A positive side effect of such restrictive rules of sexual behavior is that they may limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. For instance, the global epidemic of HIV/AIDS has had dramatically less impact in North Africa’s Muslim countries than in the non-Muslim states of sub-Saharan Africa, where the average infection rate among adults is almost 17 times higher. The statistics vividly illustrate the impact of religious and cultural prohibitions: The reported percentage of adults infected by the virus is 0.1 percent in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, in contrast to 18.8 percent in South Africa, 24.1 percent in Botswana, and 33.8 percent in Swaziland. 4 Communities devastated by this sexually transmitted disease not only confront a serious public health problem but also face a cultural challenge in that they must create a new public awareness and adjust attitudes about sexual pleasure so that they do not endanger their collective well-being.
Yet most cultures in the world do not sharply regulate an individual’s personal habits, including sexual practices Indeed, a majority of all cultures are considered sexually permissive or semi-permissive (the former having few or no restrictions on sexual experimentation before marriage, the latter allowing some experimentation but less openly). A minority of known societies—about 15 percent—have rules requiring that sexual involvement take place only within marriage.
This brings us to an anthropological definition of marriage—a culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. Such marriage rights and obligations most often include, but are not limited to, sex, labor, property, childrearing, exchange, and status. Thus defined, marriage is universal. Notably, our definition of marriage refers to “people” rather than “a man and a woman” because in some countries same-sex marriages are socially acceptable and allowed by law, even though opposite-sex marriages are far more common. We will return to this point later in the chapter.
In many cultures, marriage is considered the central and most important social institution. In such cultures, people will spend considerable time and energy on maintaining this institution. They may do so in various ways, including highlighting the ritual moment when the wedding takes place, festively memorializing the event at designated times such as anniversaries, and making it difficult to divorce.
In some societies, however, marriage is a relatively marginal institution and is not considered central to the establishing and maintenance of family life and society. For instance, marriage has lost much of its traditional significance in the Scandinavian societies of Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, in part due to changes in the political economy, more balanced gender relations, and shared public benefits of these capitalist welfare states.
Sexual and Marriage Practices among the Nayar
The relative unimportance of marriage as the major defining institution for establishing a family is not unique to wealthy European nations. For instance, historically, marriage has been of marginal significance in the family life of the Nayar people of Kerala in southwestern India. A landowning warrior caste, their estates are traditionally held by corporations made up of kinsmen related in the female line. These blood relatives live together in a large household, with the eldest male serving as manager.
Like Trobriand Islanders and contemporary Scandinavians noted above, the Nayar are a sexually permissive culture.5 A classic anthropological study describes three transactions related to customary Nayar sexual and marriage practices.6 (Note that many of the practices described here have changed since the mid-20th century.) The first, taking place shortly before a girl experiences her first menstruation, involves a ceremony that joins her with a “ritual husband” in a temporary union. This union, which does not necessarily involve sexual relations, lasts for a few days and then breaks up. (Neither individual has any further obligation, although later, when the girl becomes a woman, she and her children typically participate in ritual mourning for the man when he dies.) This temporary union establishes the girl as an adult ready for motherhood and eligible for sexual activity with men approved by her household.
The second transaction takes place when a young Nayar woman enters into a continuing sexual liaison with a man approved by her family. This is a formal relationship that requires the man to present her with gifts three times each year until the relationship is terminated. In return, the man can spend nights with her. In spite of continuing sexual privileges, however, this “visiting husband” has no obligation to support his sex partner economically, nor is her home regarded as his home. In fact, she may have such an arrangement with more than one man at the same time. Regardless of the number of men with whom she is involved, this second transaction, the Nayar version of marriage, clearly specifies who has sexual rights to whom and includes rules that deter conflicts between the men.
If a Nayar woman becomes pregnant, one of the men with whom she has a relationship (who may or may not be the biological father) must formally acknowledge paternity. This third transaction, marked by the man giving gifts to the woman and the midwife, establishes the child’s birth rights. In this sense, it is the counterpart of the registration of birth in Western societies, which clearly establishes motherhood and fatherhood. However, once a man has formally acknowledged fatherhood by gift giving, he may continue to take interest in the child, but he has no further obligations. Support and education for the child are the responsibility of the mother and her brothers with whom she and her offspring live.
Indeed, unlike most other cultural groups in the world, the traditional Nayar household includes only the mother, her children, and her other blood relatives, technically known as consanguineal kin. It does not include any of the “husbands” or other people related through marriage—technically known as affinal kin. In other words, sisters and their offspring all live together with their brothers and their mother and her brothers. Historically, this arrangement addressed the need for security in a cultural group where warfare was common.
Among the Nayar, sexual relations are forbidden between consanguineal relatives and thus are permitted only with individuals who live in other households. This brings us to another human universal: the incest taboo.
The Incest Taboo
Just as marriage in its various forms is found in all cultures, so is the incest taboo—the prohibition of sexual contact between certain close relatives. But, what is defined as “close” is not the same in all cultures. Moreover, such definitions may be subject to change over time. While the scope and details of the taboo vary across cultures and time, almost all societies past and present strongly forbid sexual relations at least between parents and children and nearly always between siblings. In some societies the taboo extends to other close relatives, such as cousins, and even some relatives linked through marriage.
Anthropologists have long been fascinated by the incest taboo and have proposed many explanations for its cross-cultural existence and variation. The simplest explanation, based on the idea of “human nature,” is that our species has an “instinctive” repulsion for incest. It has been documented that human beings raised together have less sexual attraction for one another. However, by itself this “familiarity breeds contempt” argument may simply substitute the result for the cause. The incest taboo ensures that children and their parents, who are constantly in close contact, avoid regarding one another as sexual objects.
Besides this, if an instinctive horror of incest exists, how do we account for the far from rare violations of the incest taboo? (In the United States, for instance, an estimated 10 to 14 percent of children under 18 years of age have been involved in incestuous relations.7)
Moreover, so-called instinctive repulsion does not explain institutionalized incest, such as a requirement that the divine ruler of the Inca empire in ancient Peru be married to his own (half) sister. Sharing the same father, both siblings belonged to the political dynasty that derived its sacred right to rule the empire from Inti, its ancestral Sun God. And by virtue of this royal lineage’s godly origin, their children could claim the same sacred political status as their human-divine father and mother. Ancient emperors in Egypt also practiced such religiously prescribed incest based on a similar claim to godly status.
Early students of genetics argued that the incest taboo prevents the harmful effects of inbreeding. While this is so, it is also true that, as with domestic animals, inbreeding can increase desired characteristics as well as detrimental ones. Furthermore, undesirable effects will show up sooner than without inbreeding, so whatever genes are responsible for them are quickly eliminated from the population. That said, a preference for a genetically different mate does tend to maintain a higher level of genetic diversity within a population, and in evolution this variation works to a species’ advantage. Without genetic diversity a species cannot adapt biologically to environmental change.
The inbreeding or biological-avoidance theory of incest can be challenged on several fronts. For instance, detailed census records made in Roman Egypt about 2,000 years ago show that brother–sister marriages were not uncommon in farming villages, and we have no evidence for linking this cultural practice to any biological imperatives. 8 To the contrary, some anthropologists have argued that the incest taboo exists as a cultural means to preserve the stability and integrity of the family, which is essential to maintaining social order. Sexual relations between members other than the husband and wife would introduce competition, destroying the harmony of a social unit fundamental to societal order. A truly convincing explanation of the incest taboo has yet to be advanced.9
Endogamy and Exogamy
Whatever its cause, the utility of the incest taboo can be seen by examining its effects on social structure. Closely related to prohibitions against incest are cultural rules against endogamy (from Greek endon, “within,” and gamos, “marriage”), or marriage within a particular group of individuals (cousins and in-laws, for example). If the group is defined as one’s immediate family alone, then societies generally prohibit or at least discourage endogamy, thereby promoting exogamy (exo is Greek for “outside”), or marriage outside the group. Yet, a society that practices exogamy at one level may practice endogamy at another.
Among the Trobriand Islanders, for example, each individual has to marry outside of his or her own clan and lineage (exogamy). However, since eligible sex partners are to be found within one’s own community, village endogamy is commonly practiced.
Interestingly, societies vary widely concerning which relatives are or are not covered by rules of exogamy. For example, first cousins are prohibited from marrying each other in many countries where the Roman Catholic Church has long been a dominant institution. In the United States, laws against such marriages exist in thirty one states, and there is a general assumption nationwide that these laws are rooted in genetics. Yet, in numerous other societies around the world, first cousins are preferred spouses,10 and a recent report in the Journal of Genetic Counseling concludes that “cousins can have children together without running much greater risk than a ‘normal’ couple of their children having genetic abnormalities.”11
Early anthropologists suggested that our ancestors discovered the advantage of intermarriage as a means of creating bonds of friendship. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss elaborated on this idea. He saw exogamy as a form of intergroup social exchange in which “wifegiving” and “wife-taking” (or, as happens in communities with female-headed households, husband-giving and husband-taking) created social networks and alliances between distinct communities. By widening the human network, a larger number of people could pool natural resources and cultural information, including technology and other useful knowledge.
Building on the theory advanced by Lévi-Strauss, other anthropologists have proposed that exogamy is an important means of creating and maintaining political alliances and promoting trade between groups, thereby ensuring mutual protection and access to needed goods and resources not otherwise available. Forging wider kinship networks, exogamy also functions to integrate distinctive groups and thus potentially reduces violent conflict.
Distinction Between Marriage and Mating
Having defined marriage, in part, in terms of sexual access, we must make clear the distinction between marriage and mating. All animals, including humans, mate for breeding—some for life and some not, some with a single individual and some with several or many. Among humans, mates are secured and held solely through personal effort and mutual consent.
In contrast to mating, which occurs when individuals join for purposes of sexual relations, marriage is a socially binding and culturally recognized relationship. Only marriage is backed by social, political, and ideological factors that regulate sexual relations as well as reproductive rights and obligations. Even among the Nayar, discussed above, where marriage seems to involve little other than a sexual relationship, a woman’s husband is legally obligated to provide her with gifts at specified intervals. Nor may a Nayar woman legally have sex with a man to whom she is not married.
Thus while mating is biological, marriage is cultural. This is evident when we consider the various forms of marriage around the world.
Forms of Marriage
Within societies, and all the more so across cultures, we see contrasts in the constructs and contracts of marriage. Indeed, as is evident in the definition of marriage given above, this institution comes in various forms—and these forms are distinct in terms of the number and gender of spouses involved.
Monogamy
Monogamy—marriage in which both partners have just one spouse—is the most common form of marriage worldwide. In North America and most of Europe, it is the only legally recognized form of marriage. In these places, not only are other forms prohibited, but systems of inheritance, whereby property and wealth are transferred from one generation to the next, are based on the institution of monogamous marriage. In some parts of the world (including Europe and North America), where divorce rates are high and people who have been divorced remarry, an increasingly common form of marriage is serial monogamy, whereby an individual marries a series of partners in succession.
Polygamy
Monogamy is the most common marriage form worldwide, but it is not the most culturally preferred. That distinction goes to polygamy (one individual having multiple spouses)—specifically to polygyny, in which a man is married to more than one woman (gyne is Greek for “woman” and “wife”). Favored in about 80 to 85 percent of the world’s cultures, polygyny is commonly practiced in parts of Asia and much of sub-Saharan Africa.12
Although polygyny is the favored marriage form in these places, monogamy exceeds it, and the reason for this is economic rather than moral. In many polygynous societies, where a groom is usually expected to compensate a bride’s family in cash or kind, a man must be fairly wealthy to be able to afford more than one wife. Recent multiple surveys of twenty-five sub-Saharan African countries where polygyny is common show that it declined by about half between the 1970s and 2001. This dramatic decline has many reasons, one of which is related to families making an economic transition from traditional farming and herding to wage labor in cities. Nonetheless, polygyny remains highly significant with an overall average of 25 percent of married women in such unions.13
Polygyny is particularly common in traditional food-producing societies that support themselves by herding grazing animals or growing crops and where women do the bulk of cultivation. Under these conditions, women are valued both as workers and as child bearers. Because the labor of wives in polygynous households generates wealth and little support is required from husbands, the wives have a strong bargaining position within the household. Often, they have considerable freedom of movement and some economic independence from the sale of crafts or crops. Wealth-generating polygyny is found in its fullest elaboration in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and south-western Asia, though it is known elsewhere as well.14
In societies practicing wealth-generating polygyny, most men and women do enter into polygynous marriages, although some are able to do so earlier in life than others. This is made possible by a female-biased sex ratio and/or a mean age at marriage for females that is significantly below that for males. In fact, this marriage pattern is frequently found in societies where violence, including war, is common and where many young males lose their lives in fighting. Their high combat mortality results in a population where women outnumber men.
By contrast, in societies where men are more heavily involved in productive work, generally only a small minority of marriages are polygynous. Under these circumstances, women are more dependent on men for support, so they are valued as child bearers more than for the work they do. This is commonly the case in pastoral nomadic societies where men are the primary owners and tenders of livestock. This makes women especially vulnerable if they prove incapable of bearing children, which is one reason a man may seek another wife.
Another reason for a man to take on secondary wives is to demonstrate his high position in society. But where men do most of the productive work, they must work extremely hard to support more than one wife, and few actually do so. Usually, it is the exceptional hunter or male shaman (“medicine man”) in a food-foraging society or a particularly wealthy man in a horticultural, agricultural, or pastoral society who is most apt to practice polygyny. When he does, it is usually of the sororal type, with the co-wives being sisters. Having lived their lives together before marriage, the sisters continue to do so with their husband, instead of occupying separate dwellings of their own.
Polygyny also occurs in a few places in Europe. In 1972, for example, English laws concerning marriage changed to accommodate immigrants who traditionally practiced polygyny. Since that time polygamous marriages have been legal in England for some specific religious minorities, including Muslims and Sephardic Jews. According to one family law specialist, the real impetus behind this law change was a growing concern that “destitute immigrant wives, abandoned by their husbands, [were] overburdening the welfare state.”15
Even in the United States where it is illegal, somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 people in the Rocky Mountain states live in households made up of a man with two or more wives.16 Most consider themselves Mormons, even though the official Mormon Church does not approve of the practice. A growing minority, however, call themselves “Christian polygamists,” citing the Bible as justification.17 Despite its illegality and concerns that the practice can jeopardize the rights and well-being of young women, regional law enforcement officials have adopted a “live and let live” attitude toward religious-based polygyny in their region. Women involved in the practice are sometimes outspoken in defending it. One woman—a lawyer and one of nine co-wives—expresses her attitude toward polygyny as follows:
"I see it as the ideal way for a woman to have a career and children. In our family, the women can help each other care for the children. Women in monogamous relationships don’t have that luxury. As I see it, if this lifestyle didn’t already exist, it would have to be invented to accommodate career women."18
In some societies, if a man dies, leaving behind a wife and children, it is customary that one of his brothers marries the widowed sister-in-law—but this obligation does not preclude the brother having another wife then or in the future. This custom, called the levirate (from the Latin levir, which means “husband’s brother”), not only provides security for the widow (and her children) but also is a way for the husband’s family to maintain the established relationship with her family and their rights over her sexuality and her future children: It acts to preserve kin relationships between families previously established. The levirate also ensures that the deceased man’s lineage will be perpetuated, as all children born to his remarried widow are formally acknowledged as his legitimate offspring, even though his brother is their biological father.
A related marriage tradition is the sororate (Latin soror means “sister”), in which a man has the right to marry a (usually younger) sister of his deceased wife. In some societies, the sororate also applies to a man who has married a woman who is unable to bear children. This custom entitles a man to a replacement wife from his in-laws. In societies that have the levirate and sororate—customary in many traditional foraging, farming, and herding cultures—the in-law relationship between the two families is maintained even after the spouse’s death and secures an established alliance between two groups.
Although monogamy and polygyny are the most common forms of marriage in the world today, other forms do occur. Polyandry, the marriage of one woman to two or more men simultaneously, is known in only a few societies, perhaps in part because a woman’s life expectancy is usually longer than a man’s, and female infant mortality is somewhat lower, so a surplus of women in a society is likely.
Fewer than a dozen societies are known to have favored this form of marriage, but they involve people as widely separated as eastern Inuit (Eskimos) in Canada, Marquesan Islanders of Polynesia, and Tibetans in Central Asia. In Tibet, where inheritance is in the male line and arable land is limited, the marriage of brothers to a single woman (fraternal polyandry) keeps the land together by preventing it from being repeatedly subdivided among sons from one generation to the next. Unlike monogamy, it also holds down population growth, thereby avoiding increased pressures on resources. Finally, among Tibetans who practice a mixed economy of farming, herding, and trading in the Trans Himalayas, fraternal polyandry provides the household with an adequate pool of male labor for all three subsistence activities.19
Other Forms of Marriage
There are several other marriage forms, each with its own particular cultural expressions and reasons for being. For instance, the social practice of group marriage occurs in a few societies. Also known as co-marriage, this is a rare arrangement in which several men and women have sexual access to one another. Until a few decades ago, Iñupiat Eskimos in northern Alaska, for instance, engaged in “spouse exchange” (nuliaqatigiit) between non-kin, with two conjugal husband–wife couples being united by shared sexual access. Highly institutionalized arrangements, these intimate relationships implied ties of mutual aid and support across territorial boundaries and were expected to last throughout the lifetime of the participants.20 The ties between the couples were so strong that their children retained a recognized relationship to one another.21
In contrast to group marriage, there are also arrangements anthropologists categorize as fictive marriage—marriage by proxy to the symbols of someone not physically present in order to establish a social status for a spouse and heirs. One major reason for such a marriage is to control rights to property in the next generation. One type of fictive marriage occurs in several traditional African societies, most famously among Nuer cattle herders of southern Sudan, where a woman can marry a man who has died without heirs. In such situations the deceased man’s brother may become his standin, or proxy, and marry a woman on his behalf. As in the case of the marriage custom of the sororate, discussed above, the biological offspring will be considered as having been fathered by the dead man’s spirit. Recognized as his legitimate children, they are his rightful heirs. Because such spouses are absent in the flesh yet believed to exist in spirit form, anthropologists refer to these fictive unions as ghost marriages.22
Fictive marriage variations also exist outside Africa. For instance, a form of ghost marriage can be found in traditional Christianity, in particular Roman Catholic monasteries, where women who remain virgins devote their lives to religious service. When a young woman decides to become a nun, she may enter a religious order as a novice. Being promised in spiritual marriage to Jesus Christ, deemed to be the divine bridegroom, she makes vows of celibacy and chastity, abstaining from regular marriage and renouncing all sexual pleasures. In a special marriage by proxy ceremony, such women are “wedded” as spouses of Christ, who they believe died as a human but lives on as divine spirit in heaven. Veiled and clothed as divine spouses, these nuns also receive a new name, thus completely shedding their old social identities.23
Other cultural forms of wedding by proxy can be found throughout the world. In the Netherlands, for example, there is the legal custom known as “marriage with the glove” (huwelijk met de handschoen). In this official ceremony, just one of the marriage partners appears before the civil authorities—the other is represented symbolically by an imaginary glove and physically by someone formally authorized as a legal proxy. Traditionally, such proxy marriage ceremonies accommodated physically separated partners such as Dutch seafarers or nationals residing in remote territories.
In several places in the United States, including Colorado and Texas, we find yet another example of marriage by proxy. These marriages involve citizens who are incarcerated, deployed in the military, residing in a foreign country, or otherwise prevented from being physically present at the formal ceremony. In California, this wedding option became legal in 2004 but is restricted to members of the U.S. armed forces in wartime or to those who are deployed in combat operations abroad. Since the 1860s, a double-proxy marriage has been possible in Montana, where partners may become legally married in a civil wedding ceremony with neither party appearing before the official authorities.
The U.S. government recognizes legal proxy marriages, and as a result these ceremonies are becoming more common in the military, especially among troops deployed in dangerous overseas operations. In cases of injury or death, a military person married in a proxy wedding ceremony may leave a partner (with or without children) with full military benefits. Those who survive and return home may opt to celebrate their already legal marriage in a religious or otherwise meaningful ceremony with family and friends.24
Choice of Spouse
The Western egalitarian ideal that an individual should be free to marry whomever he or she chooses is a distinct arrangement, certainly not universally embraced. In many societies, marriage and the establishment of a family are considered far too important to be left to the whims of young people. The individual relationship of two people who are expected to spend their lives together and raise their children together is viewed as incidental to the more serious matter of making allies of two families through the marriage bond. Marriage involves a transfer of rights between families, including rights to property and rights over children, as well as sexual rights. Thus marriages tend to be arranged for the economic and political advantage of the family unit.
Although arranged marriages are rare in North American society, they do occur. Among ethnic minorities, they may serve to preserve traditional values that people fear might otherwise be lost. Among families of wealth and power, marriages may be arranged by segregating their children in private schools and carefully steering them toward appropriate spouses.
Cousin Marriage
While cousin marriage is prohibited in some societies, certain cousins are the preferred marriage partners in others. A parallel cousin is the child of a father’s brother or a mother’s sister. In some societies, the preferred spouse for a man is his father’s brother’s daughter (or, from the woman’s point of view, her father’s brother’s son). This is known as patrilateral parallel-cousin marriage.
Although not obligatory, such marriages have been favored historically among Arabs, the ancient Israelites, and the ancient Greeks. All of these societies are (or were) hierarchical in nature—that is, some people are ranked higher than others because they have more power and property—and although male dominance and descent are emphasized, property of value to men is inherited by daughters as well as sons. When a man marries his father’s brother’s daughter (or a woman marries her father’s brother’s son), property is retained within the single male line of descent. In these societies, generally speaking, the greater the property, the more this form of parallel-cousin marriage is apt to occur.
A cross cousin is the child of a mother’s brother or a father’s sister. Some societies favor matrilateral cross-cousin marriage—marriage of a man to his mother’s brother’s daughter or a woman to her father’s sister’s son. This preference exists among food foragers (such as the Aborigines of Australia) and some farming cultures (including various peoples of South India). Among food foragers, who inherit relatively little in the way of property, such marriages help establish and maintain ties of solidarity between social groups. In agricultural societies, however, the transmission of property is an important determinant. In societies that trace descent exclusively in the female line, for instance, property and other important rights usually pass from a man to his sister’s son; under cross-cousin marriage, the sister’s son is also the man’s daughter’s husband.
Same-Sex Marriage
As noted earlier in this chapter, our definition of marriage refers to a union between “people” rather than “a man and a woman” because in some societies same-sex marriages are socially acceptable and officially allowed by law. Marriages between individuals of the same sex may provide a way of dealing with problems for which opposite-sex marriage offers no satisfactory solution. This is the case with woman–woman marriage, a practice permitted in many societies of sub-Saharan Africa, although in none does it involve more than a small minority of all women.
Details differ from one society to another, but woman–woman marriages among the Nandi people living in the highlands of the Rift Valley Province of western Kenya may be taken as representative of such practices in Africa.25 The Nandi are a pastoral people who also do considerable farming. Control of most significant property and the primary means of production—livestock and land—is exclusively in the hands of men and may only be transmitted to their male heirs, usually their sons. Since polygyny is the preferred form of marriage, a man’s property is normally divided equally among his wives for their sons to inherit. Within the household, each wife has her own home in which she lives with her children, but all are under the authority of the husband, who is a remote and aloof figure within the household. In such situations, the position of a woman who bears no sons is difficult; not only does she not help perpetuate her husband’s male line—a major concern among the Nandi—but also she has no one to inherit the proper share of her husband’s property.
To get around these problems, a woman of advanced age who bore no sons may become a female husband by marrying a young woman. The purpose of this arrangement is for the young wife to provide the male heirs her female husband could not. To accomplish this, the woman’s wife enters into a sexual relationship with a man other than her female husband’s male husband; usually it is one of his male relatives. No other obligations exist between this woman and her male sex partner, and her female husband is recognized as the social and legal father of any children born under these conditions.
In keeping with her role as female husband, this woman is expected to abandon her female gender identity and, ideally, dress and behave as a man. In practice, the ideal is not completely achieved, for the habits of a lifetime are difficult to reverse. Generally, it is in the context of domestic activities, which are most highly symbolic of female identity, that female husbands most completely assume a male identity.
The individuals who are parties to woman–woman marriages enjoy several advantages. By assuming male identity, a barren or sonless woman raises her status considerably and even achieves near equality with men, who otherwise occupy a far more favored position in Nandi society than women. A woman who marries a female husband is usually one who is unable to make a good marriage, often because she (the female husband’s wife) has lost face as a consequence of premarital pregnancy. By marrying a female husband, she too raises her status and also secures legitimacy for her children. Moreover, a female husband is usually less harsh and demanding, spends more time with her, and allows her a greater say in decision making than a male husband does. The one thing she may not do is engage in sexual activity with her marriage partner. In fact, female husbands are expected to abandon sexual activity altogether, including with their male husbands to whom they remain married even though the women now have their own wives.
In contrast to woman–woman marriages among the Nandi are same-sex marriages that include sexual activity between partners. Over the past decade, the legal recognition of such unions has become a matter of vigorous debate in some parts of the world. Several countries—including Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden—have passed laws legalizing gay marriages. Meanwhile, numerous U.S. states have adopted constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage, while others—including Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—now legally recognize these unions. Additional states recognize same-sex marriage but do not allow official gay wedding ceremonies to take place within their boundaries. The issue of same-sex marriage remains unsettled in many parts of the world, with official policies sometimes swinging back and forth—evidence of the fact that cultures are dynamic and capable of change. In addition, close to a dozen U.S. states and about two dozen countries around the world recognize civil unions (also known as civil or domestic partnerships), which offer a varying range of marriage benefits.
The arguments most commonly marshaled by opponents of same-sex unions are, first, that marriage has always been between males and females—but as we have just seen, this is not true. Same-sex marriages have been documented not only for a number of societies in Africa but in other parts of the world as well. As among the Nandi, they provide acceptable positions in society for individuals who might otherwise be marginalized.
A second argument against same-sex unions is that they legitimize gays and lesbians, whose sexual orientations have been widely regarded as unnatural. But again, as discussed in earlier chapters, neither cross-cultural studies nor studies of other animal species suggest that homosexual behavior is unnatural.
A third argument, that the function of marriage is to produce children, is at best a partial truth, as marriage involves economic, political, and legal considerations as well. Moreover, it is increasingly common for same-sex partners (and growing numbers of heterosexual couples) to have children through adoption or by turning to modern reproductive technologies. There is also the fact that in many societies, such as the Nandi, there is a separation between the sexual and the reproductive attributes of women
Divorce
Like marriage, divorce in most societies is a matter of great concern to the couple’s families as it impacts not only the individuals dissolving their marital relationship but also offspring, in-laws, other relatives, and sometimes entire communities. Indeed, divorce may have social, political, and economic consequences far beyond the breakup of a couple and their household.
Across cultures, divorce arrangements can be made for a variety of reasons and with varying degrees of difficulty. Among the Gusii farmers of western Kenya, for instance, sterility and impotence are grounds for a divorce. Among certain aboriginal peoples in northern Canada and Chenchu foragers in central India, divorce is traditionally discouraged after children are born; couples usually are urged by their families to adjust their differences. By contrast, in the south-western United States, a traditional Hopi Indian woman in Arizona could divorce her husband at any time merely by placing his belongings outside the door to indicate he is no longer welcome. Among the most common reasons for divorce across cultures are infidelity, sterility, cruelty, and desertion.26
An adult unmarried woman is very rare in most non-Western societies where a divorced woman usually soon remarries. In many societies, economic considerations are often the strongest motivation to wed. On the island of New Guinea, a man does not marry because of sexual needs, which he can readily satisfy out of wedlock, but because there it is important to have a female partner to carry out tasks that traditionally fall to women—making pots and cooking his meals, fabricating nets, and weeding his plantings. Likewise, women in communities that depend for security upon males capable of fighting need husbands who are raised to be able warriors as well as good hunters.
Although divorce rates may be high in various parts of the world, they have become so high in Western industrial and post-industrial societies that many worry about the future of what they view as traditional and familiar forms of marriage and the family. It is interesting to note that although divorce was next to impossible in Western societies between 1000 and 1800, for the many generations in those centuries few marriages lasted more than about ten or twenty years, due to high mortality rates caused in part by inadequate health care and medical expertise.27 For instance, women dying young in childbirth ended many marriages. With increased longevity, separation by death has diminished, and separation by legal action has grown. In the United States today, some 50 percent of first marriages end in divorce—twice the 1960 divorce rate but slightly less than the high point in the early 1980s.28
Notes
1 Kirkpatrick, R. C. (2000). The evolution of human homosexual behavior. Current Anthropology 41, 385.
2 Herdt, G. H. (1993). Semen transactions in Sambia culture. In D. N. Suggs & A. W. Mirade (Eds.), Culture and human sexuality (pp. 298–327). Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
3 Timmons, H., & Kumar, H. (2009, July 3). Indian court overturns gay sex ban. New York Times.
4 AIDS Epidemic Update. (2007), p. 7. Geneva: Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (USAID) and World Health Organization. www. unaids.org; see also Gray, P. B. (2004, May). HIV and Islam: Is HIV prevalence lower among Muslims? Social Science & Medicine 58 (9), 1751–1756.
5 Our interpretation of the Nayar follows Goodenough, W. H. (1970). Description and comparison in cultural anthropology (pp. 6–11). Chicago: Aldine.
6 Gough, K. (1959). The Nayars and the definition of marriage. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 89, 23–34.
7 Whelehan, P. (1985). Review of incest, a biosocial view. American Anthropologist 87, 678; see also U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families. (2005). Child maltreatment 2003. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
8 Leavitt, G. C. (1990). Sociobiological explanations of incest avoidance: A critical review of evidential claims. American Anthropologist 92, 982.
9 In a sample of 129 societies, anthropologist Nancy Thornhill (1993) found that only fifty-seven had specific rules against parent–child or sibling incest.
Twice that number (114) had explicit rules to control activity with cousins, in-laws, or both (quoted in Haviland, W. A., & Gordon, R. J. (Eds.), Talking about people (p. 127). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield). Absence of specific incest rules, however, does not mean sexual relations with close relatives were either common or condoned.
10 Ottenheimer, M. (1996). Forbidden relatives: The American myth of cousin marriage (pp. 116–133). Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
11 Grossman, J. (2002). Should the law be kinder to kissin’ cousins? A genetic report should cause a rethinking of incest laws. Find Law. (accessed October 16, 2009)
12 Lloyd, C. B. (Ed.). (2005). Growing up global: The changing transitions to adulthood in developing countries (pp. 450–453). Washington, DC: National Academies Press, Committee on Population, National Research Council, and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies.
13 Ibid.
14 White, D. R. (1988). Rethinking polygyny: Co-wives, codes, and cultural systems. Current Anthropology 29, 529–572.
15 Cretney, S. (2003). Family law in the twentieth century: A history (pp. 72–73). New York: Oxford University Press.
16 Egan, T. (1999, February 28). The persistence of polygamy. New York Times Magazine, 52.
17 Wolfson, H. (2000, January 22). Polygamists make the Christian connection. Burlington Free Press, 2c.
18 Johnson, D. (1996). Polygamists emerge from secrecy, seeking not just peace but respect. In W. A. Haviland & R. J. Gordon (Eds.), Talking about people (2nd ed., pp. 129–131). Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.
19 Levine, N. E., & Silk, J. B. (1997). Why polyandry fails. Current Anthropology 38, 375–398.
20 Chance, N. A. (1990). The Iñupiat and Arctic Alaska: An ethnography of development (pp. 110–111). New York: Harcourt.
21 Spencer, R. F. (1984). North Alaska Coast Eskimo. In D. Damas (Ed.), Arctic: Handbook of North American Indians (Vol. 5, pp. 320–337). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
22 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. New York: Oxford University Press.
23 See also Pope Pius XII. (1954). Sacra Virginitas. Encyclical on consecrated virginity. The Catholic Encyclopedia Online: www.newadvent.org.
24 Shane, L., III. (2005). Happy couple both no-show wedding: Deployed troops make use of double-proxy ceremony. Stars & Stripes 3 (17), 6; see also www.MarriageByProxy.com.
25 The following is based on Obler, R. S. (1982). Is the female husband a man? Woman/woman marriage among the Nandi of Kenya. Ethnology 19, 69–88.
26 Goodwin, R. (1999). Personal relationships across cultures (pp. 86–89). New York: Routledge; see also Betzig, L. (1989). Causes of conjugal dissolution: A cross-cultural study. Current Anthropology 30, 654–676.
27 Stone, L. (1998). Kinship and gender: An introduction (p. 235). Boulder, CO: Westview.
28 Whitehead, B. D., & Popenoe, D. (2004). The state of our unions: The social health of marriage in America 2004. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University National Marriage Project.
Written by William A. Haviland, Harald E. Prins, Bunny McBride and Dana Walrath in "Cultural Anthropology - The Human Challenge", Wadsworth Cengage Learning, USA, 2011, excerpts chapter 9 pp.209-288. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.