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Love, Sex, and Marriage. Sex, Love, and Marriage Reading: 1) Kinship and Marriage; 2) Jankowiak and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology . Family and Kinship Practices 亲族实践
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Sex, Love, and Marriage Reading: 1) Kinship and Marriage; 2) Jankowiak and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology. Family and Kinship Practices 亲族实践 Reading: M. Wolf, Uterine Families and the Women’s Community; P. L. Kilbride, African Polygyny: Family Values and Contemporary Changes Reading: 1) Rubie Watson, The Named and the Nameless; 2)V. Fong, China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters
Anthropology and the Study of Kinship Practices • Kinship (family, marriage, gender) forming the basis of the discipline; • ‘comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude in art’
Culture and Reproduction • Every human population, at all times, has had culturally constructed ways to either promote or limit population growth. • Three general modes of reproduction: -the foraging mode existed for most of human pre-history and had low rates of population growth. -the agricultural mode emerged with permanent settlements had increased birth rates. -industrialized mode (demographic transition) • Anthropologists have done much less research on reproduction than on production.
The difficulty of conducting field research on sexual intercourse and fertility • Sexuality involves private, secret beliefs and behaviors. The ethics of participant observation disallow intimate observation or participation, data can only be obtained indirectly. Ex.“How many times did you have intercourse last year?” • Malinowski’s first anthropology study of sexuality based on fieldwork in the Trobriands. • Sexual lived of children; sexual techniques; love magic; erotic dreams; husband-wife jealousy, etc. Note: Since the late 1980s, anthropologists have paid a lot of attention to the study of sexuality, given the increase of STDS and HIV/AIDS.
When to Begin Having Intercourse? • Biologically speaking, sexual intercourse between a fertile female and a fertile make is normally required for human reproduction. • Cultures socialize children about the appropriate time to begin sexual intercourse. Guidelines for initiating sexual intercourse differ by gender, class, race, and ethnicity. • Cross-culturally, rules more strictly forbid premarital sexual activity of girls than of boys. • In some cultures, a high value is placed on a woman becoming pregnant soon after she reaches menarche, making “teenage pregnancy” a desired condition instead of a social problem (as perceived by many experts in the US and China).
How often should one have intercourse? • The wide range in frequency of sexual intercourse confirms the role of culture in shaping sexual desire. • A study of reported intercourse frequency for Euro-Americans in the US and Hindus in India revealed that Indians had intercourse far less frequently (less than twice a week) than the Euro-Americans did (two to three times a week) in all age groups. • Fertility is higher in India than many other parts of the world where religiously based restrictions on sexual intercourse do not exist.
Fertility Decision Making and Fertility Control • Family-level • National-level • Global-level • Family planning programs of many types • Induced-abortion • The new reproduction technologies
Love, Sex and Marriage • What is marriage? -control of sexual relations -rule of sexual access -incest taboo -endogamy and exogamy • What is the distinction between marriage and mating? • Why is marriage a cultural universal?
Defining MARRIAGE No single definition of marriage is adequate to account for all of the diversity found in marriages cross-culturally. A non-ethnocentric definition of marriage is a relationship between one or more men (male or female) and one or more women (female or male) who are recognized by society as having a continuing claim to the right of sexual access to one another. Although in many societies husbands and wives live together as members of the same household, this is not the true in all societies. Most marriages around the world tend to involve a single spouse (monogamy). Yet most societies permit and regard as most desirable, marriage of an individual to multiple spouses (polygamy).
Social identity of children (who is the legal father or legal mother ?) Regulating sexual intercourse Rights to spouse’s labor / sexual division of labor Rights over spouses’ property Joint fund of property & rules of inheritance Establishing relations between spouses & their relatives, or relations of affinity 社会、文化、法律对婚姻实践的构建 According to Edmund Leach, marriage includes:
Perspectives from bio-anthropology • Among primates, the human female is unusual in her ability in sexual activity whenever she wants to or whenever her culture tells her it is appropriate, irrespective of whether or not she is fertile. • Although such activity may reinforce social bonds between individuals, competition for sexual sexual access can be disruptive, so every society has rules that govern such access. * Reproductive success is defined as the passing of genes onto the next generation in a way that they too can pass those genes on.
Perspectives from bio-anthropology Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and what can be done about it? Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic Males offers some startling new answers to these questions.
marriage vs. mating • All animals mate (form a sexual bond with individuals of the opposite sex). In some species, the bond last no longer than a single sex act. While some animals mate with a single individual others mate with several. • Only marriage, however, is backed by social, legal, and economic forces. • Mating is biological, marriage is cultural.
Cultural Regulations of Sexuality: Permissiveness vs. Restrictiveness • Premarital sex • Preparation for later marriage roles; given complete instructions in all forms of sexual expression; trial marriages. • Disgrace; responsibility of guarding the chastity and reputation of daughters of marriageable age as a burden of the mother; display of blood-stained sheets as test of pre-marital chastity • Sex in marriage - Positions & patterns; privacy; occasions • Extramarital sex -not uncommon in most societies; a difference between the restrictive code and actual practice; double standard (gender bias); rumors • Homesexuality
Why is marriage (almost) universal? • The need to regulate sexual relations so that competition over sexual access does not introduce a disruptive, combative influence into society. • The specific form marriage takes is related to who has rights to offspring that normally result from sexual intercourse, as well as how property is distributed.
The near universality of incest taboo • INCEST refers to sexual relations with a close relative (parents/children/siblings • The incest taboo is a cultural universal (which can be loosely translated as 乱伦) • What constitutes incest varies widely from culture to culture and a true convincing explanation is yet to be advanced. Ex. Difficulties of defining DIRT.
Explaining INCEST Taboo Instinctive Horror • This theory argues that Homo sapiens are genetically programmed to avoid incest. • This theory has serious flaws. • Cultural universality does not necessarily entail a genetic basis (e.g., fire making). • If genetically programmed, a formal incest taboo would be unnecessary. • Cannot explain why in some societies people can marry their cross cousins (children of one’s brother and sister) but not their parallel cousins (children of two brothers and two sisters).
INCEST Taboo Biological Degeneration • Incest taboo developed in response to abnormal offspring born from incestuous unions. • A decline in fertility and survival does accompany brother-sister mating across several generations. • However, human marriage patterns are based on specific cultural beliefs rather than universal concerns about biological degeneration several generations in the future. • Neither instinctive horror nor biological degeneration can explain the very widespread custom of marrying cross cousins. • Fears about degeneration cannot explain why sexual unions between parallel cousins but not cross cousins are so often tabooed.
Explaining the Taboo Attempt and Contempt: • Malinowski (and Freud) argued that the incest taboo originated to direct sexual feelings away from one's family to avoid disrupting the family structure and relations (familiarity increases the chances for attempt). • The opposite theory argues that people are less likely to be sexually attracted to those with whom they have grown up (familiarity breeds contempt). 青梅竹马？ Ex. Kibbutz in Israel
Although children raised together on an Israel kibbutz rarely marry one another, it is not because of any instinctive desire to avoid mating with people who are close. They marry outside their group because service in the military takes them out of their kibbutz Kibbutz and the control of sexual relations ?
Royal Incest * Royal families in widely diverse cultures have engaged in what would be called incest, even in their own cultures. *The manifest function of royal incest in Polynesia was the necessity of marriage partners having commensurate mana. * The latent function of Polynesian royal incest was that it maintained the ruling ideology. * The royal incest, generally, had a latent economic function: it consolidated royal wealth.
Marry out or die out? A more accepted argument: the taboo originated to ensure exogamy. Incest taboos force people to create and maintain wide social networks by extending peaceful relations beyond one's immediate group. Incest taboos are seen as an adaptively advantageous cultural construct. This argument focuses on the adaptive social results of exogamy, such as alliance formation, not simply on the idea of biological degeneration. Incest taboos also function to increase a group's genetic diversity
Perspectives from sociocultural anthropology • Despite the potentially harmful biological results of systematic inbreeding, human marriage patterns are based on specific cultural beliefs rather than universal concerns about biological degeneration several generations in the future.
Marriage Prohibition in the US • State laws prohibited the marriage of some relatives (parent-child and sibling marriages; marriages between first cousins) • Cousin prohibitions were enacted long before the discovery of the genetic mechanism of disease • Powerful myth based on a discredited social evolutionary theory and contradicted by the results of modern genetic research • Underlying cultural logic
GIFT • means present in English • means poison in German • means married in the Scandinavian languages. Q: any significance for kinship analysis?
Marriage as Group Alliance: exchange between “givers and takers” • One classical anthropology theory defines marriage as the “exchange of gift” between two groups - “wife-givers” and “wife-takers” • Ideally there is a “balanced exchange between the givers (bride’s family) and the takers (groom’s family) • Rules of “balanced/expected reciprocity” • Marriage payment: brideprice/bridewealth/bride service; dowry • Marriage strategy: hypergamy vs. hypogamy • Marriage rules: endogamy; exogamy
Endogamy • Endogamy and exogamy may operate in a single society. • Endogamy can be seen as functioning to express and maintain social difference, particularly in stratified societies. • Homogamy is the practice of marrying someone similar to you in terms of background, social status, aspirations, and interests.
Example of Endogamy • India's caste system. - It is argued that, although India's varna and America's "races" are historically distinct, they share a caste-like ideology of endogamy.
Caste / casta /jati (stratification system in South Asia) Castes = “breeds” or “types” (“ascribed status”) • Brahmans (priests) • Kshatriyas ( nobles and warriors) • Vaishyas (merchants or skilled artisans) • Shudras (common labors) Harijians (outcasts / untouchables)
Marriage and Jati Hierarchy Endogamy (marrying within Jati) Hypogamy (marrying “down” hierarchy) Hypergamy (marrying “up” hierarchy) -avoid “ritual pollution”
Other examples of endogamy? • Religious Ex. Orthodox Jewish, Muslims (including the Chinese Hui), • Race/ethnicity Problems of crosscultural marriages? • Socioeconomic class How about homogamy
Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage • Most anthropologists would agree same-sex marriages are legitimate unions between two individuals because like other kinds of marriage, same-sex marriage can allocate all of the rights discussed by anthropologist Leach. • In the U.S., since same-sex marriage is illegal, same-sex couples are denied many of these rights (e.g., rights to the labor of the other, over the other's property, relationships of affinity with the other's relatives).
Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage There are ethnographic examples in which same-sex marriages are culturally sanctioned (e.g., the Nuer, the Azande, the Igbo, berdaches, and the Lovedu).
Bridewealth and Dowry • Particularly in descent-based societies, marriage partners represent an alliance of larger social units. • Bridewealth is a gift from the husband's kin to the wife's, which stabilizes the marriage by acting as an insurance against divorce. • Dowry, less common than bridewealth, correlates with low status for women. • Fertility is often considered essential to the stability of a marriage. • Polygyny (man taking more than one wife) may be practiced to ensure fertility.
In Europe, where both men and women inherit family wealth, the “marriage” of women to the church as nuns passed wealth that might otherwise have gone to husbands and offspring to the Church instead. The “marriage” of women to the church
Love and marriage, love and marriageThey go together like a horse and carriageThis I'll tell you brotherYou can't have one without the otherLove and marriage, love and marriageIt's an institute you can't disparageAsk the local gentryAnd they will say it's elementaryTry, try, try to separate themIt's an illusionTry, try, try, and you will only comeTo this conclusion Love and marriage, love and marriageThey go together like a horse and carriageDad was told by motherYou can't have one without the otherTry, try, try to separate themIt's an illusionTry, try, try, and you will only comeTo this conclusionLove and marriage, love and marriageThey go together like a horse and carriageDad was told by motherYou can't have one without the other Love and (monogamous) Marriage
Romantic Love and (Monogamous) Marriage • Typically, anthropologists have overlooked romantic love as a factor in the interpersonal relationships of the people they study, but this has begun to change. • “There is romantic love in cultures around the world.” • As motifs of romantic love have become more widespread, globally, it has come to play an increasingly important role in the selection of marriage partners. • In a survey of ethnographies from 166 cultures, they found what they considered clear evidence that romantic love was known in 147 of them – 87 percent. • Evidence from tales about lovers, or folklore, that offered love potions or other advice on making someone fall in love. • While romantic love appears to be a human universal, it is a still an alien idea that in many cultures that such infatuation has anything to do with the choice of a spouse. Source: Jankowiak and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology
Romantic Love as a Cultural Construction The media propagate popular culture, and images from around the world are creeping into everyday lives. Cultural sources are being merged in ways that are forcing the redefinition of identity across the globe.
Divorce • Divorce is found in many different societies. - Marriages that are political alliances between groups are harder to break up than marriages that are more individual affairs. - Payments of bridewealth also discourage divorce. - Divorce is more common in matrilineal societies as well as societies in which postmarital residence is matrilocal (such as Naxi of SW China) - Divorce is harder in patrilocal societies as the woman may be less inclined to leave her children who, as members of their father's lineage, would need to stay him.
Divorce in the U.S. • The U.S. has one of the world's highest divorce rates (a steep rise between 1970 and 1994 • The U.S. has a very large percentage of professional women. • patterns of residence and family types vary with socioeconomic class (ex. extended families as a response to poverty) - Americans value independence.
Plural Marriages • Polygamy • Illegal in North America and Post-1949 China • “serial monogamy” in postindustrial societies (multiple marriages and divorces) • Polygyny (multiple wives) - Practiced in patriarchal societies (ex. pre-revolutionary China, some African countries and elsewhere in the world) • Polyandry (multiple husbands) Ex. Fraternal polyandry in Tibet (brothers share a wife)
