Marriage

1. Marriage • What Is Marriage? • Incest and Exogamy • Explaining the Taboo • Endogamy • Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage • Marriage As a Group Alliance • Divorce • Plural Marriages

2. What Is Marriage? • Establishes legal parentage of children • Gives spouses rights • Genitor – biological father of a child • Pater – socially recognized father of a child • No definition of marriage broad enough to apply easily to all societies and situations

3. Incest and Exogamy • Forces people to create and maintain a wide social network • Incest – sexual relations with a close relative • The incest taboo is a cultural universal • What constitutes incest varies widely from culture to culture • Exogamy – practice of seeking a spouse outside one’s own group

4. Incest and Exogamy • In societies with unilineal descent systems (patrilineal or matrilineal), the incest taboo is often defined based on the distinction between two kinds of first cousins • In societies with unilineal descent systems (patrilineal or matrilineal), the incest taboo is often defined based on the distinction between two kinds of first cousins • Parallel cousins – children of two brothers or two sisters • Cross cousins – children of a brother and a sister

5. Parallel and Cross Cousins and Patrilineal Moiety Organization

6. Matrilineal Moiety Organization

7. Explaining the Taboo • No universally accepted explanation for fact that all cultures ban incest • Cross cultural finding show incest and its avoidance shaped by kinship structures • Focus on risks and avoidance of father-daughter incest correlates with a patriarchal nuclear family structure

8. Instinctive Horror Theory • Homo sapiens are genetically programmed to avoid incest • This theory has been refuted • Specific kin types included within the incest taboo have a cultural rather than a biological basis

9. Biological Degeneration Theory • Incest taboo developed in response to abnormal offspring born from incestuous unions • Decline in fertility and survival accompanies brother-sister mating across several generations • Human marriage patterns based on specific cultural beliefs rather than universal concerns about biological degeneration several generations in the future

10. Attempt and Contempt • Opposite theory argues that people are less likely to be sexually attracted to those with whom they have grown up • Malinowski (and Freud) argued incest taboo originated to direct sexual feelings away from one’s family to avoid disrupting the family structure and relations

11. Explaining the Taboo • More accepted argument is that taboo originated to ensure exogamy • Incest taboos force people to create and maintain wide social networks • Incest taboos are seen as an adaptively advantageous cultural construct • Marry Out or Die Out

12. Endogamy • Endogamy can be seen as functioning to express and maintain social difference, particularly in stratified societies • Endogamy and exogamy may operate in a single society, but do not apply to same social unit

13. Endogamy • Homogamy – practice of marrying someone similar to you in terms of background, social status, aspirations, and interests • Caste • India’s caste system is extreme endogamy • Although India’s varna and America’s “races” historically distinct, they share caste-like ideology of endogamy

14. Royal Incest • Royal families in widely diverse cultures engaged in what would be called incest, even in their own cultures • Manifest function – reason given for a custom by its natives • Latent function – effect of custom that was not explicitly recognized by the natives • Royal incest, generally, had latent economic function

15. Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage • Establish legal father and legal mother • Give monopoly in sexuality of the other • Give rights to labor of the other • Give rights over the other’s property • Establish joint fund of property • Establish socially significant “relationship of affinity • Edmund Leach argued that rights allocated by marriage include

16. Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage • In U.S., since same-sex marriage is illegal, same-sex couples denied many of these rights • This does not mean same-sex marriages, like any other cultural construction, are not capable of meeting these needs, only that in U.S. laws prevent them from doing so • There are many examples in which same-sex marriages are culturally sanctioned

17. Bridewealth and Dowry • Bridewealth – gift from husband’s kin to the wife’s • Dowry – marital exchange in which the wife’s group provides substantial gifts to the husband’s family • Particularly in descent-based societies, marriage partners represent an alliance of larger social units

18. Durable alliances • Continuation of marital alliances when one spouse dies • Sororate – may marry wife’s sister if wife dies • Levirate – right to marry husband’s brother if husband dies

19. Sororate and Levirate

20. Divorce • Marriages that are political alliances between groups harder to break up than marriages that are more individual affairs • Bridewealth discourages divorce • Divorce is more common in matrilineal societies as well as societies in which postmarital residence is matrilocal • Divorce found in many different societies

21. Divorce • 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 with him • 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 with him • Contemporary Western societies stress romantic love as necessary for good marriage

22. Divorce • Very large percentage of gainfully employed women • Americans value independence • U.S. has one of world’s highest divorce rates

23. Plural Marriages • Even in cultures that approve of polygamy, monogamy tends to be the norm • Polygyny more common than polyandry because, where sex ratios are not equal, there tend to be more women than men • Multiple wives tend to be associated with wealth and prestige • No single explanation for polygyny • Polygyny

24. Plural Marriages • Polyandry quite rare, being practiced almost exclusively in South Asia • Polyandry usually practiced in response to specific circumstances, and in conjunction with other marriage formats • Among Paharis of India, polyandry associated with relatively low female population, due to covert female infanticide • In other cultures, polyandry resulted from the fact that men traveled a great deal • Polyandry