Defining Marriage

Marriage; an introduction

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.

1.      R. H. Lowie said that marriage is relatively a permanent bond between permissible mates. It creates reciprocal relationship between the spouses, i.e, between husband and wife or kin members, siblings, giving rights, duties and status to the children in the society.

Beals and Hoizer: marriage is a set of cultural pattern to sanction parenthood and provide a suitable background for the care and rearing of the children.

3.  C.P. Kottack: Marriage is a socially recognized relationship between a socially recognized male (Husband) and a socially recognized female (Wife) so that the children born to the wife are accepted as the offspring of both the husband and wife.

4.  Edward Westmark in his ‘History of Marriage’ defines Marriage as “the more or less durable connection between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of offspring”.

5.     Malinowski says that marriage is a “contract for the production and maintenance of children”.

6.   Kathleen Gough: Marriage is a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides that a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of the relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum.
    Mazumdar ,defines “marriage as a socially sanctioned union of male and female, or as a secondary institution devised by society to sanction the union and mating of male and female, for purposes of (a). establishing a household,(b). entering into sex relations, (c). procreating, and (d). providing care for the off-spring”

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, child rearing, 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.

Let us examine, for example, the definition given in Notes and Queries (R. A. I. 1951, p. 110): ‘Marriage is a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are recognized legitimate offspring of both parents.’ The first element (heterosexual union) does not conform to such ethnographic phenomena as the traditional woman-marriage among the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1951) or the homosexual marriages of postmodern societies (Weston 1991). Even if the second element (offspring legitimacy) apparently fits with the marriage customs of the matrilineal Nayars of South India, an anthropological test case for the definition of marriage (Gough 1959), it might be rejected for its vagueness and its limited range of ethnographic cases. As Bell (1997) notes, the statement that marriage is required to produce legitimate children is finalist and tautological.

According to the ethnographic data, marriage is neither necessary nor sufficient to define the legitimacy of children and many societies recognize a sharp differentiation between social parenthood and marriage. Leach (1961), recognizing that marriage might be defined as ‘a bundle of rights,’ identified the following different rights: legal fatherhood, legal motherhood, monopoly of sexual access between married partners, right to domestic services and other forms of labor, right over property accruing to one's spouse, rights to a joint fund of property for the benefit of the children of marriage, and recognized relations of affinity such as that between brothers-in-law. But from this bundle of rights, no single right or set of rights might be defined as central to the universal definition of marriage.

Most anthropologists agree, however, that marriage in most human societies involves the following:

• A culturally defined (variable) relationship between a man and a woman from different families, which regulates sexual intercourse and legitimizes children

• A set of rights the couple and their families obtain over each other, including rights over children born to the woman

• An assignment of responsibility for nurturing and enculturating children to the spouses and/or to one or both sets of their relatives

• A creation of variably important bonds and relationships between the families of the couple that

have social, economic, political, and sometimes ritual dimensions

Characteristics of Marriage

1. Universality: Marriage is more or less a universal institution. It is found among the preliterate as well as literate peoples. It is enforced as a social rule in some of the societies.

2. Relationship between Man and Women: Marriage is a union of men and women. It indicates relation between one or more men to one or more women.

3. Marriage Bond is Enduring: Marriage indicates a long lasting bond between the husband and wife. Hence it is not coextensive with sexual life. It lasts even after the sexual satisfaction is obtained. The Hindus believe that marriage is a sacred bind between the husband and wife which even the death cannot break.

4. Marriage requires social Approval: union between men and women becomes a marital bond only when the society gives its approval.

5. Marriage is Associated with some Civil or Religious Ceremony: Marriage get its social recognition through some ceremony. This ceremony may have its own customs rites, and rituals etc.It means marriage has to be concluded in a public and solemn manner.

6. Marriage creates Mutual Obligation: Marriage imposes certain rights and duties on both the husband and wife. Both are required to support each other and their children.

The British anthropologist Edmund Leach (1955) observed that, depending on the society, several different kinds of rights are allocated by marriage. According to Leach, marriage can, but doesn’t always, accomplish the following:

1. Establish the legal father of a woman’s children and the legal mother of a man’s.

2. Give either or both spouses a monopoly on the sexuality of the other.

3. Give either or both spouses rights to the labor of the other.

4. Give either or both spouses rights over the other’s property.

5. Establish a joint fund of property—a partnership—for the benefit of the children.

6. Establish a socially significant “relationship of affinity” between spouses and their relatives.

 Rules of marriage

No society gives absolute freedom for its members to select their life partners. Rules regarding who should marry whom always govern such selection. Endogamy and Exogamy are the two main rules that condition the marital choice.

1. Endogamy:

Endogamy: (Endo= within, gamy= marriage) Endogamy refers to the rule that a man must marry someone within his own social group i.e., Caste Tribe. The endogamous rule is to maintain marital alliances between the close blood relations. For example: Caste, Religion, Tribe Marriage cannot take place between two persons if, they do not belong to same caste, religion and tribe. Hoebel defined endogamy as, “the social rule that requires an individual to marry within a culturally defined group of which he is a member.” Mostly, this results in conservation of property, relations, retention of services and avoidance of external social bonds. The Urapim, a small tribe of Papua New Guinea practice strict endogamy. It is a rule of marriage in which the life-partners are to be selected within the group. It is marriage within the group and the group may be caste, class, tribe, race, village, religious group etc. We have caste endogamy, class endogamy, sub caste endogamy, race endogamy and tribal endogamy etc.In caste endogamy marriage has to take place within the caste.

2.       Exogamy:

Exogamy: (Exo= outside, gamy= marriage) Exogamy refers to the rule that a man must marry someone outside his own group. It prohibits marrying within the group. The so-called blood relatives shall neither have marital connections nor sexual contacts among themselves.The most important reason of these exogamous rules is to prevent marital alliances between the close blood relations. For example: clans in tribal communities and Gotra system in Hindu society. If a man and a woman belong to the same Gotra, they cannot marry each other. Hoebel defined exogamy as, “the social rule that requires an individual to marry outside a culturally defined group of which he is a member.” Malinowski assumed that exogamy is the prohibition of marriage between members of one descent group (clan) which is explained in incest taboo. Such rule is reported among Gonds, Baiga, Ho, Oraon, etc.

-Forms of exogamy:

Gotra Exogamy: The Hindu practice of one marrying outside one's own gotra.

Pravara Exogamy: Those who belong to the same pravara cannot marry among themselves.

Village Exogamy: Many Indian tribes like Naga,Garo,Munda etc have the practice of marrying outside their village.

Pinda Exogamy: Those who belong to the same panda or sapinda( common parentage) cannot marry within themselves.

Isogamy: It is the marriage between two equals (status).

Anisogamy: It is an asymmetric marriage alliance between two individuals belonging to  different social statuses. It is of two forms - Hypergamy and Hypogamy.

Hypergamy: Hypergamy is a system of marriage where a man gets his daughter married to a person of the same or higher social and economical status. This type of system is found in the stratified societies like Hindus, wherein it is practiced to retain the social status and prestige of the group. In Hindu society this is known as Anuloma

Hypogamy: It is the marriage of high caste man with a low caste woman. Hypogamy is just the opposite of Hypergamy. Here, a man gets his daughter married to a man of either same or lower social and economical status than his. In Hindu society this is known as Pratiloma. Pratiloma/ hypogamy refer to inter-caste marriages which are not approved socially.

The diagram specifies three ranges of relationship:

1. an inner group of close relatives with whom marriage is forbidden,
2. an intermediate range of relatives, associates, and allies with whom marriage relations are encouraged and often required, and
3. an outer range of outsiders with whom marriage or other forms of interaction must be avoided

1.   Preferential and Prescriptive norms:

 When individuals or families select spouses, some types of person are ruled out or disapproved of, while others are thought to be particularly appropriate, either because a preference exists in favour of such marriages, or because the persons concerned are already related in a particular, prescribed way. Marriage preferences are found in all societies, but prescriptions are confined to those exhibiting what Lévi-Strauss called elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1969). Many elementary structures involve cross-cousin marriage, Homans and Schneider (1955) assumed that Lévi-Strauss was trying to explain the widespread preference for marriage among first cross-cousins, but Needham (1962) argued that this was a misunderstanding. Elementary structures are not just unusually strong preferences for marrying specific close relatives, but global systems of classification, whereby prescriptive relationship terminologies divide up a person’s entire kinship universe into marriageable and non-marriageable categories. The marriageable category may include cross-cousins, but is not limited to them. In this technical context, therefore, both terms have meanings differing significantly from their dictionary definitions (Needham 1973:177). With regard to the three aspects of kinship—classification, rules, and behaviour—‘preference’ seems to imply the exercise of choice at the level of individual behaviour, while ‘prescriptions’ ought to be requirements or rules. However, ethnographers normally take marriage preferences to be customs with some degree of jural force, whereas prescriptions are now usually seen as classificatory phenomena.

How did humans develop exogamous rules?

How and why did humans develop exogamous rules? One important point that has been stressed repeatedly (Fox 1980, 1989; Brown 1991) is that exogamy and the incest taboo are different, though related. The incest taboo has to do with restrictions on sexual relations, whereas exogamy has to do with restrictions on marriage. Fox (1989: 54) was quite right when he wrote: “While every teenager knows these [sex and marriage] are different, many anthropologists get them confused.” Some anthropologists tried to explain exogamy by calling it an “extension of the incest taboo”; others tried to explain the incest taboo by saying that it forced people to “marry out.” But these attempts only muddled the problem further. The incest taboo and exogamy are related in the sense that if a society bans sex between two people, it would be rather stupid to allow them to marry. The reverse, however, does not hold. A society can forbid people to marry one another but still allow them to have sexual relations. Indeed, some societies specify categories of people whom one is forbidden to marry but with whom one may have sex.

Exogamy, unlike the incest taboo, is rather easy to explain. It helps foster peaceable relationships between groups. According to Fox’s theory, evolving hominids (or, rather, male hominids) found that power over mate allocation was politically advantageous, in that by allocating mates one could acquire useful in-law relatives. It is but a small step from this arrangement to a rule of exogamy, which guaranteed that a group of people would use marriage to make connections with other groups. If a group forbids marriage within itself, it is forced to acquire spouses from other groups, and when that happens, harmonious relationships between the groups are promoted by the fact of their interdependency for spouses. This interdependency was undoubtedly important to early humans, who were now armed with lethal weapons, as groups expanded, moved about, and bumped into one another, possibly competing for resources. An anthropologist of the last century, Sir Edward B. Tylor (1889: 267), put it succinctly: “Again and again in the world’s history, savage tribes must have had before them the simple practical alternative between marrying out or being killed-out.”

The rule of exogamy prescribes marriage outside a certain group. But there may be many groups into which marriage is permitted, or it may be that two groups are directly exchanging spouses, so that the people of group A must not only marry outside group A but also marry into group B. The potentials for deterring conflict or for forming strong alliances are of course greater in cases where groups systematically exchange spouses. Marriages can be used, then, to deter hostilities or to form and cement alliances between groups. Western European history is full of examples of political alliances formed through marriages between royal families. Of course, peace or long-lasting political alliance through intermarriage is not always guaranteed.

Marriage Exchanges: Dowry and Bridewealth

In many societies, marriages are affirmed with an exchange of property. This is usually the case in places where families have a hand in arranging a marriage. A property exchange recognizes the challenges faced by a family that loses a member and by a family that takes on a new member. These practices also reflect different notions about the value of the new family member. Dowry payments are known from U.S. and Western European history. A dowry is a gift given by a bride’s family to either the bride or to the groom’s family at the time of the marriage. In societies that practice dowry, families often spend many years accumulating the gift. In some villages in the former Yugoslavia, the dowry was meant to provide for a woman if she became a widow. The dowry was her share of her family’s property and reflected the tradition that land was usually inherited by a woman’s brothers.

The dowry might include coins, often woven together in a kind of apron and worn on her wedding day. This form of dowry also represented a statement of wealth, prestige or high status for both families; her family’s ability to give this kind of wealth, and the prestige of the family who was acquiring a desirable new bride. Her dowry also could include linens and other useful items to be used during her years as a wife. In more recent times, dowries have become extravagant, including things like refrigerators, cars, and houses. A dowry can also represent the higher status of the groom’s family and its ability to demand a payment for taking on the economic responsibility of a young wife. This was of thinking about dowry is more typical of societies in which women are less valued than men. A good dowry enables a woman’s family to marry into a better family. In parts of India, a dowry could sometimes be so large that it would be paid in installments. Bride burnings, killing a bride, could happen if her family did not continue to make the agreed upon payments (though there may be other reasons for this awful crime in individual cases). This of course is illegal, but does sometimes occur. Historically, dowry was most common in agricultural societies. Land was the most valuable commodity and usually land stayed in the hands of men. Women who did not marry were sometimes seen as a burden on their own families because they were not perceived as making an economic contribution and they represented another mouth to feed. A dowry was important for a woman to take with her into a marriage because the groom’s family had the upper economic hand. It helped ease the tension of her arrival in the household, especially if the dowry was substantial.

Bridewealth, by contrast, often represents a higher value placed on women and their ability to work and produce children. Bridewealth is an exchange of valuables given from a man’s family to the family of his new wife. Bridewealth is common in pastoralist societies in which people make their living by raising domesticated animals. The Masaai are example of one such group. A cattle-herding culture located in Kenya and Tanzania, the Maasai pay bridewealth based on the desirability of the woman. Culturally defined attributes such as her age, beauty, virginity, and her ability to work contribute to a woman’s value. The economic value placed on women does not mean that women in such societies necessarily have much freedom, but it does sometimes give them some leverage in their new domestic situations. In rare cases, there might be simultaneous exchanges of dowry and bridewealth. In such cases, often the bridewealth gift was more of a token than a substantial economic contribution.

                                                                                          

Common Cultural Themes: Marriage in Traditional and Industrialized Societies

      Characteristic                                                Traditional                                   Industrial                  

What is the structure of marriage	Extended (marriage embeds spouses in a large kinship network of explicit obligations)	Nuclear (marriage brings fewer obligations of marriage)
Who holds authority	Patriarchal	Although some patriarchal features remain, authority is divided more equally
How many spouses at a time	Most have one spouse (monogamy), while have several (polygamy)	monogamy
Who selects the spouse	Parents, usually the father, select the spouse (patrilocal residence), less commonly with residence) the bride’s family (matrilocal residence)	Individuals choose their own spouse
Where does the couple live	Couples usually reside with the groom’s family	Couples establish a new home (neolocal )
How is descent figured	Usually figured from male ancestors (patrilineal  kinship) and less commonly from female ancestors (matrilineal  kinship)	Figured from male and female ancestors equally ( bilineal kinship)
How is inheritance figured	Rigid system of rules; usually patrilineal but can be matrilineal	Highly individualistic; usually bilineal

INCEST TABOO

The prohibition of sexual relations between immediate relatives, usually between parents and children, and between siblings. The prohibition usually extends to persons adopted into or marrying into any of these primary relationships, and is thus attributed to a need to limit sexual activity to a single generation within the nuclear family group (to avoid conflict), as well as to the fear of inbreeding.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) claimed that with the incest taboo, humans marked themselves off as being part of human “culture” as opposed to animal “nature.” And in terms of kinship systems the taboo is important because if it did not exist (and if people regularly practiced incest), we wouldn’t need kinship systems to regulate human reproduction.

The two most popular theories of incest were those originally proposed by Edward Westermarck (1891) and Sigmund Freud (1918). Westermarck proposed that persons raised together, or persons living closely together from early childhood, develop a natural aversion to having sexual relations with one another. He had brother-sister relations in mind, but the same line of thinking applied to parent-child relations as well, accounting for the aversion to sexual relations between child rearers and children. Since it is usually the case that parents raise children, and siblings live together in childhood, incest avoidance results between primary kin. In Westermarck’s view, this natural incest aversion is a human instinct that evolved or was naturally selected to prevent the harmful effects of close inbreeding. Only later did a taboo develop to discourage any aberrant tendencies.

According to Freud (who focused more on parent-child incest), humans unconsciously do wish to commit incest, but this desire is repressed. His idea was that repression is triggered by guilt. Ridiculous as it might seem today, what Freud proposed was that at some time in the remote past there existed a human “primal horde” headed by a father who kept, all to himself, a group of women with whom he mated. His sons, wanting access to the females, killed him. But then, since they had been raised to respect and obey their father, they felt guilty and so “tabooed” their own access to the women (their mothers and sisters). Humans since then have somehow inherited all this trauma and continue to “live it out.” Of course, later Freudians found it necessary to dispense with this idea of the “primal horde” as a pre-historical event, but they retained the notions of unconscious desire, guilt, and repression to account for an incest taboo.

These two theories of Westermarck and Freud are at odds. One maintains that humans normally do not want to commit incest, so we need a taboo for the few misfits who do. The other holds that humans really do want to commit incest, but that this impulse immediately triggers guilt and repression, leading to a taboo that expresses and confirms that very human psycho-familial process. Both theories have been criticized, but of the two, Westermarck’s has held up a little better. The idea of an aversion to sex between children raised together received support from studies of the Israeli kibbutzim (communal villages), where male and female infants are detached from their parents and raised together through adolescence. According to these studies, children raised together showed no sexual interest in one another upon reaching adulthood and, though free to do so, did not marry one another. Additional support for Westermarck has come from studies of a Chinese custom called “minor marriages,” whereby parents adopt a female child to raise as the future bride of their son. The girl and boy are raised together and, later, are forced to marry. These marriages were found to be considerably less fertile, less happy, and far more prone to divorce than regular, or “major,” Chinese marriages.

Families, Households and Domestic Groups

 A family can be defined as the smallest group of individuals who see themselves as connected to one another. They are usually part of larger kinship groups, but with whom they may not interact on a daily basis. Families tend to reside together and share economic opportunities and other rights and responsibilities. Family rights and responsibilities are a significant part of understanding families and how they work. In the United States, for example, minor children have a right to be supported materially by their parents or other legal guardians. Parents have a responsibility to support and nurture their children. Spouses have a right to mutual support from each other and property acquired during a marriage is considered “common property” in many U.S. states unless specified otherwise by a pre-nuptial agreement. Some family responsibilities are cultural and not legal. Many such responsibilities are reinforced by religious or other ideological notions.

 Family members who reside together are called households. A household may include larger kinship groups who think of themselves as separate but related families. Households may also include non-family or kin members, or could even consist exclusively of non-related people who think of themselves as family. Many studies of families cross-culturally have focused on household groups because it is households that are the location for many of the day-to-day activities of a society. Households are important social units in any community Sometimes families or households are spread across several residential units but think of themselves as a single group for many purposes. In Croatia, because of urban housing constraints, some extended family households operate across one or more residential spaces. An older couple and their married children might live in apartments near each other and cooperate on childcare and cooking as a single household unit. Domestic group is another term that can be used to describe a household.

Domestic groups can describe any group of people who reside together and share activities pertaining to domestic life including but not limited to childcare, elder care, cooking and economic support, even if they might not describe themselves as “family.” Households may include nuclear families, extended families, joint extended families, or even combinations of families that share a residence and other property as well as rights and responsibilities. In certain regions of Croatia large agricultural households were incredibly numerous. I carried out research in a region known as Slavonia, which from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was was near the border of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Families in portions of this region were referred to as zadruzi (plural) or a zadruga (singular). They sometimes numbered up to 100 members, all related through blood and marriage. But these households were much more than a nuclear or even a joint extended family. They were more like small towns with specialists within the household group who did things such as shoe horses or sew. These very large households supported a military culture where men between sixteen and sixty years old had to be ready for military service. Croatian anthropologists in the 1800s reported that one family was so large that an elderly woman died and this was not noticed for three days! The local government in this case forced the family to divide, separating their property and residing in smaller numbers.

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