marriage

marriage Since the nineteenth century, complex issues in the study of marriage have involved the productive and reproductive powers of the body. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many scholars, such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, and James Frazer, viewed evolution in sexuality and family life as a crucial dynamic in the history of human civilization, asserting an evolutionary development from primitive promiscuity and group marriage to modern constraint, monogamy, and patriarchy. In the 1920s and 1930s, the increased practice of fieldwork — the extended practical observation of everyday life in societies — induced specialists in this ethnographic discipline, such as the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his students, to abandon the ‘conjectural histories’ of the evolutionists. Rather, they developed a view of sexual constraint and individual marriage — as opposed to promiscuity and group marriage — as common elements in many different types of societies. This new method, described in its earliest form as functionalism but modified considerably over time, has become a mainstay of the modern social sciences; it stresses the crucial significance of marriage for many aspects of group structure in all societies, including patterns of descent, residence, alliance, and classification of kin.

Definitions

These perspectives share a concern to define marriage, whether as a means to trace the evolutionary development of its different types or as a prelude to the identification of its distinctive functions in society. Many attempts have been made to identify the essential nature of marriage and to list its purposes, a project often as revealing of the observer's assumptions as of the observed practices. Across cultures, the ceremonial and social phenomena conventionally defined as marriage assume myriad forms and serve varied purposes, yet marriage is usually defined as the formal ideological recognition of a sexual relationship between one man and one woman (monogamy); among one man and two or more women (polygamy: polygyny); or among one woman and two or more men (polygamy: polyandry). Because sexual intercourse is approved in this relationship, the children of a marriage usually possess a status superior to children born beyond its boundaries.

In an argument against such essentialism, the anthropologist Edmund Leach rejected universal definitions and instead approached marriage as a ‘bundle of rights’. Among the classes of rights allocated by institutions ‘commonly classed as marriage’, Leach noted that in different societies ‘marriage’ may serve:(i) to establish the legal father of a woman's children;(ii) to establish the legal mother of a man's children;(iii) to give the husband a monopoly in the wife's sexuality;(iv) to give the wife a monopoly in the husband's sexuality;(v) to give the husband partial or monopolistic rights to the wife's domestic or other labour services;(vi) to give the wife partial or monopolistic rights to the husband's labour services;(vii) to give the husband rights over the property of his wife;(viii) to give the wife rights over the property of her husband;(ix) to establish a joint fund of property, a partnership, for the benefit of the children of the marriage; and(x) to establish a socially significant ‘relationship of affinity’ between the husband and his wife's brothers.

Leach's essay, and the debate it provoked in the late 1950s, had a seminal influence on approaches to marriage as an ethnographic problem, as a culturally specific set of beliefs, practices, and institutions. Because marriage did not establish all of these types of rights in any known society, Leach concluded that the ‘institutions commonly described as marriage do not all have the same legal and social concomitants’ and that the meaning of marriage in any society could emerge only from detailed investigation of its ethnographic context. At the same time, Leach's essay typified an approach that has focused on how marriage may structure relationships between individuals and among groups, and has stressed the interrelationship of principles of descent, rules of residence, and issues of power over property.

Yet such jural approaches have serious ethnographic limitations, as even the basic conditions of sex between spouses and reproduction of legitimate offspring are not invariably present in relations understood as marriage. A form of woman-to-woman marriage among the Nuer in eastern Africa, observed in the 1930s, created conjugal relationships that furnished heirs for barren women but excluded the sexual partner of the child-bearers from the marital relationship. Nuer also practised a form of ‘ghost marriage’ between dead men and living women — marriages undertaken by the male relatives, usually younger brothers, of men who died heirless — in order to preserve the names of the deceased in their lineages. In this context, the jural marriage existed between the living and the dead, not between the sexual partners. Furthermore, in several European states and in the US, weddings are performed for lesbian and homosexual partners and also for heterosexual partners who are incapable of sexual intercourse. The meanings and experience of marriage elude persistent efforts to define the custom in terms of legitimate sexuality, the approved reproduction of children, or other sets of formal ‘rights and duties’.

Recent trends

Two important recent developments in work on marriage have been the feminist critique of jural approaches and the revival of the broad historical and comparative perspective of the late nineteenth century, without its ‘conjectural histories’ and flawed evolutionist designs. A feminist perspective on marriage has suggested that the stress on ‘rights and duties’ too narrowly subsumes women's experiences under juridical issues and obscures the reciprocity between husband and wife and the informal power women wield within marriage. These insights have been useful in the analysis, for instance, of the competition for power among male heads of households and co-wives in polygynous marriage systems.

A second recent development in the study of marriage has revived the project of comparative social science as a complement to the ethnographic discipline of fieldwork. Avoiding what Jack Goody has styled ‘the ghastly warning of what can go wrong’ in the work of the earlier evolutionists, this approach uses ethnographic data, Goody's ‘clusters of interacting variables’, to address ‘problems of comparison and long-term change’ in social institutions. A major focus of comparison has been the correlation of marriage practices, patterns of inheritance, and other aspects of social systems, such as divisions of labour and forms of economic production, in the societies of Africa, Asia, and Europe. This comparative method has resulted in appropriately qualified correlations among (i) monogamy, dowry, status endogamy (like marrying like in class terms), and forms of plough agriculture in many Eurasian societies, producing more stratified social systems; and (ii) polygyny, bridewealth, exogamy, and horticulture in African societies, resulting in more open and interrelated social systems. Furthermore, a distinctive European pattern of marriage and inheritance has been identified, developing after the fourth century ce and marked by ‘extensive prohibitions’ of close or cousin marriage; abolition of the levirate and sororate (customary unions with the wife of a dead brother or the sister of a dead wife) and an increase in widows who did not remarry; the limitation of adoption; and the proscription of concubinage. More controversially, it has been suggested that this pattern resulted from the Christian Church's use of its power over laws of marriage and family to secure property for its temporal purposes.

Dan Beaver

Bibliography

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1951). Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Goody, J. (1983). The development of the family and marriage in Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Rosaldo, M. and Lamphere, L. (ed.) (1974). Woman, culture, and society. Stanford University Press, Stanford.