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1. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Parallel and Cross Cousins and Patrilineal Moiety
Organization

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Matrilineal Moiety Organization

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
– 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
Explaining the Taboo
No universally accepted explanation for fact
that all cultures ban incest

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
• incest taboos
• A prohibition against incest exists in all
current societies but the
particular relationships prohibited varies
with place and time. The
most commonly prohibited relationships
are a child and a parent such
as father and daughter or two siblings such
as a brother and sister.
A marriage between cousins—

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
– This theory has been refuted
• Specific kin types included within the
incest taboo have a cultural rather than a
biological basis
Instinctive Horror Theory
• Homo sapiens are genetically programmed
to avoid incest

10. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
– 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
Biological Degeneration Theory
• Incest taboo developed in response to
abnormal offspring born from
incestuous unions

11. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
• Malinowski (and Freud) argued incest
taboo originated to direct sexual
feelings away from one’s family to
avoid disrupting the family structure
and relations
Attempt and Contempt
– Opposite theory argues that people are
less likely to be sexually attracted to those
with whom they have grown up

12. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

13. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

14. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
– 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
• In U.S., since same-sex marriage is
illegal, same-sex couples denied many
of these rights
Marital Rights and Same-Sex
Marriage

18. © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Sororate and Levirate

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Divorce
– Very large percentage of gainfully
employed women
– Americans value independence
• U.S. has one of world’s highest divorce
rates

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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

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©2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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