Marriage is defined differently across cultures and serves various purposes such as establishing legal parentage, giving spouses rights, and forming group alliances. Incest is universally taboo, though what constitutes incest varies. Explanations for the incest taboo include promoting genetic diversity through exogamy and avoiding disrupting family structures. Marriage customs such as bridewealth, dowry, and post-marital residence patterns influence divorce rates and kinship systems.

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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

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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

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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

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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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Parallel and Cross Cousins and Patrilineal Moiety
Organization

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Matrilineal Moiety Organization

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– 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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• 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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– 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

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– 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

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• 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

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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

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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

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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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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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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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– 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

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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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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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Sororate and Levirate

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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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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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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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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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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