Defining Marriage and Family:
- Marriage: a socially recognized, enduring, stable bond between two (or more) people who have certain rights and obligations toward one another
o Socially recognized
o Producing new rights and new obligations
o 2 major functions or marriage:
- Institution producing descendants
- Creates alliances (Levi Strauss wrote about this)
n Affines
n Incest taboo
n 2 kinds of people in this world (those you can have relationships with and those that you cannot)
- Household: group of people occupying an common dwelling
- Family: a marriage couple, or other group of adult kin folk, who cooperate economically in the upbringing of children, most sharing a common dwelling
Families and Ideal Types:
- Nuclear families
o Common in both foraging and industrial societies
o Parents and their children
o Includes single-parent families
- Extended and joint families
o More common worldwide than nuclear families
o 3 or more generations (parents, children, and grandparents) living in common group
o Especially prevalent in farming and pastoral economies
Endogamy, Exogamy, and the Incest Taboo:
- Incest taboo: a ban on sexual relations within the nuclear family
- While the incest taboo is universal, beyond the nuclear family “forbidden” relatives are different in different societies
- Cultural aspects
- Endogamy: marrying within your lineage
o To maintain social hierarchies and status
o Ex: castes system in India, racial classification in the US
Exogamy: marrying outside your lineage
Effects of Exogamy on Social Organization:
- Village exogamy
o Creates alliances over broader geographic region
o Ex: marrying someone in Brandon
- Lineage and clan exogamy
o Binds descent groups into larger systems of relationship
- Alliance theory
Effects of Endogamy on Social Organization:
- Class or rank endogamy
o Castes
o Marry within your caste (India)
- Ethnic and racial endogamy
o Ethnic groups and “races”
o Until 1970/1980 couldn't marry outside race (US)
- Religious endogamy
o Faith communities
Forms of Marriage:
- Monogamy
o Serial monogamy
- Polygamy
o Plural marriage
o Two forms:
- Polygyny
n Marriage between a man and two or more women
n Sororal polygyny
- Polyandry
n Marriage between a woman and two or more men
n Fraternal polyandry
Explanations of Polygyny:
- Occurs in different societies for different reasons
o May help correct sex ratio imbalance in societies where women outnumber men
o May be tied to wealth and status, especially in strongly patriarchal societies, where women are viewed as property
o Adaptive in societies where women serve important economic roles o Children increase social status in patrilineal societies through growth of lineage or clan
Other Forms of Marriage:
- Same-sex marriage
o Traditionally allowed in some societies
o Legal in Canada, South Africa, and in some European countries
o Judith Bulter suggests that it:
- Extends the power of the state
n Why would you want the state to have more control over your life - don't get married
- Breaks long-standing alliances
- Adaptive forms
o Marriage to ensure continuation of partilineal or matrilineal descent groups o Nuer (Southern Sudan)
- “Ghost marriage”
n If a man died, his brother can marry a woman in his place
n Their children belong to the dead guy - keeps the dead guys lineage going
n The dead man is the socially recognized father
n Also in Singaporean Chinese
- Woman as “husband”
n Woman cant have children with husband so secret boyfriend impregnates her
n Adding people to her kin group, even though she cannot have children
n Husband is socially recognized father
Levi Strauss:
- Women - Marriage (1940's)
- Wrote about how women are the objects of exchange/trade between men in most societies
- Ex: walking woman down the aisle and giving her off to the new husband (object being traded)
Marriage as Alliance and Economic Exchange:
- Marriage establishes an economic and a social relationship
- 3 forms of economic exchange:
o Bride wealth
- Also called bride price, but not purchasing the woman
- Gifts from the grooms family to the brides family
n Represents new alliances and compensation for the loss of the daughters labour (one less person to work around house) o Bride service
- For months/years, the groom works for the brides family o Dowry
- Brides family gives gifts/cash to the grooms family
- All the stuff that a bride will need to make up her own household
- Early inheritance
- Out of control today, what is expected from family and violence
n Dowry free weddings - modern
Marriage as a Rite of Passage:
- Arranged marriages
o Common where alliances formed through marriage are important
- Courtship
o Common in societies without arranged marriages, where people choose their own marriage partners
- Wedding rituals
o Publicly confirm change in marital and kinship status
- We live in a post traditional world, where it is now about the individual and love
- Bride capture:
o The groom and kinfolk kidnap bride from family
o All in good fun, fake rescue of the girl
o Traffic in women/alliances - exchange of women “conversion of female labour into male wealth”
Patterns of Residence after Marriage:
- Residence Rules:
o Matrilocal and Patrilocal
- With or near either family
o Avunculocal
- Resides with the husbands mothers brother
o Bilocal and Neolocal
- Bilocal - alternate between residence
- Neolocal - a new home for both
Widowhood and Divorce:
- Levirate and Soroate
o Levirate: if a woman's husband dies, she marries his brother
o Soroate: If a mans wife dies, he marries her sister
o In the event of a spouses death
o Strategies to preserve kin ties
- Divorce
o Societies vary in their beliefs concerning divorce and remarriage
o May be freely practiced, or subject to social and religious restrictions o In extremely patriarchal societies, only men may have the right to divorce
Bigamy and Polygamy:
- Bigamy: one has two spouses
o Illegal in the US - crime
o Marrying someone before your divorce is final
- Polygamy: one has multiple spouses
Introduction: Gender, Sexuality, Race and Inequality:
- Biological determinism: when explorers saw these strange sexual practices, they must be from a deeply rooted biological drive (the primitives could not help it)
o Negative way of approach
o Victorian Era
o Led to medicalization
- Medicalization: deviant sexual practices were given a medical diagnosis
o “sick” and “well” (good and bad)
- 1930-1950's - very socially conservative time (family centered, kinship structures, sexuality in families)
- Levi Strauss: women were objects exchanged amongst men (in his kinship model) - 1960's
- 1960-1970
o Civil Rights Movement in the US - racial equality
o Stonewall Riots in NYC - sexual equality
o March for Women's Rights - gender equality
- 1960's - prompted feminist anthropology
o It is not about women power, women first, etc
o It is a different way of thinking and approaching a problem
o Shows all the types of people in the world, not just Western white heterosexual men
- Sex is biological and gender is socially constructed
- Judith Butler - “gender is performance”
- Queer theory:
o Nothing within your identity is fixed
o Your identity is little more than a pile of social and cultural things which you have previously expressed or which have been said about you
o There is not really an “inner self”- we come to believe that we have one based on repeatedly talking about it
o Gender, like other aspects of identity, is a performance, reinforced through repetition
o People can therefore change