Love, Sex, and Marriage

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Love, Sex, and Marriage
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• Sex, Love, and Marriage
• Reading 1) Kinship and Marriage 2) Jankowiak
  and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural Perspective on
  Romantic Love, Ethnology. 
• Family and Kinship Practices ????
• Reading M. Wolf, Uterine Families and the
  Womens Community P. L. Kilbride, African
  Polygyny Family Values and Contemporary Changes 
• Reading 1) Rubie Watson, The Named and the
  Nameless 2) V. Fong, Chinas One-Child Policy
  and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters

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Anthropology and the Study of Kinship Practices

• Kinship (family, marriage, gender) forming the
  basis of the discipline
• comparable to logic in philosophy and the nude
  in art

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Culture and Reproduction

• Every human population, at all times, has had
  culturally constructed ways to either promote or
  limit population growth.
• Three general modes of reproduction
• -the foraging mode existed for most of human
  pre-history and had low rates of population
  growth.
• -the agricultural mode emerged with permanent
  settlements had increased birth rates.
• -industrialized mode (demographic transition)
• Anthropologists have done much less research on
  reproduction than on production.

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The difficulty of conducting field research on
sexual intercourse and fertility

• Sexuality involves private, secret beliefs and
  behaviors. The ethics of participant observation
  disallow intimate observation or participation,
  data can only be obtained indirectly.
• Ex.How many times did you have intercourse last
  year?
• Malinowskis first anthropology study of
  sexuality based on fieldwork in the Trobriands.
• Sexual lived of children sexual techniques love
  magic erotic dreams husband-wife jealousy, etc.
• Note Since the late 1980s, anthropologists have
  paid a lot of attention to the study of
  sexuality, given the increase of STDS and
  HIV/AIDS.

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When to Begin Having Intercourse?

• Biologically speaking, sexual intercourse between
  a fertile female and a fertile make is normally
  required for human reproduction.
• Cultures socialize children about the appropriate
  time to begin sexual intercourse. Guidelines for
  initiating sexual intercourse differ by gender,
  class, race, and ethnicity.
• Cross-culturally, rules more strictly forbid
  premarital sexual activity of girls than of boys.
  
• In some cultures, a high value is placed on a
  woman becoming pregnant soon after she reaches
  menarche, making teenage pregnancy a desired
  condition instead of a social problem (as
  perceived by many experts in the US and China).

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How often should one have intercourse?

• The wide range in frequency of sexual intercourse
  confirms the role of culture in shaping sexual
  desire.
• A study of reported intercourse frequency for
  Euro-Americans in the US and Hindus in India
  revealed that Indians had intercourse far less
  frequently (less than twice a week) than the
  Euro-Americans did (two to three times a week) in
  all age groups.
• Fertility is higher in India than many other
  parts of the world where religiously based
  restrictions on sexual intercourse do not exist.

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Fertility Decision Making and Fertility Control

• Family-level
• National-level
• Global-level
• Family planning programs of many types
• Induced-abortion
• The new reproduction technologies

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Love, Sex and Marriage

• What is marriage?
• -control of sexual relations
• -rule of sexual access
• -incest taboo
• -endogamy and exogamy
• What is the distinction between marriage and
  mating?
• Why is marriage a cultural universal?

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Defining MARRIAGE

• No single definition of marriage is adequate to
  account for all of the diversity found in
  marriages cross-culturally.
• A non-ethnocentric definition of marriage is a
  relationship between one or more men (male or
  female) and one or more women (female or male)
  who are recognized by society as having a
  continuing claim to the right of sexual access to
  one another.
• Although in many societies husbands and wives
  live together as members of the same household,
  this is not the true in all societies.
• Most marriages around the world tend to involve a
  single spouse (monogamy). Yet most societies
  permit and regard as most desirable, marriage of
  an individual to multiple spouses (polygamy).

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According to Edmund Leach, marriage includes

• Social identity of children
• (who is the legal father or legal mother ?)
• Regulating sexual intercourse
• Rights to spouses labor / sexual division of
  labor
• Rights over spouses property
• Joint fund of property rules of inheritance
• Establishing relations between spouses their
  relatives, or relations of affinity
• ????????????????

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Perspectives from bio-anthropology

• Among primates, the human female is unusual in
  her ability in sexual activity whenever she wants
  to or whenever her culture tells her it is
  appropriate, irrespective of whether or not she
  is fertile.
• Although such activity may reinforce social bonds
  between individuals, competition for sexual
  sexual access can be disruptive, so every society
  has rules that govern such access.
• Reproductive success is defined as the passing
  of genes onto the next generation in a way that
  they too can pass those genes on.

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Perspectives from bio-anthropology

• Whatever their virtues, men are more violent than
  women. Why do men kill, rape, and wage war, and
  what can be done about it? Drawing on the latest
  discoveries about human evolution and about our
  closest living relatives, the great apes, Demonic
  Males offers some startling new answers to these
  questions.

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marriage vs. mating

• All animals mate (form a sexual bond with
  individuals of the opposite sex). In some
  species, the bond last no longer than a single
  sex act. While some animals mate with a single
  individual others mate with several.
• Only marriage, however, is backed by social,
  legal, and economic forces.
• Mating is biological, marriage is cultural.

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Cultural Regulations of Sexuality Permissiveness
vs. Restrictiveness

• Premarital sex
• Preparation for later marriage roles given
  complete instructions in all forms of sexual
  expression trial marriages.
• Disgrace responsibility of guarding the chastity
  and reputation of daughters of marriageable age
  as a burden of the mother display of
  blood-stained sheets as test of pre-marital
  chastity
• Sex in marriage
• - Positions patterns privacy occasions
• Extramarital sex
• -not uncommon in most societies a difference
  between the restrictive code and actual practice
  double standard (gender bias) rumors
• Homesexuality

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Why is marriage (almost) universal?

• The need to regulate sexual relations so that
  competition over sexual access does not introduce
  a disruptive, combative influence into society.
• The specific form marriage takes is related to
  who has rights to offspring that normally result
  from sexual intercourse, as well as how property
  is distributed.

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The near universality of incest taboo

• INCEST refers to sexual relations with a close
  relative (parents/children/siblings
• The incest taboo is a cultural universal (which
  can be loosely translated as ??)
• What constitutes incest varies widely from
  culture to culture and a true convincing
  explanation is yet to be advanced.
• Ex. Difficulties of defining DIRT.

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Explaining INCEST Taboo

• Instinctive Horror
• This theory argues that Homo sapiens are
  genetically programmed to avoid incest.
• This theory has serious flaws.
• Cultural universality does not necessarily entail
  a genetic basis (e.g., fire making).
• If genetically programmed, a formal incest taboo
  would be unnecessary.
• Cannot explain why in some societies people can
  marry their cross cousins (children of ones
  brother and sister) but not their parallel
  cousins (children of two brothers and two
  sisters).

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INCEST Taboo

• Biological Degeneration
• Incest taboo developed in response to abnormal
  offspring born from incestuous unions.
• A decline in fertility and survival does
  accompany brother-sister mating across several
  generations.
• However, human marriage patterns are based on
  specific cultural beliefs rather than universal
  concerns about biological degeneration several
  generations in the future.
• Neither instinctive horror nor biological
  degeneration can explain the very widespread
  custom of marrying cross cousins.
• Fears about degeneration cannot explain why
  sexual unions between parallel cousins but not
  cross cousins are so often tabooed.

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Explaining the Taboo

• Attempt and Contempt
• Malinowski (and Freud) argued that the incest
  taboo originated to direct sexual feelings away
  from one's family to avoid disrupting the family
  structure and relations (familiarity increases
  the chances for attempt).
• The opposite theory argues that people are less
  likely to be sexually attracted to those with
  whom they have grown up (familiarity breeds
  contempt). ?????
• Ex. Kibbutz in Israel

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Kibbutz and the control of sexual relations ?

• Although children raised together on an Israel
  kibbutz rarely marry one another, it is not
  because of any instinctive desire to avoid
  mating with people who are close.
• They marry outside their group because
  service in the military takes them out of their
  kibbutz

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Royal Incest

• Royal families in widely diverse cultures have
  engaged in what would be called incest, even in
  their own cultures.
• The manifest function of royal incest in
  Polynesia was the necessity of marriage partners
  having commensurate mana.
• The latent function of Polynesian royal incest
  was that it maintained the ruling ideology.
• The royal incest, generally, had a latent
  economic function it consolidated royal wealth.

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Royal incest
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Marry out or die out?

• A more accepted argument the taboo originated to
  ensure exogamy. Incest taboos force people to
  create and maintain wide social networks by
  extending peaceful relations beyond one's
  immediate group. Incest taboos are seen as an
  adaptively advantageous cultural construct.
• This argument focuses on the adaptive social
  results of exogamy, such as alliance formation,
  not simply on the idea of biological
  degeneration.
• Incest taboos also function to increase a group's
  genetic diversity

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Perspectives from sociocultural anthropology

• Despite the potentially harmful biological
  results of systematic inbreeding, human marriage
  patterns are based on specific cultural beliefs
  rather than universal concerns about biological
  degeneration several generations in the future.

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Marriage Prohibition in the US

• State laws prohibited the marriage of some
  relatives (parent-child and sibling marriages
  marriages between first cousins)
• Cousin prohibitions were enacted long before the
  discovery of the genetic mechanism of disease
• Powerful myth based on a discredited social
  evolutionary theory and contradicted by the
  results of modern genetic research
• Underlying cultural logic

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GIFT

• means present in English
• means poison in German
• means married in the Scandinavian languages.
• Q any significance for kinship analysis?

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Marriage as Group Alliance exchange between
givers and takers

• One classical anthropology theory defines
  marriage as the exchange of gift between two
  groups - wife-givers and wife-takers
• Ideally there is a balanced exchange between the
  givers (brides family) and the takers (grooms
  family)
• Rules of balanced/expected reciprocity
• Marriage payment brideprice/bridewealth/bride
  service dowry
• Marriage strategy hypergamy vs. hypogamy
• Marriage rules endogamy exogamy

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Endogamy

• Endogamy and exogamy may operate in a single
  society.
• Endogamy can be seen as functioning to express
  and maintain social difference, particularly in
  stratified societies.
• Homogamy is the practice of marrying someone
  similar to you in terms of background, social
  status, aspirations, and interests.

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Example of Endogamy

• India's caste system.
• - It is argued that, although India's varna and
  America's "races" are historically distinct, they
  share a caste-like ideology of endogamy.

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Caste / casta /jati (stratification system in
South Asia)

• Castes breeds or types
• (ascribed status)
• Brahmans (priests)
• Kshatriyas ( nobles and warriors)
• Vaishyas (merchants or skilled artisans)
• Shudras (common labors)
• Harijians (outcasts / untouchables)

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Marriage and Jati Hierarchy

• Endogamy
• (marrying within Jati)
• Hypogamy
• (marrying down hierarchy)
• Hypergamy
• (marrying up hierarchy)
• -avoid ritual pollution

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Other examples of endogamy?

• Religious
• Ex. Orthodox Jewish, Muslims (including the
  Chinese Hui),
• Race/ethnicity
• Problems of crosscultural marriages?
• Socioeconomic class
• How about homogamy

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Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage

• Most anthropologists would agree same-sex
  marriages are legitimate unions between two
  individuals because like other kinds of marriage,
  same-sex marriage can allocate all of the rights
  discussed by anthropologist Leach.
• In the U.S., since same-sex marriage is illegal,
  same-sex couples are denied many of these rights
  (e.g., rights to the labor of the other, over the
  other's property, relationships of affinity with
  the other's relatives).

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Marital Rights and Same-Sex Marriage

• There are ethnographic examples in which same-sex
  marriages are culturally sanctioned (e.g., the
  Nuer, the Azande, the Igbo, berdaches, and the
  Lovedu).

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Bridewealth and Dowry

• Particularly in descent-based societies, marriage
  partners represent an alliance of larger social
  units.
• Bridewealth is a gift from the husband's kin to
  the wife's, which stabilizes the marriage by
  acting as an insurance against divorce.
• Dowry, less common than bridewealth, correlates
  with low status for women.
• Fertility is often considered essential to the
  stability of a marriage.
• Polygyny (man taking more than one wife) may be
  practiced to ensure fertility.

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The marriage of women to the church

• In Europe, where both men and women inherit
  family wealth, the marriage of women to the
  church as nuns passed wealth that might otherwise
  have gone to husbands and offspring to the Church
  instead.

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Love and (monogamous) Marriage

• Love and marriage, love and marriageThey go
  together like a horse and carriageThis I'll tell
  you brotherYou can't have one without the
  otherLove and marriage, love and marriageIt's
  an institute you can't disparageAsk the local
  gentryAnd they will say it's elementaryTry,
  try, try to separate themIt's an illusionTry,
  try, try, and you will only comeTo this
  conclusion

• Love and marriage, love and marriageThey go
  together like a horse and carriageDad was told
  by motherYou can't have one without the
  otherTry, try, try to separate themIt's an
  illusionTry, try, try, and you will only comeTo
  this conclusionLove and marriage, love and
  marriageThey go together like a horse and
  carriageDad was told by motherYou can't have
  one without the other

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Romantic Love and (Monogamous) Marriage

• Typically, anthropologists have overlooked
  romantic love as a factor in the interpersonal
  relationships of the people they study, but this
  has begun to change.
• There is romantic love in cultures around the
  world.
• As motifs of romantic love have become more
  widespread, globally, it has come to play an
  increasingly important role in the selection of
  marriage partners.
• In a survey of ethnographies from 166 cultures,
  they found what they considered clear evidence
  that romantic love was known in 147 of them 87
  percent.
• Evidence from tales about lovers, or folklore,
  that offered love potions or other advice on
  making someone fall in love.
• While romantic love appears to be a human
  universal, it is a still an alien idea that in
  many cultures that such infatuation has anything
  to do with the choice of a spouse.
• Source Jankowiak and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural
  Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology

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Romantic Love as a Cultural Construction

• The media propagate popular culture, and images
  from around the world are creeping into everyday
  lives.
• Cultural sources are being merged in ways that
  are forcing the redefinition of identity across
  the globe.

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Divorce

• Divorce is found in many different societies.
• - Marriages that are political alliances between
  groups are harder to break up than marriages that
  are more individual affairs.
• - Payments of bridewealth also discourage
  divorce.
• - Divorce is more common in matrilineal
  societies as well as societies in which
  postmarital residence is matrilocal (such as Naxi
  of SW China)
• - 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 him.

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Divorce in the U.S.

• The U.S. has one of the world's highest divorce
  rates (a steep rise between 1970 and 1994
• The U.S. has a very large percentage of
  professional women.
• patterns of residence and family types vary with
  socioeconomic class (ex. extended families as a
  response to poverty)
• - Americans value independence.

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Plural Marriages

• Polygamy
• Illegal in North America and Post-1949 China
• serial monogamy in postindustrial societies
  (multiple marriages and divorces)
• Polygyny (multiple wives)
• - Practiced in patriarchal societies (ex.
  pre-revolutionary China, some African countries
  and elsewhere in the world)
• Polyandry (multiple husbands)
• Ex. Fraternal polyandry in Tibet (brothers share
  a wife)

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Polygyny vs. Polyandry
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Is Polygamy confusing or just a matter of family
values?
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African Polygyny Family values and contemporary
changes
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Enculturation/ Socialization and the Life Cycle

• The main agents of SOCIALIZATION (enculturation)
  family, school, peer groups, the mass media,
  and the work (particular attention to gender
  socialization) .
• The main stages of life cycle identified as1)
  infancy 2)childhood and adolescence, 3) young
  and mature adulthood, and 4) old age
• Anthropological notions of social birth and
  social person
• Social death vs. biological death

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Readings

• Jankowiak and Fischer, A Cross-Cultural
  Perspective on Romantic Love, Ethnology.
• M. Wolf, Uterine Families and the Womens
  Community.
• Philip L. Kilbride
• African Polygyny Family values and contemporary
  changes