AN ELASTIC INSTITUTION?: John Borneman and Lorie Kain Hart

...In the 1860s New York lawyer and anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan attempted a systematic cross-cultural study of the institution of marriage. Morgan's data were imperfect, but he was able to demonstrate that the record of human societies showed a startling diversity of socially approved forms of marriage. All societies had some form of regularized partnership, but no single standard human form could be identified. Generally, even within a society, there was a certain elasticity of marriage forms.

The most famous of these unions were the ones most foreign to Western Victorian society: marriage between a woman and several men; marriage between a man and several women; forms of "visiting" marriage, whereby a man might visit his wife but not live with her. As anthropologists assembled more reliable data, they found it difficult to produce a definition of human marriage that would hold true for all its socially legitimate forms. ...

Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of French structural anthropology, argued that it is only the "division of labor between the sexes that makes marriage indispensable." It follows that if men and women are granted equal access to jobs of similar worth -- as is often the case today -- the meaning of marriage will change.

The cult of romantic love in a companionate marriage is a recent innovation in the history of marriage. While romantic passion has existed in all societies, only in a few has this unstable emotion been elaborated and intensified culturally and considered the basis for the social institution of marriage. Indeed, marriage has traditionally been more concerned with -- and successful in -- regulating property relations and determining lineage or inheritance rights than with confining passion and sexual behavior. ...

Our society no longer approves of treating women as incompetent minors and the wards of their husbands within the structure of a patriarchal union. We do not approve, generally, of plural marriages -- the basis of our disapproval being that they abrogate the rights of women and especially of young girls. We no longer generally feel that the sole function of women in society is to produce children and serve men as domestic labor. In other words, when we censure certain types of marriage, the basis on which we do so is our defense of individual human rights. This is our ethical standard. ...

What, then, about restriction of the legal bond of marriage to a man and a woman? Does marriage have to be heterosexual? The human record tells us otherwise. While the model of marriage is arguably heterosexual, the practice of marriage is not. In a broad spectrum of societies in Africa, for example, when a woman's husband dies, she may take on his legal role in the family, and acquire a legal "wife" to help manage the domestic establishment. This role of wife is above all social, and not contingent on her sexual relations. These societies, which practice heterosexuality, take this woman-woman marriage as commonsensical; they recognize that above all marriage functions socially to extend and stabilize the network of care.

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David Blankenhorn replies here. I'll note, too, that the only kind of "same-sex marriage" these anthropologists can adduce looks a lot more like the "marrying your nanny or your mom so you can raise your kids together" model that Mary Catelli and others have discussed on this site than like what SSM supporters in this country favor.
posted by Eve at 4:03 PM | link

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