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11. MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY
Most
young Americans today look forward to the time when they can "get
married and start a family". In other words, they hope to find a person
of the other sex who will make them happy for life and with whom they
can share the joys of parenthood in a house or apartment of their own.
All
of these expectations seem so natural, simple, and well justified, that
it may be hard to believe that young people of other times and other
cultures have often felt quite differently. However, as we can learn
from historians and anthropologists, our own present forms of marriage
and family are relatively new and by no means universal. For example,
in some non-Western societies people may marry a person of the same sex
or more than one partner of the other sex, the marriage may be quite
unrelated to happiness, love, sexual intercourse, or procreation, it
may not lead to establishing a new household, and it may, from the very
beginning, be planned only as a temporary arrangement.
By
the same token, in some societies of the past, a family did not consist
only of parents and their children, but included a number of other
close and distant relatives as well as servants, friends, and permanent
guests. On the other hand, sometimes the children's natural father or
mother was excluded from the family and remained an unrecognized
"outsider". Indeed, in some cases the "official" husbands or wives were
themselves children and younger than their legal offspring.
These
few observations may suffice to show that it makes little sense to talk
about marriage and family in the abstract, as if they had the same
meaning for everyone. There are simply too many different forms of
marriage and too many different types of family in the world. In short,
there are too many exceptions for any rule that we might set up.
Marriage and family are actually very difficult to define and even more
difficult to explain.
Nevertheless, scholars have often
tried to explain marriage and family by pointing to some of their
obvious functions. After all, it is a biological fact that sexual
intercourse between men and women can produce children, and that these
children need adult care and protection for many years before they can
fend for themselves. Thus, it has been suggested that, with all of
their possible variations, marriage and family are natural and
inevitable institutions which provide for the proper raising of
children, i.e., ultimately for the survival of the human species.
Indeed, the two institutions have been found to serve many additional
useful functions, such as providing sexual satisfaction and
companionship for the spouses and economic cooperation between all
family members. The larger community has also been said to profit from
the arrangement since marriage tends to restrict, regulate, and refine
human sexual behavior which might otherwise become promiscuous and
barbaric. By the same token, a stable family life has often been seen
as the best guarantee of social peace.
Yet, upon closer
examination, it becomes clear that all of these worthy goals can also
be accomplished without marriages and families. Children do not have to
depend on their parents, but can very well be raised by other adults in
professional nurseries, daycare centers, schools, and similar
institutions. Sexual satisfaction and companionship can be found
outside of marriage, and economic cooperation can be achieved in all
sorts of ways between all sorts of people. Sexual behavior can be
regulated by religious and secular authorities, and social peace can be
preserved even in societies which downgrade the family as an
institution and subject everyone directly to some totalitarian control.
On
the other hand, as already hinted above, in some parts of the globe the
institution of marriage has shown such puzzling features that, for a
very long time, modern Western observers could not make sense out of
them. For example, the theory that marriage always ensures the raising
of children by their own parents is contradicted in certain societies
by some very strange rules of determining "fatherhood". Thus, among the
biblical Israelites who practiced the levirate (i.e., a man's
compulsory marriage to his brother's widow), a dead man became the
father of children conceived by his widow and his brother. Similarly,
among the Nayar in Southern India, a young girl was briefly married to
a man who never had a chance to impregnate her, but nevertheless later
became the legitimate father of all her children. Even more bizarre:
Among the Nuer in Southern Sudan, a woman could marry another woman and
be considered the father of that woman's children by some male
outsider. Furthermore, the belief that sexual intercourse is the basis
or object of marriage loses conviction when one considers the example
of the Mojave Indians who allowed adult men to marry baby girls. Or, to
give one final illustration, among the Siberian Chukchee, a woman who
became pregnant by an authorized lover might marry not him, but a baby
husband not older than her own child, and she might, in fact, nurse
both of them together at her breast.
Curiously enough, if
one looks for an explanation of these customs, one eventually finds
that, in spite of their dissimilarities, they have one common
denominator, and that it is an economic one. That is to say, in all of
the above cases, marriage has little to do with biological parenthood
or sexual partnership, but instead is concerned with social legitimacy,
official family lines, property rights, and laws of inheritance. In
short, it is a method for the orderly transmission and conservation of
wealth and status. Its particular form depends on the political
organization of each society. This observation, in turn, has prompted
some scholars to describe the origin and "true" basis of marriage as
economic. Friedrich Engels's study The Origin of the Family, Private
Property and the State, written in the 1880s, is perhaps the best known
example of this approach.
However, while economic factors
have undoubtedly played an important role in the development of
marriage and family, they cannot explain everything about them. For
instance, if only economic considerations were involved, same-sex
marriages would long have been common ail over the world. Instead,
marital partners have nearly always been of different sex. And another
point deserves to be made: While marriage usually involves a division
of labor between the sexes, one can never predict with certainty how it
will work out in practice. What one society calls "men's work", is
"women's work" in another and vice versa. It is not true that all wives
and mothers everywhere spend their lives as homemakers caring for their
children, or that all husbands and fathers work outside the home as
providers. Modern anthropologists have found cultures in which these
roles were reversed.
Under the circumstances, we are forced
to search for still other explanations, and thus some contemporary
scholars have suggested that we look beyond the relationships between
husband and wife or parents and children. There seems to be more to
marriage than that. Indeed, it appears that any such narrow individual
concerns are irrelevant to the question. The French anthropologist
Claude Levi-Strauss, for example, cites an interesting clue provided by
the natives of New Guinea who state that "the purpose of getting
married is not so much to obtain a wife, but to secure
brothers-in-law". Accordingly, Levi-Strauss describes husband and wife
as pawns in a larger social game played by their two respective
families who use the marriage for the mutual acquisition of in-laws.
This means that we are actually dealing with a paradox: Although it is
true that marriages produce families, it is also true that families
produce marriages as a means of establishing alliances between each
other. Such ever-enlarging alliances are the preconditions of
civilization. Social progress would have been impossible if people had
not found a way of affiliating themselves systematically with other
people beyond their immediate blood kin. Fortunately, however, they
found it by creating the incest taboo which forced everyone to marry
outside his own family. Thus, families were linked up to form larger
groups, and the survival of the human race was assured. (For further
details see Levi-Strauss, "The Family," in the anthology by A.S. and
J.H. Skolnick under "Reference and Recommended Reading" below. The
essay had appeared earlier in Man, Culture, and Society, edited by H.L.
Shapiro, New York: 1956.)
It should be pointed out that
Levi-Strauss's explanation of the incest taboo is not considered
definitive by everyone. On the other hand, his conclusion about the
place of the family in society seems indisputable: The small family of
parents and children is not the natural elementary component,
cornerstone, or building block of society, as is so often thoughtlessly
assumed. In fact, a society does not consist of families any more than
it consists of individuals. The old model of a society, state, or
nation being made up of people or groups of people is wrong. Societies,
states, or nations are not composed of people, but of relationships,
and these relationships cannot be understood by simply adding up
numbers. With regard to the family, the relationship of those within it
to the rest of society is obviously far from static. Families are
necessary, but they are not meant to be permanent. On the contrary,
society survives precisely because they are continuously being formed,
broken up, and formed again by marriages. Adults live with children in
a temporary family unit only to give them away in marriage so that they
may found their own temporary family units, and so on. Thus, every
marriage breaks up the two families of bridegroom and bride while at
the same time forging a bond between them and establishing a third,
entirely new family. The point of the whole enterprise, however, is the
continued transference, realignment, and exchange of social
obligations. As Levi-Strauss summarizes it, quoting the Bible: " 'You
will leave your father and mother' provides the iron rule for the
establishment and functioning of any society."
It is
interesting to note, however, that many past and present thinkers have
wanted to see this "iron rule" applied much more strictly than is being
suggested by Levi-Strauss. That is to say, throughout history Utopian
philosophers from Plato to K'ang Yu-wei have wanted to see marriage and
family abolished altogether. Children should therefore be taken away
from their fathers and mothers from their day of birth. For example, in
Plato's Republic wives and children were to be held in common, so that
"no parent would know his own child, nor any child his own parent". As
a result, all family feelings would be transferred to the whole
community. In K'ang Yu-wei's Book of the Great Equality (1935),
children were to be raised in public institutions, because families
were an obstacle to the "perfection of human nature". Similar
sentiments have been expressed by certain religious leaders. Indeed, it
is striking how many of those who have tried to save or improve mankind
have found their efforts obstructed by marital bonds and family
loyalties. Thus, as we can learn from the Bible, Jesus himself was
quite indifferent to marriage and family as social institutions. He
wandered about homeless, remained unmarried, left his own relatives
behind, and never showed them any special consideration (Matthew 12;
46-50). When some young men wanted to become his followers, he asked
them to ignore their families and to devote themselves entirely to the
cause. He even told one of them not to waste time with his father's
funeral, but to "go and preach the kingdom of God" (Luke 9; 59-60).
Accordingly, the early Christians generally put little emphasis on
family relationships and family life. The concept of a close "Christian
family" and the idyllic image of the "Holy Family" in Nazareth are
products of later historical periods.
There is, of course,
little doubt that families can hold an individual down and that they
can frustrate ambition, stifle initiative, hamper personal growth, or
sabotage noble causes. Occasionally, they can even be downright
destructive, ft is also clear that entrenched family systems often
promote and perpetuate inequality. In short, the family is a very
conservative institution, and it usually serves the prevailing social
order, whatever it happens to be. By the same token, revolutionaries,
reformers, and social visionaries often lose patience with it. Family
ties tend to get in the way of sudden social change, even if it is
meant to be for the better.
On the other hand, any larger
social change sooner or later also affects the family, This fact is
illustrated today by the well-publicized "crisis" of marriage and
family in our own society. We can now often hear it said that the
technological and political changes of our recent history have led to a
"breakdown" of the family, and that this, in turn, will eventually lead
to the breakdown of society itself. However, these dour predictions do
not have to come true and may even rest on false assumptions. As we
have mentioned earlier, the family and society do not stand in a static
relationship to each other, but exist in a state of dynamic tension,
indeed, almost confrontation, in a creative equilibrium subject to
constant readjustment. Thus, we may at present simply be going through
another phase in which the demands of family and society are being
forced to find a new balance.
The following pages are
devoted to a more detailed discussion of these and other issues. For
the sake of clarity, marriage and family are examined in separate
sections. Both of these sections, however, offer some historical and
cross-cultural observations and point to future possibilities.
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