Marriage and Incest Taboos in Cross-Cultural Anthropology

Defining Marriage

Marriage is a sanctioned union between people that establishes certain rights and obligations between those people, their children, and their relatives (Ember & Ember, 2010). These rights and obligations may include many things: the right to property, labor, childrearing and bearing, status, and home (Ember & Ember, 2010). These privileges and rights vary greatly from culture to culture. For example, in some cultures, women found guilty of certain crimes, such as adultery, may be stoned to death — this was the case for a woman in northern Nigeria, for instance (Haviland et al., 2010).

Marriage, for many cultures, is a social institution, and many societies spend considerable time and energy maintaining it. However, in many parts of the world, marriage is marginal and not central to establishing or maintaining the life of the family or society (Haviland et al., 2010). For many cultures, marriage has lost its traditional significance, resulting largely from "political economy, more balanced gender relations, and shared public benefits of the capitalist welfare states" (Haviland et al., 2010). So what significance does marriage have today?

The Universality of Marriage

Marriage as an institution has been regarded as a universal feature of human society for centuries. However, the "unimportance of marriage as the major defining institution for establishing a family" has been a historical fact for centuries, and is not unique to Europe alone (Haviland et al., 2010; Ember & Ember, 2010). Among the Nayar people of Kerala in southwestern India, for example, marriage has long carried only marginal significance (Ember & Ember, 2010; Haviland et al., 2010).

The Nayar are a landowning warrior caste in which kinsmen related through the female line own estates, with blood relatives living together in large households where males serve as managers. This culture is one in which considerable sexual liberty is demonstrated, though this has changed somewhat over the course of the twentieth century. Traditionally, just before a girl experiences her first menstrual cycle, she undergoes a ceremony joining her to a ritual husband — a temporary union not necessarily involving sexual relations and lasting only a few days (Haviland et al., 2010).

According to Haviland et al. (2010), when a girl becomes a woman she then prepares for motherhood and becomes eligible for sexual activity. She enters into relationships with men her family approves. Typically this is a man who presents himself as fit and interested in the relationship. If approved, the relationship becomes formal: the man must present her with gifts three times a year until the relationship terminates, and in exchange he is permitted to spend evenings with the woman. This is only a visiting husband, however — he is not obligated to support her, nor to live in the household. In fact, the woman may have multiple "visiting partners" (Haviland et al., 2010), each of whom must present himself for approval and provide certain gifts.

The Nayar of Kerala: A Case Study

To those familiar with Western culture, Nayar practices may seem unusual, but to the Nayar themselves such arrangements are considered entirely normal and capable of maintaining the peace and harmony of village life. This "version of marriage" also helps reduce conflicts that might otherwise arise among men in the village. Examining this culture, one cannot easily assert that a single "universal theme" of marriage exists.

Yet if one considers how common it is for people in other cultures to live with their sexual partners, the Nayar are not so different from other couples who live together, enjoy sexual relations, and exchange gifts — and who may eventually separate and find new partners.

When a Nayar woman becomes pregnant, one of her male partners must acknowledge paternity and provide gifts to her and her midwife, thereby establishing the child's birth rights. This functions much like formal registration of parenthood (Haviland et al., 2010). No proof that the man is the biological father is required. The mother and her brothers bear the obligation to support the child; the Nayar household is composed of the mother, her children, and blood relatives only — what is referred to as a "consanguine kin" household — and does not include any of the visiting husbands (Haviland et al., 2010, p. 213). This arrangement provides security for women and children in a context where warfare is common. Consanguine relatives do not engage in sexual relations with one another, a norm akin to the incest taboo found across cultures.

This pattern is not entirely unlike practices in European and Western societies, where single mothers often care for their children with the support of family, sometimes enjoying multiple partnerships and invoking the principles of common-law marriage. In this light, the Nayar simply practice what many might recognize as a formalized system that Western observers have failed to categorize as marriage.

References

Ember, C. R., & Ember, M. (2010). Cultural Anthropology. Pearson Education.

Gough, K. (1959). The Nayars and the definition of marriage. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 89, 23–34.

Haviland, W. A., Prins, H. E. L., McBride, B., & Walrath, D. (2010). Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenges. Cengage Learning.

Whelehan, P. (1985). Review of incest, a biosocial view. American Anthropologist, 87, 678.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families. (2005). Child maltreatment 2003. U.S. Government Printing Office.