Marriage and Family

Marriage, a legally and socially sanctioned union, usually between a man and a woman, that is
regulated by laws, rules, customs, beliefs, and attitudes that prescribe the rights and duties of
the partners and accords status to their offspring (if any). The universality of marriage within
different societies and cultures is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions for
which it provides structure, such as sexual gratification and regulation, division of
labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal
needs for affection, status, and companionship. Perhaps its strongest function concerns
procreation, the care of children and their education and socialization, and regulation of lines of
descent. Through the ages, marriages have taken a great number of forms.

Marital Customs and Laws

Some form of marriage has been found to exist in all human societies, past and present. Its
importance can be seen in the elaborate and complex laws and rituals surrounding it. Although
these laws and rituals are as varied and numerous as human social and cultural organizations,
some universals do apply.

The main legal function of marriage is to ensure the rights of the partners with respect to each
other and to ensure the rights and define the relationships of children within a community.
Marriage has historically conferred a legitimate status on the offspring, which entitled him or her
to the various privileges set down by the traditions of that community, including the right
of inheritance. In most societies marriage also established the permissible social relations
allowed to the offspring, including the acceptable selection of future spouses.

Until the late 20th century, marriage was rarely a matter of free choice. In Western societies
love between spouses came to be associated with marriage, but even in Western cultures (as
the novels of writers such as Henry James and Edith Wharton attest) romantic love was not the
primary motive for matrimony in most eras, and one’s marriage partner was carefully chosen.

Endogamy, the practice of marrying someone from within one’s own tribe or group, is the oldest
social regulation of marriage. When the forms of communication with outside groups are limited,
endogamous marriage is a natural consequence. Cultural pressures to marry within one’s
social, economic, and ethnic group are still very strongly enforced in some societies.

Exogamy, the practice of marrying outside the group, is found in societies in

which kinship relations are the most complex, thus barring from marriage large groups who may
trace their lineage to a common ancestor.

In societies in which the large, or extended, family remains the basic unit, marriages are usually
arranged by the family. The assumption is that love between the partners comes after marriage,
and much thought is given to the socioeconomic advantages accruing to the larger family from
the match. By contrast, in societies in which the small, or nuclear, family predominates, young
adults usually choose their own mates. It is assumed that love precedes (and determines)
marriage, and less thought is normally given to the socioeconomic aspects of the match.

In societies with arranged marriages, the almost universal custom is that someone acts as an
intermediary, or matchmaker. This person’s chief responsibility is to arrange a marriage that will
be satisfactory to the two families represented. Some form of dowry or bridewealth is almost
always exchanged in societies that favour arranged marriages.

What is the history of same-sex marriage?

The definition of marriage as a legal and social concept has a long and complex history. In
societies in which individuals choose their own mates, dating is the most typical way for people
to meet and become acquainted with prospective partners. Successful dating may result in
courtship, which then usually leads to marriage.
Family, a group of persons united by the ties of marriage, blood, or adoption, constituting a
single household and interacting with each other in their respective social positions, usually
those of spouses, parents, children, and siblings. The family group should be distinguished from
a household, which may include boarders and roomers sharing a common residence. It should
also be differentiated from a kindred (which also concerns blood lines), because a kindred may
be divided into several households. Frequently the family is not differentiated from
the marriage pair, but the essence of the family group is the parent-child relationship, which may
be absent from many marriage pairs.

At its most basic, then, a family consists of an adult and his or her offspring. Most commonly, it
consists of two married adults, usually a man and a woman (almost always from different
lineages and not related by blood) along with their offspring, usually living in a private and
separate dwelling. This type of unit, more specifically known as a nuclear family, is believed to
be the oldest of the various types of families in existence. Sometimes the family includes not
only the parents and their unmarried children living at home but also children that have married,
their spouses, and their offspring, and possibly elderly dependents as well; such an
arrangement is called an extended family.

Nuclear family, in sociology and anthropology, a group of people who are united by ties of
partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized
children. Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such
couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded
with the advent of same-sex marriage. Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s
biological or adopted offspring.

Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form
of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of
this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a “nuclear family complex” in which
the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by
people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of
these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may be the responsibility not of his
biological genitor but of his mother’s brother, who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.

Extended family, an expansion of the nuclear family (parents and dependent children), usually
built around a unilineal descent group (i.e., a group in which descent through either the female
or the male line is emphasized). The extended family system often, but not exclusively, occurs
in regions in which economic conditions make it difficult for the nuclear family to achieve self-
sufficiency. Cooperation being necessary, aid is recruited, usually either from the
patrilineal kin or the matrilineal kin. In traditional China, for example, the extended family ideally
consisted of the nuclear family of the head of the household, his unmarried daughters, his sons
and their families, his sons’ sons’ families and unmarried daughters, and so forth. The extended
family may include more distant kin, but the uncles, aunts, or cousins usually belong to the
same clan as members of the core lineage.

The relationships between members of the extended family are such that the form of address a
person employs consists of an extension of nuclear family terms to a wider circle of relatives
within the resident clan. In a matrilineal family, for example, a person might refer to his maternal
uncle as “father” and to the latter’s children as “brothers” and “sisters.” The extended family
does not necessarily live in the same dwelling, but normally the members live close together
and work in teams.

It is common for the senior kin to assume the role of mate selection for those of marriageable
age, who are considered too inexperienced to make a proper choice. Qualities sought in a
spouse by the interested kin in an extended family include work ability, capacity to adapt,
procreative power, status, and financial worth.

In common usage, the term extended family has been given a variety of meanings. It may, for
example, refer to a household that includes other kin in addition to the members of the nuclear
family (known in anthropological terminology as a conjugal family), or it may be loosely applied
to mean all living consanguineal kin. Compare nuclear family.
Polygamy, marriage to more than one spouse at a time. The most typical forms of polygamy
have been polygyny, in which cowives share a husband, or polyandry, in which cohusbands
share a wife. However, same-sex marriage may instigate new forms of polygamy. Similar but
without the commitment of marriage is polyamory, having or desiring
multiple intimate relationships at the same time with the full knowledge and consent of all parties
involved.

The term polygamy is often used as a synonym for polygyny, which appears once to have been
fairly common worldwide. Nowhere, however, have any of these been the exclusive form of
marriage.

Marital Residence, Kinship and Descent

A. Kinship, system of social organization based on real or putative family ties. The modern
study of kinship can be traced back to mid-19th-century interests in comparative legal
institutions and philology. In the late 19th century, however, the cross-cultural comparison of
kinship institutions became the particular province of anthropology.

If the study of kinship was defined largely by anthropologists, it is equally true that anthropology
as an academic discipline was itself defined by kinship. Until the last decades of the 20th
century, for example, kinship was regarded as the core of British social anthropology, and no
thorough ethnographic study could overlook the central importance of kinship in the functioning
of so-called stateless, nonindustrial, or traditional societies.

Kinship is a universal human phenomenon that takes highly variable cultural forms. It has been
explored and analyzed by many scholars, however, in ways quite removed from any popular
understanding of what “being kin” might mean.

B. Descent, the system of acknowledged social parentage, which varies from society to society,
whereby a person may claim kinship ties with another. If no limitation were placed on the
recognition of kinship, everybody would be kin to everyone else; but in most societies some
limitation is imposed on the perception of common ancestry, so that a person regards many of
his associates as not his kin.

The practical importance of descent comes from its use as a means for one person to assert
rights, duties, privileges, or status in relation to another person, who may be related to the first
either because one is ancestor to the other or because the two acknowledge a common
ancestor. Descent has special influence when rights to succession, inheritance,
or residence follow kinship lines.

C. Residence, in anthropology, the location of a domicile, particularly after marriage. Residence

has been an important area of investigation because it is a locus where biological
(consanguineal) and marital (affinal) forms of kinship combine.

In traditional cultures, residence practices generally follow established customs. If newlyweds

establish a home independent of the location of either set of parents, they are said to
establish neolocal residence. If they live with or near the kin of the husband, they follow the rule
of patrilocality or virilocal residence; if they live with or near the kin of the wife, the residence is
said to be matrilocal or uxorilocal. When the couple alternates between the wife’s group and the
husband’s group, their household arrangements are called bilocal residence.

These postmarital residence patterns hold even when partners dwell apart much of the time. For
instance, among some traditional American Arctic peoples, adult men reside in a communal
men’s house while women and their children reside in smaller individual homes. Similarly, in
some traditional South American Indian communities a large men’s house is complemented by
one or more large houses in which women and their children dwell communally. In such cases,
residence is reckoned at the level of the hamlet or village rather than the household.
Cultures that practice the avunculate, a custom in which children have a special relationship
with their mother’s brothers, may follow an avunculocal residence system. In such systems,
boys leave their natal home during adolescence and join the household of one of their maternal
uncles. When the boy marries, his wife joins him as a member of the uncle’s residence group.
Hence, an avunculocal household might include a senior married couple (or cowives and their
husband), their unmarried daughters and preadolescent sons, and the husband’s nephews and
their wives, preadolescent sons, and daughters. Notably, cultures that practice the avunculate
often enjoin cross-cousin marriage, in which one marries the child of one’s mother’s brother or
father’s sister. In other words, avunculocal societies encourage pairing between a daughter and
her father’s nephew.

Whatever the preferred form of residence, its establishment after marriage signifies the potential
severance of old alignments in favour of new ones. When such a move necessitates that one
person live with relatives acquired through marriage, the new situation may place him or her at
least temporarily at an emotional disadvantage. This is particularly the case when the residence
is a considerable distance from the individual’s natal home, a situation that may also leave the
person at greater risk for psychological or physical abuse. To some extent, marital exchanges
such as bridewealth and dowry are intended to protect the person who has to leave the natal
residence.

Origins and Anatomy of the State

State, political organization of society, or the body politic, or, more narrowly, the institutions
of government. The state is a form of human association distinguished from other social groups
by its purpose, the establishment of order and security; its methods, the laws and their
enforcement; its territory, the area of jurisdiction or geographic boundaries; and finally by
its sovereignty. The state consists, most broadly, of the agreement of the individuals on the
means whereby disputes are settled in the form of laws. In such countries as the United
States, Australia, Nigeria, Mexico, and Brazil, the term state (or a cognate) also refers to
political units that are not sovereign themselves but subject to the authority of the larger state, or
federal union.

Historical conceptions

Greek and Roman precedents

The history of the Western state begins in ancient Greece. Plato and Aristotle wrote of
the polis, or city-state, as an ideal form of association, in which the whole community’s religious,
cultural, political, and economic needs could be satisfied. This city-state, characterized primarily
by its self-sufficiency, was seen by Aristotle as the means of developing morality in the human
character. The Greek idea corresponds more accurately to the modern concept of the nation—
i.e., a population of a fixed area that shares a common language, culture, and history—whereas
the Roman res publica, or commonwealth, is more similar to the modern concept of the state.
The res publica was a legal system whose jurisdiction extended to all Roman citizens, securing
their rights and determining their responsibilities. With the fragmentation of the Roman system,
the question of authority and the need for order and security led to a long period of struggle
between the warring feudal lords of Europe.

Machiavelli and Bodin

Niccolò Machiavelli, oil on canvas by Santi di Tito; in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.(more)
It was not until the 16th century that the modern concept of the state emerged, in the writings
of Niccolò Machiavelli (Italy) and Jean Bodin (France), as the centralizing force whereby stability
might be regained. In The Prince, Machiavelli gave prime importance to the durability of
government, sweeping aside all moral considerations and focusing instead on the strength—the
vitality, courage, and independence—of the ruler. For Bodin, his contemporary, power was not
sufficient in itself to create a sovereign; rule must comply with morality to be durable, and it must
have continuity—i.e., a means of establishing succession. Bodin’s theory was the forerunner of
the 17th-century doctrine known as the divine right of kings, whereby monarchy became the
predominate form of government in Europe. It created a climate for the ideas of the 17th-century
reformers like John Locke in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, who began to
reexamine the origins and purposes of the state.

Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau

For Locke and Rousseau, as well as for Locke’s English predecessor Thomas Hobbes, the
state reflected the nature of the human beings who created it. The “natural condition” of man,
said Hobbes, is self-seeking and competitive. Man subjects himself to the rule of the state as
the only means of self-preservation whereby he can escape the brutish cycle of mutual
destruction that is otherwise the result of his contact with others.

John Locke
For Locke, the human condition is not so gloomy, but the state again springs from the need for
protection—in this case, of inherent rights. Locke said that the state is the social contract by
which individuals agree not to infringe on each other’s “natural rights” to life, liberty, and
property, in exchange for which each man secures his own “sphere of liberty.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, undated aquatint.
Rousseau’s ideas reflect an attitude far more positive in respect of human nature than either
Hobbes or Locke. Rather than the right of a monarch to rule, Rousseau proposed that the state
owed its authority to the general will of the governed. For him, the nation itself is sovereign, and
the law is none other than the will of the people as a whole. Influenced by Plato, Rousseau
recognized the state as the environment for the moral development of humanity. Man, though
corrupted by his civilization, remained basically good and therefore capable of assuming the
moral position of aiming at the general welfare. Because the result of aiming at individual
purposes is disagreement, a healthy (noncorrupting) state can exist only when the common
good is recognized as the goal.

Social Stratification

Social stratification
Since social stratification is the most binding and central concern of sociology, changes in the
study of social stratification reflect trends in the entire discipline. The founders of sociology—
including Weber—thought that the United States, unlike Europe, was a classless society with a
high degree of upward mobility. During the Great Depression, however, Robert and Helen Lynd,
in their famous Middletown (1937) studies, documented the deep divide between the working
and the business classes in all areas of community life. W. Lloyd Warner and colleagues
at Harvard University applied anthropological methods to study the Social Life of a Modern
Community (1941) and found six social classes with distinct subcultures: upper upper and lower
upper, upper middle and lower middle, and upper lower and lower lower classes. In 1953 Floyd
Hunter’s study of Atlanta, Georgia, shifted the emphasis in stratification from status to power; he
documented a community power structure that controlled the agenda of urban politics.
Likewise, C. Wright Mills in 1956 proposed that a “power elite” dominated the national agenda in
Washington, a cabal comprising business, government, and the military.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, research in social stratification was influenced by the attainment
model of stratification, initiated at the University of Wisconsin by William H. Sewell. Designed to
measure how individuals attain occupational status, this approach assigned each occupation a
socioeconomic score and then measured the distance between sons’ and fathers’ scores, also
using the educational achievement of fathers to explain intergenerational mobility. Peter M.
Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan used this technique in the study published as The American
Occupational Structure (1967).

Attempting to build a general theory, Gerhard Lenski shifted attention to whole societies and
proposed an evolutionary theory in Power and Privilege (1966) demonstrating that the dominant
forms of production (hunting and gathering, horticulture, agriculture, and industry) were
consistently associated with particular systems of stratification. This theory was enthusiastically
accepted, but only by a minority of sociologists. Addressing the contemporary world, Marion
Levy theorized in Modernization and the Structures of Societies (1960) that underdeveloped
nations would inevitably develop institutions that paralleled those of the more economically
advanced nations, which ultimately would lead to a global convergence of societies. Challenging
the theory as a conservative defense of the West, Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World
System (1974) proposed a more pessimistic world-system theory of stratification. Wallerstein
averred that advanced industrial nations would develop most rapidly and thereby widen global
inequality by holding the developing nations in a permanent state of dependency.

Egalitarianism, the belief in human equality, especially political, social, and economic
equality. Egalitarianism has been a driving principle of many modern social movements,
including the Enlightenment, feminism, civil rights efforts, and the establishment of
international human rights. Given that there are many ways in which people can relate as
equals or be treated the same, egalitarianism as a concept is versatile and
sometimes contentious.

Social class, a group of people within a society who possess the same socioeconomic status.
Besides being important in social theory, the concept of class as a collection of individuals
sharing similar economic circumstances has been widely used in censuses and in studies
of social mobility.
The term class first came into wide use in the early 19th century, replacing such terms
as rank and order as descriptions of the major hierarchical groupings in society. This usage
reflected changes in the structure of western European societies after the industrial and political
revolutions of the late 18th century. Feudal distinctions of rank were declining in importance,
and the new social groups that were developing—the commercial and industrial capitalists and
the urban working class in the new factories—were defined mainly in economic terms, either by
the ownership of capital or, conversely, by dependence on wages. Although the term class has
been applied to social groups in a wide range of societies, including ancient city-states,
early empires, and caste or feudal societies, it is most usefully confined to the social divisions in
modern societies, particularly industrialized ones. Social classes must be distinguished
from status groups; the former are based primarily upon economic interests, while the latter
are constituted by evaluations of the honour or prestige of an occupation, cultural position, or
family descent.

Gender Hierarchies
Gender Differences

Differences between males and females can be based on (a) actual gender differences (i.e.,
men and women are actually different in some abilities), (b) gender roles (i.e., differences in
how men and women are supposed to act), or (c) gender stereotypes (i.e., differences in how
we think men and women are). Sometimes gender stereotypes and gender roles reflect actual
gender differences, but sometimes they do not.

In terms of language and language skills, girls develop language skills earlier and know more
words than boys; however this does not translate into long-term differences. Girls are also more
likely than boys to offer praise, to agree with the person they’re talking to, and to elaborate on
the other person’s comments. Boys, in contrast, are more likely than girls to assert their opinion
and offer criticisms (Leaper & Smith, 2004). In terms of temperament, boys are slightly less able
to suppress inappropriate responses and slightly more likely to blurt things out than girls (Else-
Quest, Hyde, Goldsmith, & Van Hulle, 2006).

With respect to aggression, boys exhibit higher rates of unprovoked physical aggression than
girls, but no difference in provoked aggression (Hyde, 2005). Some of the biggest differences
involve the play styles of children. Boys frequently play organized rough-and-tumble games in
large groups, while girls often play fewer physical activities in much smaller groups (Maccoby,
1998). There are also differences in the rates of depression, with girls much more likely than
boys to be depressed after puberty. After puberty, girls are also more likely to be unhappy with
their bodies than boys.

There is considerable variability between individual males and females. Also, even when there
are average group differences, the actual size of most of these differences is quite small. This
means, knowing someone’s gender does not help much in predicting his or her actual traits.

Gender equality, condition of parity regardless of an individual’s gender.

Gender equality addresses the tendency to ascribe, in various settings across societies,
different roles and status to individuals on the basis of gender. In this context, the
term gender generally refers to an individual’s gender identity (e.g., male, female, or neither) or
to a person’s gender role, which is the manifestation of one’s gender identity. Gender is not
necessarily associated with the anatomical sex of an individual. Accordingly, the term gender
equality is sometimes also used to mean “universal equality irrespective of gender, sex,
or sexuality.”

Religion
Universality of Religion

Archaeologists have found evidence of influence of religion on mankind as early as 60,000

years ago. Religious belief and practices are known to contemporary societies. Edward Taylor
believes that religion originated when human speculated about dreams, trances and death. The
appearance of dead persons in dreams led the people to believe that the souls of the dead were
still around. Tylor used the term animism to refer to the belief in souls. His views were criticized
for not dealing with emotional component of religion.
According to Marett animatism which Freud believed that people would turn to go to God during
times of uncertainty and in course of time would outgrow the need for religion. Malinowski
believed that religion is born when humans are under stress and their efforts to overcomes
some problems are of no avail. By performing religious ceremonies people could communicate
with the dead and derive a measure of comfort.
Religion along with its rituals and beliefs meet the psychological need of people. The religion
originates in society and serves social needs. Emile Durkheim is of the view that humans are
pushed and pulled in society by forces of public opinion, custom and law and the experience
leads them to believe in religion which gives people to gain confidence to live amicably in
society.
There are variations in the details of religious beliefs and practices. There are differences in the
kinds of supernatural beings or forces and the character of the beings. They also differ in their
structure and what they do. An example is mana a supernatural impersonal force of malayo-
polynesian origin. The concept of mana is prevalent in many societies.

Types of ritual

Because of the complexities inherent in any discussion of ritual, it is often useful to make
distinctions by means of typology. Although typologies do not explain anything, they do help to
identify rituals that resemble each other within and across cultures.

Imitative
All rituals are dependent upon some belief system for their complete meaning. A great many
rituals are patterned after myths. Such rituals can be typed as imitative rituals in that the ritual
repeats the myth or an aspect of the myth. Some of the best examples of this type of ritual
include rituals of the New Year, which very often repeat the story of creation. In a passage from
one of the Brahmanas, the answer to the question of why the ritual is performed is that the gods
did it this way “in the beginning.” Rituals of this imitative type can be seen as a repetition of the
creative act of the gods, a return to the beginning.
This type of myth has led to a theory that all rituals repeat myths or basic motifs in myths. A
version of this line of thought, often called “the myth-ritual” school, is that myth is the thing said
over ritual. In other words, myths are the librettos for ritual. The works of such scholars as Jane
Harrison and S.H. Hooke are examples of this theory. Although it cannot be denied that some
rituals explicitly imitate or repeat a myth (e.g., a myth of creation), it cannot be maintained that
all rituals do so. The ritual pattern of the ancient Near East, which Hooke considers basic to
the festival celebrating the creation, is itself a typological construction. In any case, although
there is a combat and killing narrated in the festival myth, no known evidence exists
of ritual killing or of king-sacrifice in the ancient Near East. Nevertheless, some rituals do repeat
the story of a myth and represent an important type of ritual behaviour, even though the type
cannot be universalized as a description of all ritual action.

Positive and negative

Rituals may also be classified as positive or negative. Most positive rituals are concerned
with consecrating or renewing an object or an individual, and negative rituals are always in
relation to positive ritual behaviour. Avoidance is a term that better describes the negative ritual;
the Polynesian word tabu (English, taboo) also has become popular as a descriptive term for
this kind of ritual. The word taboo has been applied to those rituals that concern something to
be avoided or forbidden. Thus, negative rituals focus on rules of prohibition, which cover an
almost infinite variety of rites and behaviour. The one characteristic they all share, however, is
that breaking the ritual rule results in a dramatic change in ritual man, usually bringing him some
misfortune.

Variation in this type of ritual can be seen from within a culture as well as cross-culturally. What
is prohibited for a subject, for example, may not be prohibited for a king, chief, or shaman.
Rituals of avoidance also depend upon the belief system of a community and the ritual status of
the individuals in their relation to each other. Contact with the forbidden or transgression of the
ritual rules is often offset by rituals of purification.

Sacrificial

Another type of ritual is classified as sacrificial. Its importance can be seen in the assessment of
sacrificial ritual as the earliest or elementary form of religion. See sacrifice.

The significance of sacrifice in the history of religions is well documented. One of the best
descriptions of the nature and structure of sacrifice is to be found in Essai sur la nature et le
fonction du sacrifice, by the French sociologists Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss,
who differentiated between sacrifice and rituals of oblation, offering, and consecration. This
does not mean that sacrificial rituals do not at times have elements of consecration, offering, or
oblation but these are not the distinctive characteristics of sacrificial ritual. Its distinctive feature
is to be found in the destruction, either partly or totally, of the victim. The victim need not be
human or animal; vegetables, cakes, milk, and the like are also “victims” in this type of ritual.
The total or partial destruction of the victim may take place through burning, dismembering or
cutting into pieces, eating, or burying.

Life crisis

Any typology of rituals would not be complete without including a number of very important rites
that can be found in practically all religious traditions and mark the passage from one domain,
stage of life, or vocation into another. Such rituals have often been classified as rites of
passage, and the French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep’s study of these rituals remains the
classic book on the subject.