Alternative Gender Roles or Rites of Passage
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section6.4.docx6.4 Lifecycle
Some of a person's statuses within their society's particular social organization vary at different stages of life. The changes in social statuses thatare typically experienced by members of society make up their lifecycle.
Rites of Passage
Martha Cooper/National Geographic Stock
All cultures divide the lifecycle into various stages. Here, ayoung Apache girl is making the transition to adulthood.
Arnold Van Gennep (1908/1960) has pointed out that as we move from one status to another within the lifecycle, the life events and status changes that are typically experienced by individuals are commonly proclaimed to other members of society by formal rituals known as life crisis rites or rites of passage.
Ceremonies such as christenings, puberty rituals, marriages, and funerals, which we hold whenever a member of society undergoes an important change in status within the lifecycle of the group, are considered rites of passage. They symbolically dramatize how important status changes are in the eyes of society and help to maintain stability and order while society adjusts to culturally significant changes in people's lives. The acquisition of a new status calls for the successful adoption of a new set of roles by the person who is moving into the new phase of life. The formal dramatization of these changes in a ritual of status change may be psychologically beneficial to those who are beginning roles that they have not practiced before, and to other members of society who must also adopt new ways of relating to them. Four public symbolic rituals are commonly celebrated throughout the world: naming ceremonies, which confer human status on the new member of society and proclaim the parenthood of its caretakers; puberty celebrations, which confer adult status; marriages, which legitimize new sexual, economic, and childrearing obligations; and funerals, which proclaim the loss of human status by the deceased and restructure the ongoing social order.
Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Naming
The first lifecycle change is associated with birth. Yet even before that obviously major event, our parents are experiencing the status changes of pregnancy. The biological facts of conception, pregnancy, and the birth process are interpreted differently among various cultures. After birth, each society also has its specific ways of raising children.
Pregnancy
People in most societies believe that pregnancy is a result of sexual intercourse, but conception itself is explained in a variety of ways. Often the child is thought of as developing from semen, menstrual blood, or both. In many societies, both the mother and the father are believed to contribute during intercourse to the conception and sometimes to the growth of the child. Sometimes, however, the role of one parent is more important in explaining the origin of the child. For instance, in ancient Greece, the father was thought to plant the child in the mother as one might plant a seed in the field. The mother merely carried the father's child as it grew. Such a metaphor was not uncommon in horticultural societies in which men were dominant. In other societies, where men and women had equal status, the symbols of procreation might emphasize the role of both father and mother in conception. In a few cases, women were thought to become pregnant without the aid of aman.
On the surface, some societies appear to be unaware of the link between intercourse and conception. Walter E. Roth claimed that the indigenous people of the Tully River of North Queensland, Australia, were ignorant of the role of sex in pregnancy. In their view, a woman becomes pregnant from sitting over a fire on which she had roasted a black bream that had been given to her by the man who would be thefather of the child because she had hunted a particular kind of bullfrog, because some men had told her to be pregnant, or because she dreamed that the child had been put into her (Roth, 1963).
On the other hand, Tully River people were aware that copulation causes pregnancy in animals. It is unlikely, therefore, that they were unaware that sex caused pregnancy in humans in a purely physiological sense. However, in any culture, people's ideas about humans are never straightforward descriptions of observed fact, uninfluenced by their values. In this case, the Tully River people's denial of the role of sex inhuman pregnancy was not simple ignorance; it was a symbolic affirmation of their ideologically important values. According to Leach (1969), the pregnancy beliefs of the people of Tully River are ways of affirming that "the relationship between the woman's child and the clansmen of the woman's husband stems from public recognition of the bonds of marriage, rather than from the facts of cohabitation" (p. 87). In other words, the people of Tully River believe that pregnancy is "caused" by a woman's catching the right kind of bullfrog in the same sense that Christians believe that a wife's fertility is "caused" by the rice thrown at her at the end of her wedding ceremony.
Pregnancy Rituals
Pregnancy is a time of potential anxiety, as it is fraught with possible negative outcomes such as miscarriage, physical defects in the baby, or death in childbirth for either the infant or the mother. Such anxieties cause people to turn to symbolic pregnancy rituals to protect the child and pregnant woman and to aid in a successful birth. These rituals are frequently expected to apply to the husband as well as the pregnant woman. They generally take the form of taboos against doing things that have some similarity to the feared outcomes. For instance, the Great Basin Shoshone forbid a pregnant woman or her husband to eat either the mud hen, which they call the "fool's hen," or the trout, which flops about when one catches it, since the former might result in the child's being stupid and the latter in its becoming entangled in the umbilicalcord during labor.
Among the Aztecs of Mexico, pregnant women were forbidden to look at an eclipse of the sun, which they called Tonaltiu qualo, meaning "The sun is being eaten," as to see this phenomenon might result in a lip defect, such as harelip, in the unborn child. As a prophylactic against the effects of accidentally seeing an eclipse, the Aztec mother-to-be might wear an obsidian blade over her breast to protect the child.
On the other hand, some pregnancy rules require behaviors that are similar to the characteristics of a good birth. The Shoshone father was encouraged to hunt the otter because this animal is known for its enjoyment of sliding down slippery riverbanks, much as the child was hoped to pass easily through the birth canal. Like many other cultures, U.S. culture includes several traditional pregnancy taboos and admonitions. One of these is based on the idea of marking. According to this belief, children may be influenced by things that are done by or that happen to their mothers during pregnancy. For instance, birthmarks might be attributed to the mother's having eaten too many strawberries, raspberries, or other red foods. The most common expression of the concept of marking in the United States today is in admonitions to do things believed to influence the child in positive ways. For instance, a pregnant woman may hear that by spending time listening to classical music, reading good literature, and immersing herself in art she may predispose her child to similar pursuits. The concept of the marking of an unborn child by its mother parallels the idea that, after birth, mothers have the principal psychological influence on the development of the child and therefore usually receive greater credit or blame than others for what the child becomes.
Birth
In most societies, when the woman enters labor she is attended by one or more women who have already experienced childbirth themselves and who help her through the process. Most commonly, birth occurs with the woman assuming a kneeling or squatting position, a posture that facilitates the birth process more than the reclining position traditionally used in many Western hospitals. These upright birthing positions havea beneficial effect on the angle of the birth canal and take advantage of gravity in aiding the passage of the infant.
It is only in recent years that Western medicine has begun to abandon its customary treatment of women in labor as if they were ill patients undergoing a surgical procedure. With pressure from women's groups, the role of the woman in her labor has been redefined as an active partner with others involved in the birthing process, and changes have begun to be made in the woman's posture during childbirth that facilitate her role and not simply that of the medical personnel.
For most Americans and Canadians, the preferred place for the delivery still is a hospital in the presence of the physician and one or more nurses. North Americans generally regard it as desirable for a woman to seek the services of a physician starting about 2 months into her pregnancy. This doctor will evaluate the health of the woman, check the progress of the pregnancy, and deliver the baby if it is carried to term.However, particularly in the United State, this ideal is not always possible for those with low incomes, due to the high costs of medical treatment and hospital care. Thus, there is an increasing return to the less expensive system of delivery at home with the aid of a nurse-midwife who, at the same time, offers more personalized care than does the hospital system. Many hospitals, in turn, are beginning to shift from the use of specialized labor and delivery rooms to the use of birthing rooms, which can save as much as half the hospital costs for abnormal delivery.
Naming
The next important symbolic act in the life of a newborn baby is its naming ceremony. In this ritual the baby is officially received into the community of human beings and symbolically given human status by acquiring a human name. In either the birth or naming ritual, the infant is commonly brought into contact with those aspects of life that are of central concern to the members of the society into which it is being received. Thus, among the Samoans of Polynesia and the Yahgan of southernmost Argentina (Cooper, 1946; Murdock, 1934; Service, 1978a), both of whom relied heavily on sea products as their main source of food, the newborn child was bathed in the sea shortly after birth. The Mbuti Pygmy of the Ituri Forest of Africa (Gibbs, 1965) grow no food but obtain all their basic needs from the uncultivated resources of the forest; they therefore speak of the forest as their parent and their provider. They initiate their children into the human group in a ritual in which vines from the forest are tied around the children's ankles, wrists, and waists, there by bringing them into contact with their future livelihood.
In the United States, most parents begin selecting a name for the child months before the birth. Most families have no formal customary rulesfor selecting the name, such as a requirement to name the child after a particular relative, but many choose to do so. Because the selection ofthe name is largely an aesthetic issue, the popularity of different names rises and falls over the generations much as do fashions in dress.Names are officially given without ceremony right after birth when the attending physician fills out a birth certificate to be filed in the county records. In some cases, a religious naming ceremony may be conducted for the child a few weeks later.
Enculturation, Childhood, and Adolescence
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The transition to adulthood is an important stage in a young person's life.Here, a Jewish teenager completes his Bar Mitzvah ritual to become anadult in his religious community.
From birth through adolescence, we humans are raised in some kind offamily setting according to the dictates of our culture. Our upbringing usually includes some restrictions on free expression of our sexuality, including taboos against intercourse with certain family members. In many societies, attaining sexual maturity is marked by special puberty rites honoring the passage into adulthood.
Childhood and Adolescent Sexual Socialization
Before we are able to play the role of adults with complete success, we must acquire knowledge of the sexual customs of our society. Looking cross-culturally, we see enormous cultural variation in these customs. For example, the average age at which people first have sexual intercourse tends to be earlier in Africa, Europe, and North America than in Asia and Latin America.The average age that women first have sex is at about 15 years old in Chadversus 20 years old in Cambodia (Demographic and Health Survey, 2005).Research also shows that, across cultures, teen girls are often times coerced into having sex (MacKay, 2001). In addition to the age of first sex, the degree to which societies are permissive or open about sex varies greatly.As Margaret Mead's (1928) classic study showed, Samoan society (at the time of her fieldwork in the 1920s) was highly tolerant of young people having sex and did not hide practices surrounding sex, birth, or death from children.
Sexual practices, however, change over time. In the United States, in 1995, about 19% of women between 15 and 19 years old, and 21% of men of the same age range had had sex before age 15; in 2006–2008, 11% of women ages 15–19 and 14% of men of the same age range had had sex before age 15 (Abma, 2010). More generally, U.S. adolescents explore their identities as social beings during the teenage period as they practice the skills necessary to achieve an independent adult status. Acceptance by their peers becomes extremely important, and adolescents begin to create a sense of independent functioning by adopting new values that are in harmony with their peer group and with the social milieu outside their family. In this period of dating, adolescents begin to learn the skills of courtship and lay the foundations for their adult sexual identities. Although ideals historically have required that both sex and pregnancy be delayed until after the marriage ceremony, this is no longerthe case in practice.
Puberty Rituals
Balinese Puberty Rite
For the Balinese, the end of puberty is marked by filing the sixfront teeth.
· Why do Balinese celebrate the end of puberty by filingthe girls' teeth?
· Compare the life of Balinese teenagers with the life ofAmerican teenagers. What is different and what is similaracross cultures?
Near the time individuals reach biological maturity, it is common for a puberty ritual or adulthood ritual to be held. This ritual signals the transition from childhood to adulthood and impresses on both the child and his or her community that the old roles of childhood are to be set aside and that sheor he should be treated as an adult. During the period of transition from childhood to adulthood, initiates may be expected to demonstrate that they have acquired valued adult skills. They may go through a period of seclusion before the ceremony in which they are reintroduced into society as newadults. During this period, they may be taught special flirting techniques ordances that they will be expected to perform at the ceremony. Sometimes they don special clothing and ornaments or wear special hairstyles to indicate their new status. Large, public puberty rituals—which often involve groups of young persons who are initiated into adulthood together—help those youngsters make the transition into the expected adult pattern. They also build solidarity among members of the group who go through the ceremony together.
In the dominant North American culture, some of the traditional rites of passage are relatively weak or sometimes lacking. For instance, few people inthe United States experience any form of true puberty ritual as they near adulthood. Instead we have several less significant transitions, each of which confers some of the rights of adulthood: obtaining a driver's license during the teenage years, graduating from high school, gaining the right to vote atthe age of 18, and becoming old enough to drink alcoholic beverages legally at the age of 21. This lack of a clear puberty ritual often creates confusion about the roles we are expected to play and leaves individuals to wrestle alone with what in the U.S. culture is commonly called an "identity crisis."The existence of this expression in everyday language is evidence of how extensive role confusion is in this society. It suggests the benefits that rites of passage may provide to a society's members by helping them maintain a greater sense of self-confidence as they undergo the normal changes experienced by members of their group.
Not all societies practice puberty rituals, but they are relatively common. Based on their study of 186 "traditional" cultures, Schlegel and Barry(1991) found that most had puberty rituals for adolescents: primarily for girls (79%) but also for boys (68%). For girls, men arche is often the key motivator for the puberty ritual, particularly because many cultures exhibit ambivalence about menstruation, which may be seen as both apolluting event and a positive sign of fertility. For boys, there tends not to be physical event that initiates the puberty ritual. Puberty rituals for boys focus instead on transitioning boys into manhood by having them display strength or courage, or withstand pain (Gilmore, 1990).
Social circumstances that foster interdependent role playing can lock people into their current roles and make change difficult without the aid ofa mechanism for transformation from one status to another. The puberty ceremony symbolically redefines the child as an adult in a dramatic,public fashion that is difficult for those involved to ignore. The ritual proclaims the changes in rights and responsibilities that everyone in thegroup must recognize. Participation in large public, group puberty rituals not only helps transform youngsters into adults; it also builds solidarity among the entire group that goes through the ritual together.
Puberty Rites for Males
For boys, puberty rituals seem to be most dramatic when the transition from boyhood to manhood is potentially difficult. Under such circumstances, male puberty rituals are often severe and painful ordeals, involving ceremonies such as circumcision (the surgical removal of theforeskin), scarification of the body (decorating the body with a pattern made of scars), tattooing, and the filing or knocking out of front teeth as indicators of adult status.
Whiting, Kluckhohn, and Anthony (1958) found that circumcision of males as a part of initiation rituals is especially associated with three social customs: a taboo on sex between husband and wife for a year or more after the birth of a child, the sharing of sleeping quarters by mother and child with the father's quarters elsewhere, and the establishment of residence by a married couple near the husband's relatives. The first two of these customs make it more difficult for a male child to identify with the male role, as the most available adult role model is the mother. The third, residence of couples near the husband's relatives, is common where male solidarity is important among adults. The conflict between theneed to identify with the male group as an adult and the relatively weak childhood tie between father and son makes the transition from childhood to adulthood a stressful one. Hence the dramatic ritualizing of the status change through which a boy proves to the adult male community that he is capable of adopting the adult male role.
Puberty Rites for Females
For girls, puberty rites are more likely to occur in societies where the residences of newly married couples are established near the wife'srelatives than in societies where daughters leave home when they marry. The puberty ritual emphasizes the young woman's new role. The more important a woman's labor is to the family food supply, the more likely it is that female puberty rituals will be practiced. As with male initiation rituals, painful ceremonies that include such things as scarification or female circumcision are most likely in societies where the transition from childhood to adult roles is most difficult. For girls, this occurs in those societies where mothers and daughters share sleeping quarters while thefather sleeps elsewhere. In the United States, female puberty rites generally declined as the family was replaced as the primary group that carried out the work of producing income. However, there are still "coming out" parties or "debutante balls," which function to introduce marriageable females to males of the same social class, and ethnic equivalents such as the Hispanic quinceañeras, which introduce 15-year-old daughters to the families of friends of her parents.
Courtship and Marriage
Following the puberty or adulthood ritual, the next common rite of passage is marriage. Cultures handle courtship and mate selection in many different ways. In many societies, parents select marital partners. In others, especially those in which children will establish their own households that are economically independent of their parents, courtship and choice of spouse is a responsibility of the young adults themselves.
Nonmarital Sex
Following puberty, the majority of societies are quite tolerant of sexual experimentation before marriage. Frayser (1985) found that 64% of hercross-cultural sample of 61 societies had little or no restriction on premarital sexual relations. According to Ford and Beach (1952), the least permissive societies are, as might be expected, those in which wealth and class differences cause parents to have the greatest interest incontrolling the marital choices of their children, and societies in which the economic and political position of families is based on male solidarity.
Marriage Ritual
Once an agreement for marriage partners has been achieved between the families, the actual ritual of marriage may occur. Marriage rituals vary tremendously from society to society. They may involve elaborate symbolism and drama or they may be as simple as a public announcement bya couple that they consider themselves married. Where formal rituals of marriage are customary, the symbolism often emphasizes the union being created between the two families. It may also portray the relations, especially those of a stressful nature, that are expected to exist between the couple and their respective inlaws. For instance, among the Aztecs of Mexico the bride was carried, like a burden, on the back of the old woman who had acted as her matchmaker to the place of the marriage. After lectures by the elders of both families about their new responsibilities as married persons, the capes of the couple were tied together into a knot by which they were joined in marriage.
G. W. Stow (1905) described a South African! Kung San marriage ritual (which is no longer practiced) in which the bride was captured by the bridegroom and his family or friends from her defending relatives. During the wedding feast the groom was expected to seize hold of the bride.Then the two families began to fight while the bride's family focused their attention on beating the groom with their digging sticks. The groomhad to succeed in holding onto his bride during this beating for the marriage ritual to be complete. Had he failed, he would have lost his bride.
In Western societies the idea that the government had authority to regulate marriages did not exist before the Middle Ages. Instead, as has been common in many non-Western societies throughout the world, marriages were created by the negotiation of a contract between the couple or between their respective families. No religious or governmental ceremonies were required because marriage was simply a matter offamily law. Between the 8th century and the year 1000, the ceremonies that created marriages continued to be organized by families or individuals, but sometimes important, upper-class members of society were honored with a ritual blessing of the unions in church ceremonies that generally preceded the actual wedding ceremony, which was still performed according to the secular customs of family law. Gradually,nonfamily authorities became more involved in the regulation of marriages. Landowners, for instance, began to require the peasants who worked their land to obtain their permission to marry and establish new households, as marriages among the peasants could involve the movement of workers from the properties of one landowner to those of another. Governments encouraged the local religious leaders to take responsibility for keeping records of marriages as religious marriage rituals became more common. In Western European countries, it was not until the year 1215 that religious wedding ceremonies were required by church authorities for a marriage to be legitimate. The governmental regulation of marriage through the requirement that couples apply to the state for a license to marry did not become a part of the Western concept of legitimate marriage until even more recently. The beginning of formal government regulation of marriage occurred in 1636 when England passed legislation that required parishes to record marriages. However, it was not until Napoleonic times that France began requiring citizens to register their marriages with the government, such that there were penalties for failing to register marriages civilly (instead of merelyrecording them in a parish record). England and Wales followed suit by requiring civil registration of marriages in 1837, but only imposed penalties for the failure to register in 1872. Eventually, in 1929, England became the first country to legislate a minimum age for marriage,which was 16 years old for women and men.
Types of Marriage
Marriages take several forms. Four basic types seem to exist: monogamous, polygynous, polyandrous, and group marriages. These four types differ in the number of persons of one or both sexes who form the marriage relationship and in the circumstances under which each tends to be the idealized form of marriage.
In monogamous marriages two persons are joined as spouses. Monogamous marriages are the most common form of marital unit in all societies, even where other forms may be idealized as more desirable. Yet the Cultural Diversity Database indicates that only 14% of a sample of180 societies restrict marriage to the monogamous form and that another 19% prefer monogamy without for bidding other marriage forms(White and Douglas, 1987, p. 22). Even in those societies in which monogamy is the norm, individuals may be involved in more than one marriage during their lifetimes. For instance, despite the ideal of marriage as a long-term commitment, divorce is quite common in many societies, especially before the birth of a first child. In societies such as the United States in which monogamy is the accepted form of marriage, a high rate of divorce (nearly half of marriages end in divorce) and subsequent remarriage creates a particular pattern called serial monogamy,in which individuals have more than one spouse, but at different times.
Everett Collection/SuperStock
Polygamy is illegal in the United States. In 1953, hundreds offundamentalist Mormons were arrested in Short Creek, Arizona, for practicing polygamy.
If men or women are permitted to marry more than one spouse at the same time instead of serially, the form of marriage is referred to as polygamy. Polygamous marriages may involve one husband and several wives or one wife and several husbands. The form of polygamy in which one woman is married to more than one man at a time is technically referred to as polyandry. That form is less common than the form of polygamy in which one man is married to more than one woman at a time, which is referred to as polygyny. Polygyny exists, in some form and to varying degrees, in approximately 80% of societies or an estimated 850 societies (including the United States) (Ember et al., 2007; Murdock,1981). It is particularly practiced in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia(Ember et al., 2007). Among them, Mali has one of the highest rates of polygyny, with45% of married women being involved in polygynous unions (Madhavan, 2002).
More generally, the highest frequency of polygynous families is found in societies in frontier areas; in societies where warfare in common; in societies in which the ratio of adult women to men is high (a condition that is common in either of the two preceding circumstances); in groups where rapid growth of families is beneficial to family survival; and in highly patriarchal societies. Since the ratio of male to female children is about equal in all societies, relatively few men actually are able to practice polygyny even in societies where it is the preferred marital form. Most commonly, it is practiced by individuals of high social standing, while most men of lower social standing remain monogamous. Because it generally takes some time and effort to achieve the social standing that makes it possible for a man to have more than one wife, polygyny often involves an age difference between spouses, with older men taking much younger wives. White (1988a, 1988b) has demonstrated that polygyny is organized into two basic patterns: sororal polygyny and male-stratified polygyny. In sororal polygyny a man marries two or more closely related women, often sisters.Typically, the wives share a common residence with their husband. As close relatives, the co-wives are less likely to experience jealousy than might nonrelated co-wives. In societies that practice this form of polygyny, social ranking is primarily a matter of individual achievement. Each additional wife and her children increase the demands on the husband's efforts to provision his family. Thus, only a small number of men, such as outstanding hunters, warriors, or shamans, are able to demonstrate their success by marrying a second or third wife. Because the inheritance of wealth and/or high status is normally absent, inheritance rights of children are not a cause of rivalry between co-wives.
Male-stratified polygyny is more common in societies in which there are hereditary classes. In this form of polygamy, a small number of men who hold positions of rank and authority (often older men of wealthy families) marry a larger number of wives, perhaps 20 or 30. In these societies, the labor of women is often economically valuable, and each new wife increases the wealth of the family and its social prominence.The greater wealth and improved social standing make it easier for the husband to acquire yet another wife. In contrast to sororal polygyny, where the wives and their husbands often reside together, these wives often have their own residences so that their economic activities can becarried out with a minimum of direct competition between co-wives.
It is rare for a woman to have several husbands, as in a polyandrous marriage. This is the idealized family type in probably less than 0.5% of theworld's societies. The most common form of polyandrous union is one in which a woman is simultaneously married to several brothers, a form known as fraternal polyandry. It is advantageous where resources are extremely limited. Polyandrous unions have been reported among southern Indian and Tibetan peoples where land is at a premium and cannot easily be further subdivided from one generation to the next. A form of temporary polyandry that is sometimes called anticipatory levirate was also practiced by the Shoshone of the Great Basin and the Comanche of the Plains. In this form, a man might temporarily share his wife with a younger brother until he was old enough to make his own way as an independent hunter with his own family. In the event of the older brother's death, the younger might continue to live as the husbandof the polyandrous wife. Just as polygyny is only practiced by a minority of men (even in societies that prefer this marital form), only a minority of women are actually able to practice polyandry in societies where it is the preferred form of marriage. Further, because each polyandrous marriage requires more than one husband, many women are never able to marry. In polyandrous societies where the wealth of a family is based on the husbands' cooperative agricultural labor, unmarried women are economically disadvantaged and may have to enter low-ranked occupations to survive. The importance of male labor in these societies also makes it likely that female infanticide will be practiced.
It should be noted that polyandry is not a "mirror image" of polygyny. In polygynous societies, men are permitted to have more than one wife, but women may have only one husband. In polyandrous societies, men are not generally forbidden to have more than one wife. Also, polyandryis not associated with female dominance. Rather, fraternal polyandry is a means of keeping brothers together so that their means of livelihoodneed not be divided. Thus, the husbands in polyandrous families typically control their families' means of livelihood. In fact, the continuity ofthe male line of inheritance in polyandrous societies may result in descent being patrilineal (see Section 6.3: Kinship ), fatherhood being determined by a social convention other than the idea of biological ancestry. For instance, each of the co-husbands may assume fatherhood of children born during a particular period. Because of the centrality of the economic role of husbands, polyandry, like polygyny, is often associated with the subordination of women rather than higher status for women or gender equality.
When several males are simultaneously married to several females, their union is called group marriage. Group marriage and polyandry typically occur together, but group marriage and polygyny do not. Women in polyandrous families in some ways have higher status than those in polygynous families. For instance, the sexuality of plural wives in polygynous families is often jealously guarded by their husbands, but not in apolyandrous society in which married women will have plural mates as a matter of course. On the other hand, no such contrast exists for husbands in these two family types. Polyandrous societies typically have no rules against husbands sometimes marrying plural wives, something that wives in polygynous societies are not likely to be permitted to do. When one of a woman's husbands in a polyandrous society marries another woman—often a sister of the original wife—the new bride also becomes the wife of co-husbands in the original marriage as well. Such simultaneously polyandrous and polygynous families are also considered group marriages.
Fixed-term marriages are marriages that are contracted as temporary relationships. These marriages legitimize a sexual relationship in which the usual marriage characteristics, such as economic obligations or the expectation of childrearing, may be minimized. In fixed-term marriages, thelength of time of the marriage is agreed upon before it begins, so that it will come to an end after a specified period of time or whenever the activities that make it convenient for the couple to remain together have run their course. For instance, fixed-term marriages came into existence in Islam in order for soldiers to have legitimate sexual partners while they were fighting in foreign wars for long periods. At the end ofthe husband's military duty, his temporary marriage was dissolved, and he was free to return home with no further obligation to the divorced wife. Fixed-term marriages are legally recognized in several Middle Eastern countries, such as Iran and Kuwait.
A marriage can exist legally without a family being established in order to allow one or both partners to obtain social benefits that would be unavailable otherwise. Such a marriage is called a fictive marriage. For instance, immigration and naturalization quotas in the United States have resulted in the practice of marriages between U.S. citizens and potential immigrants or resident aliens for no purpose other than to facilitate the immigration or acquisition of citizenship by the noncitizen partner. In such a case, the parties to the marriage may not establish a commondomicile or sexual relationship; indeed, they need not be acquainted before the marriage nor see each other again afterward. This particular example of fictive marriage is one that is legally rejected by U.S. immigration authorities and punishable by law, but analogous fictive marriages do exist in societies where they are openly accepted as valid means to an end. For instance, among the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast it is possible for a man to marry the male heir of a chief as a means of inheriting certain privileges from the father-in-law. When there is no heir tomarry, a man may marry the chief's arm or leg as a legally valid way of becoming an inheritor.
Ghost Marriage Among the Nuer of the Sudan
Evans-Pritchard (1951) described an interesting form of fictive marriage practiced by the Nuer, a cattle-herding people who live inthe savanna region of the Upper Nile in the Sudan. Ghost marriages occur when the close, married or unmarried, male kinsman of a man or boy who died before he had any legal heirs, marries a woman in the name of the deceased relative. The living vicarious husband gives the family of the bride a number of cattle, as the deceased man would have done had he married the woman while he was still alive. Legally, the woman will be the ghost's bride, and all of the children she bears will be his.However, the vicarious husband will be treated in all other respects as if he were the woman's real husband, something that isnot true in the case of the levirate. As with the levirate, the purpose of a ghost marriage is to bear children who will be heirs to the deceased husband. However, ghost marriage differs from the levirate in several important ways. A leviratic marriage unites a widow with a surrogate for her deceased husband. The wife in a ghost marriage is not the widow of the deceased, but she becomes his wife through a marriage ritual with a living surrogate after the death of the ghost husband, whom she, in most cases, might never have known while he was alive.
Ghost marriages among the Nuer are almost as common as simple marriages between a man and woman, partly because each ghost marriage tends to create anew the circumstance which requires ghost marriages in the first place: a man who enters aghost marriage as the vicarious husband obtains no descendants through that marriage; he may well die before he is able to found a lineage of his own; and it will be up to one of his brothers or nephews to enter a ghost marriage in his behalf. Thus theNuer "solution" to the "problem" of men who die without children perpetuates the very situation it is intended to eliminate. Such a situation suggests that some pragmatic benefits may accrue to Nuer families who practice ghost marriage.
How might Nuer ghost marriage benefit the living? An answer to this question is suggested by other customs related to ghost marriage. The Nuer not only assert that a dead man may be the legal father of children born long after his death, but also that aghost may continue to own property. When a man dies without heirs, any cattle he may have owned do not revert to the larger family herd, but remain ghok jookni, "cattle of the ghost." Such cattle are sacred and may not properly be used for any purpose other than as payment to a bride's family for her bearing of children in the name of the ghost. This restriction has furtherimplications: according to Evans-Pritchard (1956), "When Nuer raid a herd to seize cattle in compensation for some injury they will not take cattle reserved for the marriage of a ghost" (p. 111). So the idea that uninherited cattle remain the property of the dead benefits the survivors because such property is still under their control and can be used for several purposes. The cows maybe milked while they are held in trust for the deceased owner, they may be used to obtain a wife for one of their living sons (so long as he enters a fictive marriage in behalf of the dead owner of the cattle that pays for the marriage), and they cannot be taken from the family in payment of debts as their other cattle can. Thus ghost marriage is, in reality, part of a larger web of cultural concepts that includes some economic benefits similar to those of family trusts in the United States.
Probably the most widespread forms of fictive marriage are the levirate and the sororate. The levirate is the obligation of a dead man's next of kin, usually one of his brothers, to marry the dead man's widow. Commonly, at least the first child of this union is considered to be the offspring of the first husband. This custom is especially important in societies that stress the importance of the line of descent through males, as it provides a way for men who die without heirs to have descendants. It also cements anew the marriage alliance between the two families whose children were originally united in marriage. At the same time, it provides the widow with someone who will continue to perform the duties of a husband. The sororate is a similar custom in which a widower, or sometimes the husband of a barren woman, marries his first wife's sister. Again, at least some of the children born to this second marriage are considered children of the first wife, a particular benefit in societies where ancestry is traced primarily through women. Like the levirate, the sororate ensures that the marriage tie between the two in-law familieswill not be dissolved by the death of one partner and that the survivor will continue to have a mate.
Just as legitimate marriages may exist without a sexual component, nonreproductive marriages may still fulfill the other functions of marriage and be socially accepted. Marriages of this type include those by persons past their reproductive years and same-sex marriages, both of whichare legitimate in a large number of human societies. Same-sex marriages consist of both male–male and female–female relationships. Cross-culturally, same-sex relationships that are regarded as marriages seem to fall into two different patterns: those that involve partners of more-or-less the same age and those where there is a customary age difference between the partners. The first marriage form has been referred to aspathic marriages (Gregerson, 1983) or intragenerational marriages (Adam, 1986), while the second have been called mentorships (Herdt, 1981)or intergenerational marriage (Adam, 1986).
Marriage in the United States
Couples in the United States today are marrying later than they were a generation ago. The median age of males marrying for the first time is nearly 26 years, and for females it is slightly over 23 years. The ideal of romantic love as a basis for marriage is perhaps nowhere else in theworld so strongly supported as it is in the United States.
Why is romantic love such an important ideal in the U.S. courtship and marriage system? One factor, certainly, is the economic unimportance of the nuclear family as a unit of production in the country. As industrialization undermined the economic role of the extended family, the marital choices of children grew increasingly independent of parental authority. As parental decision making in the choice of mates declined, emotional attraction became central to the process of mate selection. Another factor in the maintenance of the ideal of romantic love appears to be the dependent economic status of women. The romantic ideal stresses the role of women as objects of love, valued for their emotional, aesthetic,nurturing, and moral contributions to society rather than for their economic productivity and practical contributions outside the domesticsphere. This romanticizing of women as economically dependent love objects contrast with actual current marriage practices in which over half of married women are employed outside the home.
Just how does mate selection actually proceed? Several researchers suggest a model that involves a sequence of stages. First, proximity is animportant factor. People are most likely to get together with those whom they are likely to encounter. Thus, in spite of their mobility, most people in the United States actually marry a partner who lives within a few miles of them. Ineichen (1979) found that almost 65% of a sampleof 232 married couples lived in the same city before they married, most of them coming from the same area or adjacent areas of the city. Today, technologies such as the Internet are influencing how couples meet, but according to the Pew Internet and American Life polls, as of2006, only 3% of married couples met on the Internet (Madden & Lenhart, 2006).
Initial attraction is likely to be based on easily observable characteristics such as physical attractiveness, dress, and evidence of social power and prestige. After meeting one another, couples' compatibility of values and attitudes is especially important. Agreement on religious, sexual, familial, and political values is a good predictor of the development of a stable relationship (Kerkhoff & Davis, 1962). Burgess and Wallin (1953) found that engaged couples were remarkably similar in their physical attractiveness, physical health, mental health, social popularity, race,religion, parents' educational levels, parents' incomes, and the quality of their parents' marriages. Thus, similarity seems to be an important element in the attraction that leads to relationships. Current research continues to confirm these findings.
Parenthood
With marriage may come children, turning the social unit into a family. The relationship between spouses generally changes at the birth of the first child. It creates new obligations for the husband and wife and new demands on their time and energy. Their domestic roles must be adjusted to accommodate their new status as parents. No longer will they have as much exclusive time for each other.
In societies in which the family organization is important economically and politically, entry into parenthood may be formally indicated by a change in the parents' names. Using this custom, called teknonymy, a parent might be called Father of Lynn or Mother of Kay. Teknonymy is most often practiced by men in societies in which the couple takes up residence with or near the wife's family. Women may practice it as well but in fewer societies. In either case, it reflects an elevation in the social rank of the individual, as, because of the birth of the child, he or she is no longer considered an outsider to the family with which the couple resides. The name change calls attention to the greater bond that now exists between the new parent and the in-laws.
Divorce
Not all marriages last until the death of a spouse. In the United States, for instance, between 40% and 50% of marriages are likely to end indivorce, the termination of a marriage relationship. Around the world, there are societies with higher and lower rates of divorce. Reasons for divorce vary, but impotence, infertility, infidelity, laziness, and simple incompatibility are common justifications. In three quarters of the nonindustrialized societies that have been studied by anthropologists, women and men have been more or less equal in their right to divorce(Murdock, 1957). In the United States, the divorce rate grew progressively from the 1800s until about 1980. Since that time, the rate has been declining. However, for decades, women have been more likely than men to initiate a divorce. According to a recent study, two thirds ofdivorces are filed by women (Brinig & Allan, 2000).
Cross-cultural variations in divorce rates make it possible to discover some of the factors that make divorce less likely. The payment of a marriage gift to the bride's family gives her family a vested interest in the stability of the marriage because the groom's family is likely to demand return of the payment if the marriage is dissolved. The dowry, a transfer of wealth from the bride's family to the husband, has a similar effect of stabilizing marriage ties. When the couple lives in an extended family, relatives are also likely to have a stabilizing effect on their marriage. Matrilocality, the establishment of residence by a married couple with or near the family of the wife, is associated with a low divorce rate. Perhaps this is because this form of residence gives the women more control over property, which is associated with greater-than-usual social power and honor for women and less familial authority for the husband, who resides with his in-laws. Under these conditions, thefrequency of abusive behavior by the husband is often times relatively low.
Old Age
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In many cultures, the elderly are viewed as a repository ofexperience and wisdom, and they continue to be activecontributing members of society.
Many of us want to grow older, but we do not want to grow old. The negative feelings we have about aging are partly related to our cultural perceptions of the loss of health and strength that accompany the aging process, as well as the potential loss of social rank.What are the factors that contribute to the loss of social power and honor that old age brings in societies such as our own? Cross-cultural research sheds some light on this question.
Respect or lack of respect for the aged is conditioned by circumstances that support one or the other attitude. For instance, in nonliterate societies, older people who are no longer economically as productive as they once were may still be valued as repositories of knowledge that is important to others. Similarly, in societies in which witchcraft and sorcery beliefs are prominent, people who have lived a long while are likely to be considered powerful, their age being considered evidence of their having been able to negotiate an otherwise dangerous existence successfully. Probably the most powerful general predictors of attitudes toward older people are customs that govern where newly married persons take up residence and the economic roles of older people. When postmarital residence rules require a couple to live near one spouse's parents, it is easier for the parents to continue their roles as family heads into their old age. In societies in which the family is a cooperating economic or political group, an older person's status as family head can be a major determinant of his or her rank in life. According to a study of nonindustrialized societies by Lee and Kezis (1979), nuclear families lack a structure in which parents can maintain their role of family heads into old age. Older people are more likely to have high-ranked statuses in societies in which they live with related married couples and in societies in which descent is traced through only one of the parents (patrilineal or matrilineal societies) rather than through both. However, if an extended family is too large to be easily led by a single family head or couple, decisions may be made by smaller groups within the extended family. When the political power or wealth of a family is not consistently related to a particular lineage, parents' rank is lesslikely to rise with age compared to societies in which familial power or wealth is strongly related to one's lineage.
In all societies, the elderly are accorded more respect if they are socially and/or economically productive. Thus, in industrialized societies where rank is associated closely with wealth and income, the social rank of the elderly tends to decline markedly at retirement.
Death
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One of the most difficult transitions for a group is perhapsthe death of a member. In Bali, the traditional funeralcustom is cremation.
Simple and obvious criteria such as the absence of breathing, heartbeat, or reaction to pain have been used in societies throughout the world to determine when biologicaldeath has occurred. With the development of a technology to measure brain functioning directly, in the United States and other industrialized societies, more emphasis seems to be directed toward defining death as the cessation of activity in the cerebral cortex of the brain, the center of intellectual and conscious processes. However, these criteria may not always agree with one another. For instance, the cerebral cortex may no longer be active, while the heart and lungs continue to operate, or a person may be comatose and unresponsive to pain, yet later report having been fully aware of the surroundings. Life-support systems used to maintain the vital functions of comatose patients whose heart and lungs have stopped functioning further complicate the process of determining biological death.
Psychological death refers to the process by which people prepare themselves subjectively for their impending biological death. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969), who studied dyingpatients' responses to their circumstances in U.S. hospitals, identified five coping patterns that patients exhibit as distinct stages in the process of coming to terms with their impending deaths. The first reaction described by Kübler-Ross is denial. Patients refuse to accept the correctness of the diagnosis, insisting that some error has been made or that their records have been confused with those of someone else. Their basic attitude might be summed up as, "There must be some mistake; this cannot be happening to me!" The second response of patients to learning that they are dying is anger, which is characterized by rage, envy, and resentment. In this reaction, the dominant question is,"Why me, why not someone else?" The anger may be directed at anyone at hand—other patients, doctors, nurses, even family members who come to visit and comfort the person.The third reaction is one of bargaining for more time. In this coping strategy, patients seek a slight extension of their deadline—to allow doing something "for one last time" or some similar request, in return for which they vow to live a better life. Depression is the fourth response, in which the dying person mourns because of the approaching loss of people and things that have been meaningful in his or her life. Finally, some patients respond with acceptance, a kind of quiet expectation. Acceptance is not a state of happiness but one of rest in which there are almost no strong feelings, and the patient's interests narrow as he or she gradually withdraws from everyday life in preparation for what is about to happen. This may be atime of great distress for the patient's family, as they may feel rejected by the patient's withdrawal and lack of interest in their visits. WhileKübler-Ross emphasized these five coping patterns, others (Corr, 1993) have suggested that these reactions do not necessarily occur in any specific sequence and that some individuals may not experience all five.
Funeral Rites of the Dogon in Mali
The Dogon funeral celebrations are noisy and colorful. Dogonpeople do not celebrate the deaths of minors.
· What do you see as the largest difference between funeralrites in mainstream America and the funeral rites of theDogon of Mali? Are there any similarities?
· How and why is old age defined differently in Mali and inthe U.S?
Socially, death brings about the final change of status in the human lifecycle—the change from a human status to a nonhuman one. Social death is the point at which other people begin to relate to a dying person with behaviors and actions that are appropriate toward someone already biologically dead. Like psychological death, social death may occur before biological death. W.H. Rivers (1926) reported that among the Melanesians, the word mate, which means "dead person," was applied not only to the biologically dead but also to individuals who were gravely ill, close to death, and to the very old who were likely to die soon. The Melanesians, of course, distinguished between biological mate and social mate. The purpose of referring to those who were close to death as mate was that they were treated socially as if they were dead. Such persons might be buried alive so that they could proceed to a more pleasant afterlife rather than linger among the living under the unpleasant circumstances of extreme age or terminal illness. Among the Inuit of the Arctic, the survival of hunting families would be endangered if they slowed their wanderings through arctic wastes in search of food to allow the aged or infirm to keep up. Eventually, at the urging of the afflicted party, the Inuit might hold a funeral ceremony and say goodbye to the one who had to be left behind to die so that others might live.
Since all societies must restructure their social relations so that the work of the world may be continued after the death of a member, ceremonies that mark the death of persons are found in each society. The most dramatic aspect of this social custom is manifest in funeral rituals. Funeral rituals provide a mechanism for dealing with and disposing of the body of the deceased and, at the same time, provide a setting in which the survivors can be encouraged to adjust themselves to the person's now permanent absence.As a part of this second role of funeral rituals, issues of inheritance of property rights and of passing on the statuses of the deceased to new persons are dealt with in many societies during or immediately following the funeral.
