Without a clear definition of what they’re looking for, many anthropologists have found marriage wherever they’ve looked. George Murdock, a central figure in American anthropology, asserted in his classic cross-cultural anthropological survey that the nuclear family is a “universal human social grouping.” He went on to declare that marriage is found in every human society.
But as we’ve seen, researchers trying to describe human nature are highly susceptible to Flintstonization: unconsciously tending to “discover” features that look familiar, and thereby universalizing contemporary social configurations while inadvertently blocking insight into the truth. Journalist Louis Menand noted this tendency in a piece in The New Yorker, writing, “The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.” Paradoxically, in each of these cases, so-called natural behavior has to be encouraged and unnatural aberrations punished.
The now-forgotten diseases drapetomania and dysaethesia aethiopica illustrate this point. Both were described in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a leading authority on the medical care of “Negroes” in Louisiana and a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement. In his article “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Dr. Cartwright explained that drapetomania was the disease “causing Negroes to run away . the absconding from service” to their white owners, while dysaethesia aethiopica was characterized by “hebetude of and obtuse sensibility of the body.” He noted that slave overseers often referred to this disease, more simply, as “rascality.”8
Despite high-minded claims to the contrary—often couched in language chosen to intimidate would-be dissenters (dysaethesia aethiopica!)—science all too often grovels at the feet of the dominant cultural paradigm.
Another weakness of many of these studies is known as the “translation paradox:” the assumption that a word (marriage, for instance) translated from one language to another has an identical meaning.
We can agree that birds sing and bees dance only as long as we remember that their singing and dancing has almost nothing in common with ours—from motivation to execution. We use identical words to signify very different behaviors. It’s the same with marriage.
People everywhere do pair off—even if just for a few hours, days, or years. Maybe they do it to share pleasure, to make babies, to please their families, to seal a political alliance or business deal, or just because they like each other. When they do, the resident anthropologist standing in the shadows of love says, “Aha, this culture practices marriage, too. It’s universal!” But many of these relationships are as far from our sense of marriage as a string hammock is from Grandma’s featherbed. Simply changing the jargon and referring to long-term pair bond rather than marriage is no better. As Donald Symons put it, “The lexicon of the English language is woefully inadequate to reflect accurately the texture of human experience.. To shrink the present vocabulary to one phrase—pair-bond—and to imagine that in so doing one is being scientific ... is simply to delude oneself.”9
Even if we overlook the ubiquitous linguistic confusion, people who consider themselves to be married can have strikingly different notions of what their marriage involves. The Ache of Paraguay say that a man and woman sleeping in the same hut are married. But if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut, they’re not married anymore. That’s it. The original no-fault divorce.
Among the !Kung San (also known as Ju/’hoansi) of Botswana, most girls marry several times before they settle into a long-term relationship. For the Curripaco of Brazil, marriage is a gradual, undefined process. One scientist who lived with them explains, “When a woman comes to hang her hammock next to her man and cook for him, then some younger Curripaco say they are married (kainukana). But older informants disagree; they say they are married only when they have demonstrated that they can support and sustain each other. Having a baby, and going through the fast together, cements a marriage.”10
In contemporary Saudi Arabia and Egypt, there is a form of marriage known as Nikah Misyar (normally translated as “traveler’s marriage”). According to a recent article in Reuters:
Misyar appeals to men of reduced means, as well as men looking for a flexible arrangement—the husband can walk away from a misyar and can marry other women without informing his first wife. Wealthy Muslims sometimes contract misyar when on holiday to allow them to have sexual relations without breaching the tenets of their faith. Suhaila Zein al-Abideen, of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Medina, said almost 80 percent of misyar marriages end in divorce. “A woman loses all her rights. Even how often she sees her husband is decided by his moods,” she said.11
In the Shia Muslim tradition, there is a similar institution called Nikah Mut’ah (“marriage for pleasure”), in which the relationship is entered into with a preordained termination point, like a car rental. These marriages can last anywhere from a few minutes to several years. A man can have any number of temporary wives at the same time (in addition to his “permanent wife”). Often used as a religious loophole in which prostitution or casual sex can fall within the bounds of religious requirements, there is no paperwork or ceremony required. Is this, too, marriage?
Apart from expectations of permanence or social recognition, what about virginity and sexual fidelity? Are they universal and integral parts of marriage, as parental investment theory would predict? No. For many societies, virginity is so unimportant there isn’t even a word for the concept in their language. Among the Canela, explain Crocker and Crocker, “Virginity loss is only the first step into full marriage for a woman.” There are several other steps needed before the Canela society considers a couple to by truly married, including the young woman’s gaining social acceptance through her service in a “festival men’s society.” This premarital “service” includes sequential sex with fifteen to twenty men. If the bride-to-be does well, she’ll earn payments of meat from the men, which will be paid directly to her future mother-in-law on a festival day.
Cacilda Jetha (coauthor of this book) conducted a World Health Organization study of sexual behavior among villagers in rural Mozambique in 1990. She found that the 140 men in her study group were involved with 87 women as wives, 252 other women as long-term sexual partners, and 226 additional women on an occasional basis, working out to an average of four ongoing sexual relationships per man, not counting the unreported casual encounters many of these men likely experienced as well.
Among the Warao, a group living in the forests of Brazil, ordinary relations are suspended periodically and replaced by ritual relations, known as mamuse. During these festivities, adults are free to have sex with whomever they like. These relationships are honorable and believed to have a positive effect upon any children that might result.
In his fascinating profile of the Piraha and a scientist who studies them, journalist John Colapinto reports that “though [they] do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting their women to sleep with outsiders.”12