Among the Siriono, it’s common for brothers to marry sisters, forming an altogether different sort of Brady Bunch. The marriage itself takes place without any sort of ceremony or rituaclass="underline" no exchanges of property or vows, not even a feast. Just rehang your hammocks next to the women’s and you’re married, boys.
This casual approach to what anthropologists call “marriage” is anything but unusual. Early explorers, whalers, and fur trappers of the frigid north found the Inuit to be jaw-droppingly hospitable hosts. Imagine their confused gratitude when they realized the village headman was offering his own bed (wife included) to the weary, freezing traveler. In fact, the welcome Knud Ramusen and others had stumbled into was a system of spouse exchange central to Inuit culture, with clear advantages in that unforgiving climate. Erotic exchange played an important role in linking families from distant villages in a durable web of certain aid in times of crisis. Though the harsh ecology of the Arctic dictated a much lower population density than the Amazon or even the Kalahari Desert, extra-pair sexual interaction helped cement bonds that offered the same insurance against unforeseen difficulties.
None of this behavior is considered adultery by the people
involved. But then, adultery is as slippery a term as marriage.
It’s not just thy neighbor’s wife who can lead a man astray,
but thine own as well. A well-known moral guide of the
Middle Ages, the Speculum Doctrinale (Mirror of Doctrine),
written by Vincent of Beauvais, declared, “A man who loves
his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone
else’s wife, or too much love for one’s own, is shameful.”
The author went on to advise, “The upright man should love
13
his wife with his judgment, not his affections.” Vincent of Beauvais would have enjoyed the company of Daniel Defoe (of London), famous still as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe scandalized Britain in 1727 with the publication of a nonfiction essay with the catchy title Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom. Apparently that title was a bit much. For a later edition, he toned it down to A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed. This was no desert island adventure but a moralizing lecture on the physical and spiritual dangers of enjoying sex with one’s spouse.
Defoe would have appreciated the Nayar people, native to southern India, who have a type of marriage that doesn’t necessarily include any sexual activity at all, has no expectation of permanence, and no cohabitation—indeed the bride may never see the groom again once the marriage ritual has been performed. But since divorce is not permitted in this system, the stability of these marriages must be exemplary, according to the anthropological surveys.
As these examples show, many qualities considered essential components of marriage in contemporary Western usage are anything but universaclass="underline" sexual exclusivity, property exchange, even the intention to stay together for long. None of these are expected in many of the relationships evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists insist on calling marriage.
Now consider the confusion created by the words mate and mating. A mate sometimes refers to a sexual partner in a given copulation; other times, it refers to a partner in a recognized marriage, with whom children are raised and all sorts of behavioral and economic patterns are established. To mate with someone could mean to join together “till death do us part,” or it could refer to nothing more than a quickie with “Julio down by the schoolyard.” When evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women have different innate cognitive or emotional “modules,” which determine their reactions to a mate’s infidelity, we suppose that this refers to a mate in a long-term relationship.
But you never know. When we read, “Sex differences in humans’ mate-selection criteria exist and persist because the mechanisms that mediate mate evaluation differ for men and women,” and that “a tendency to become sexually aroused by visual stimuli constitutes part of the mate-selection process in men,”14 we scratch our heads, wondering whether this is a discussion of how people choose that special someone to introduce to Mom or merely the immediate, visceral response patterns heterosexual men often experience in the presence of an attractive woman. Given that men have shown these same response patterns in response to photographs, films, attractively attired mannequins, and a Noah’s ark of farm animals—none of which are available for marriage—it seems that this language must refer to sexual attraction alone. But we’re not really sure. At what point does a mate become a mate with whom to mate?
CHAPTER NINE
Paternity Certainty: The
Crumbling Cornerstone of the Standard Narrative
According to anthropologist Robert Edgerton, the Marind-anim people of Melanesia believed:
Semen was essential to human growth and development. They also married quite young, and to assure the bride’s fertility, she had to be filled with semen. On her wedding night, therefore, as many as ten members of her husband’s lineage had sexual intercourse with the bride, and if there were more men than this in the lineage, they had intercourse with her the next night.. A similar ritual was repeated at various intervals throughout a woman’s life.1
Welcome to the family. Have you met my cousins?
Lest you think this a particularly unusual wedding celebration, it seems the ancestors of the Romans did something similar. Marriage was celebrated with a wedding orgy in which the husband’s friends had intercourse with the bride, with witnesses standing by. Otto Kiefer, in his 1934 Sexual Life in Ancient Rome, explains that from the Roman perspective, “Natural and physical laws are alien and even opposed to the marriage tie. Accordingly, the woman who is
entering marriage must atone to Mother Nature for violating her, and go through a period of free prostitution, in which she purchases the chastity of marriage by preliminary unchastity.”2
In many societies, such unchaste shenanigans continue well beyond the wedding night. The Kulina of Amazonia have a ritual known as the dutse’e bani towi: the “order to get meat.” Don Pollock explains that the village women “go in a group from household to household at dawn, singing to the adult men in each house, ‘ordering’ them to go hunting. At each house, one or more women in the group step forward to bang on the house with a stick; they will serve as the sex partners of the men of the house that night, if they are successful in their hunt. Women in the group ... are not allowed to select their own husband.”
What happens next is significant. Feigning reluctance, the men drag themselves from their hammocks and head off into the jungle, but before splitting up to hunt independently, they agree on a time and place outside the village to meet later, where they’ll redistribute whatever they’ve bagged, thus ensuring that every man returns to the village with meat, guaranteeing extra-pair sex for one and all. Yet another nail in the coffin of the standard narrative.
Pollock’s description of the hunters’ triumphal return is beyond improvement:
At the end of the day the men return in a group to the village, where the adult women form a large semicircle and sing erotically provocative songs to the men, asking for their ‘meat.’ The men drop their catch in a large pile in the middle of the semicircle, often hurling it down with dramatic gestures and smug smiles.. After cooking the meat and eating, each woman retires with the man whom she selected as her partner for the sexual tryst. Kulina engage in this ritual with great humor and perform it regularly.