family and marriage

PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY

Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, Laura Tubelle de González

2020 American Anthropological Association
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Arlington, VA 22201

ISBN Print: 978-1-931303-67-5
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8 8
FAMILY AND MARRIAGE FAMILY AND MARRIAGE

Mary Kay Gilliland, Central Arizona College
[email protected]

Learning Objectives Learning Objectives

• Describe the variety of human families cross-culturally with examples.

• Discuss variation in parental rights and responsibilities.

• Distinguish between matrilineal, patrilineal, and bilateral kinship systems.

• Identify the differences between kinship establish by blood and kinship established by marriage

• Evaluate the differences between dowry and bridewealth as well as between different types of post-marital residence.

• Recognize patterns of family and marriage and explain why these patterns represent rational decisions within the cultural
contexts.

Family and marriage may at first seem to be familiar topics. Families exist in all societies and they are

part of what makes us human. However, societies around the world demonstrate tremendous variation

in cultural understandings of family and marriage. Ideas about how people are related to each other,

what kind of marriage would be ideal, when people should have children, who should care for children,

and many other family related matters differ cross-culturally. While the function of families is to ful-

fill basic human needs such as providing for children, defining parental roles, regulating sexuality, and

passing property and knowledge between generations, there are many variations or patterns of family

life that can meet these needs. This chapter introduces some of the more common patterns of family

life found around the world. It is important to remember that within any cultural framework variation

does occur. Some variations on the standard pattern fall within what would be culturally considered

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the “range of acceptable alternatives.” Other family forms are not entirely accepted, but would still be

recognized by most members of the community as reasonable.

RIGHTS, RESPONSIBILITIES, STATUSES, AND ROLES IN FAMILIES

Some of the earliest research in cultural anthropology explored differences in ideas about family.

Lewis Henry Morgan, a lawyer who also conducted early anthropological studies of Native American

cultures, documented the words used to describe family members in the Iroquois language.1 In the book

Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), he explained that words used to describe

family members, such as “mother” or “cousin,” were important because they indicated the rights and

responsibilities associated with particular family members both within households and the larger com-

munity. This can be seen in the labels we have for family members—titles like father or aunt—that

describe how a person fits into a family as well as the obligations he or she has to others.

The concepts of status and role are useful for thinking about the behaviors that are expected of indi-

viduals who occupy various positions in the family. The terms were first used by anthropologist Ralph

Linton and they have since been widely incorporated into social science terminology.2 For anthropol-

ogists, a status is any culturally-designated position a person occupies in a particular setting. Within

the setting of a family, many statuses can exist such as “father,” “mother,” “maternal grandparent,” and

“younger brother.” Of course, cultures may define the statuses involved in a family differently. Role is

the set of behaviors expected of an individual who occupies a particular status. A person who has the

status of “mother,” for instance, would generally have the role of caring for her children.

Roles, like statuses, are cultural ideals or expectations and there will be variation in how individuals

meet these expectations. Statuses and roles also change within cultures over time. In the not-so-distant

past in the United States, the roles associated with the status of “mother” in a typical Euro-American

middle-income family included caring for children and keeping a house; they probably did not include

working for wages outside the home. It was rare for fathers to engage in regular, day-to-day housekeep-

ing or childcare roles, though they sometimes “helped out,” to use the jargon of the time. Today, it is

much more common for a father to be an equal partner in caring for children or a house or to some-

times take a primary role in child and house care as a “stay at home father” or as a “single father.” The

concepts of status and role help us think about cultural ideals and what the majority within a cultural

group tends to do. They also help us describe and document culture change. With respect to family and

marriage, these concepts help us compare family systems across cultures.

KINSHIP AND DESCENT

Kinship is the word used to describe culturally recognized ties between members of a family. Kinship

includes the terms, or social statuses, used to define family members and the roles or expected behaviors

family associated with these statuses. Kinship encompasses relationships formed through blood con-

nections (consanguineal), such as those created between parents and children, as well as relationships

created through marriage ties (affinal), such as in-laws (see Figure 1). Kinship can also include “chosen

kin,” who have no formal blood or marriage ties, but consider themselves to be family. Adoptive par-

ents, for instance, are culturally recognized as parents to the children they raise even though they are

not related by blood.

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Figure 1: These young Maasai women from Western Tanzania are affinal kin, who share responsibilities for
childcare. Maasai men often have multiple wives who share domestic responsibilities. Photo used with
permission of Laura Tubelle de González.

While there is quite a bit of variation in families cross-culturally, it is also true that many families can

be categorized into broad types based on what anthropologists call a kinship system. The kinship sys-

tem refers to the pattern of culturally recognized relationships between family members. Some cultures

create kinship through only a single parental line or “side” of the family. For instance, families in many

parts of the world are defined by patrilineal descent: the paternal line of the family, or fathers and their

children. In other societies, matrilineal descent defines membership in the kinship group through the

maternal line of relationships between mothers and their children. Both kinds of kinship are consid-

ered unilineal because they involve descent through only one line or side of the family. It is impor-

tant to keep in mind that systems of descent define culturally recognized “kin,” but these rules do not

restrict relationships or emotional bonds between people. Mothers in patrilineal societies have close

and loving relationships with their children even though they are not members of the same patrilin-

eage.3 In the United States, for instance, last names traditionally follow a pattern of patrilineal descent:

children receive last names from their fathers. This does not mean that the bonds between mothers and

children are reduced. Bilateral descent is another way of creating kinship. Bilateral descent means that

families are defined by descent from both the father and the mother’s sides of the family. In bilateral

descent, which is common in the United States, children recognize both their mother’s and father’s fam-

ily members as relatives.

As we will see below, the descent groups that are created by these kinship systems provide members

with a sense of identity and social support. Kinship groups may also control economic resources and

dictate decisions about where people can live, who they can marry, and what happens to their property

after death. Anthropologists use kinship diagrams to help visualize descent groups and kinship. Figure

2 is a simple example of a kinship diagram. This diagram has been designed to help you see the differ-

ence between the kinship groups created by a bilateral descent system and a unilineal system.

184 PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

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Figure 2: This kinship chart illustrates bilateral descent.

Kinship diagrams use a specific person, who by convention is called Ego, as a starting point. The peo-

ple shown on the chart are Ego’s relatives. In Figure 2, Ego is in the middle of the bottom row. Most

kinship diagrams use a triangle to represent males and a circle to represent females. Conventionally,

an “equals sign” placed between two individuals indicates a marriage. A single line, or a hyphen, can be

used to indicate a recognized union without marriage such as a couple living together or engaged and

living together, sometimes with children.

Children are linked to their parents by a vertical line that extends down from the equals sign. A sibling

group is represented by a horizontal line that encompasses the group. Usually children are represented

from left to right–oldest to youngest. Other conventions for these charts include darkening the symbol

or drawing a diagonal line through the symbol to indicate that a person is deceased. A diagonal line may

be drawn through the equals sign if a marriage has ended.

Figure 2 shows a diagram of three generations of a typical bilateral (two sides) kinship group, focused

on parents and children, with aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and grandchildren. Note that every-

one in the diagram is related to everyone else in the diagram, even though they may not interact on a

regular basis. The group could potentially be very large, and everyone related through blood, marriage,

or adoption is included.

The next two kinship diagram show how the descent group changes in unilineal kinship systems like

a patrilineal system (father’s line) or a matrilineal system (mother’s line). The roles of the family mem-

bers in relationship to one another are also likely to be different because descent is based on lineage:

descent from a common ancestor. In a patrilineal system, children are always members of their father’s

lineage group (Figure 3). In a matrilineal system, children are always members of their mother’s lineage

group (Figure 4). In both cases, individuals remain a part of their birth lineage throughout their lives,

even after marriage. Typically, people must marry someone outside their own lineage. In figures 3 and

4, the shaded symbols represent people who are in the same lineage. The unshaded symbols represent

people who have married into the lineage.

In general, bilateral kinship is more focused on individuals rather than a single lineage of ancestors

as seen in unlineal descent. Each person in a bilateral system has a slightly different group of relatives.

For example, my brother’s relatives through marriage (his in-laws) are included in his kinship group,

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but are not included in mine. His wife’s siblings and children are also included in his group, but not in

mine. If we were in a patrilineal or matrilineal system, my brother and I would largely share the same

group of relatives.

Figure 3: This kinship chart shows a patrilineal household with Ego in father’s lineage.

Matrilineages and patrilineages are not just mirror images of each other. They create groups that

behave somewhat differently. Contrary to some popular ideas, matrilineages are not matriarchal. The

terms “matriarchy” and “patriarchy” refer to the power structure in a society. In a patriarchal society,

men have more authority and the ability to make more decisions than do women. A father may have

the right to make certain decisions for his wife or wives, and for his children, or any other dependents.

In matrilineal societies, men usually still have greater power, but women may be subject more to the

power of their brothers or uncles (relatives through their mother’s side of the family) rather than their

fathers.

Among the matrilineal Hopi, for example, a mothers’ brother is more likely to be a figure of authority

than a father. The mother’s brothers have important roles in the lives of their sisters’ children. These

roles include ceremonial obligations and the responsibility to teach the skills that are associated with

men and men’s activities. Men are the keepers of important ritual knowledge so while women are

respected, men are still likely to hold more authority.

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Figure 4: This kinship chart shows a matrilineal household with Ego in mother’s lineage.

The Nayar of southern India offer an interesting example of gender roles in a matrilineal society. In

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men and women did not live together after marriage because

the husbands, who were not part of the matrilineage, were not considered relatives. Women lived for

their entire lives in extended family homes with their mothers and siblings. The male siblings in the

household had the social role of father and were important father figures in the lives of their sisters’

children. The biological fathers of the children had only a limited role in their lives. Instead, these men

were busy raising their own sisters’ children. Despite the matrilineal focus of the household, Nayar

communities were not matriarchies. The position of power in the household was held by an elder male,

often the oldest male sibling.

The consequences of this kind of system are intriguing. Men did not have strong ties to their bio-

logical offspring. Marriages were fluid and men and women could have more than one spouse, but

the children always remained with their mothers. 4 Cross-culturally it does seem to be the case that in

matrilineal societies women tend to have more freedom to make decisions about to sex and marriage.

Children are members of their mother’s kinship group, whether the mother is married or not, so there

is often less concern about the social legitimacy of children or fatherhood.

Some anthropologists have suggested that marriages are less stable in matrilineal societies than in

patrilineal ones, but this varies as well. Among the matrilineal Iroquois, for example, women owned the

longhouses. Men moved into their wives’ family houses at marriage. If a woman wanted to divorce her

husband, she could simply put his belongings outside. In that society, however, men and women also

spent significant time apart. Men were hunters and warriors, often away from the home. Women were

the farmers and tended to the home. This, as much as matrilineality, could have contributed to less for-

mality or disapproval of divorce. There was no concern about the division of property. The longhouse

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belonged to the mother’s family, and children belonged to their mother’s clan. Men would always have

a home with their sisters and mother, in their own matrilineal longhouse.5

Kinship charts can be useful when doing field research and particularly helpful when documenting

changes in families over time. In my own field research, it was easy to document changes that occurred

in a relatively short time, likely linked to urbanization, such as changes in family size, in prevalence of

divorce, and in increased numbers of unmarried adults. These patterns had emerged in the surveys and

interviews I conducted, but they jumped off the pages when I reviewed the kinship charts. Creating

kinship charts was a very helpful technique in my field research. I also used them as small gifts for the

people who helped with my research and they were very much appreciated.

KINSHIP TERMS

Another way to compare ideas about family across cultures is to categorize them based on kinship

terminology: the terms used in a language to describe relatives. George Murdock was one of the first

anthropologists to undertake this kind of comparison and he suggested that the kinship systems of the

world could be placed in six categories based on the kinds of words a society used to describe relatives.6

In some kinship systems, brothers, sisters, and all first cousins call each other brother and sister. In such

a system, not only one’s biological father, but all one’s father’s brothers would be called “father,” and all

of one’s mother’s sisters, along with one’s biological mother, would be called “mother.” Murdock and

subsequent anthropologists refer to this as the Hawaiian system because it was found historically in

Hawaii. In Hawaiian kinship terminology there are a smaller number of kinship terms and they tend

to reflect generation and gender while merging nuclear families into a larger grouping. In other words,

you, your brothers and sisters, and cousins would all be called “child” by your parents and your aunts

and uncles.

Other systems are more complicated with different terms for father’s elder brother, younger brother,

grandparents on either side and so on. Each pattern was named for a cultural group in which this pat-

tern was found. The system that most Americans follow is referred to as the Eskimo system, a name

that comes from the old way of referring to the Inuit, an indigenous people of the Arctic (Figure 1).

Placing cultures into categories based on kinship terminology is no longer a primary focus of anthro-

pological studies of kinship. Differences in kinship terminology do provide insight into differences in

the way people think about families and the roles people play within them.

Sometimes the differences in categorizing relatives and in terminology reflect patrilineal and matri-

lineal systems of descent. For example, in a patrilineal system, your father’s brothers are members of

your lineage or clan; your mother’s brothers do not belong to the same lineage or clan and may or may

not be counted as relatives. If they are counted, they likely are called something different from what you

would call your father’s brother. Similar differences would be present in a matrilineal society.

An Example from Croatia

In many U.S. families, any brother of your mother or father is called “uncle.” In other kinship systems,

however, some uncles and aunts count as members of the family and others do not. In Croatia, which

was historically a patrilineal society, all uncles are recognized by their nephews and nieces regardless

of whether they are brothers of the mother or the father. But, the uncle is called by a specific name

188 PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

that depends on which side of the family he is on; different roles are associated with different types of

uncles.

A child born into a traditional Croatian family will call his aunts and uncles stric and strina if they are

his father’s brothers and their wives. He will call his mother’s brothers and their wives ujak and ujna.

The words tetka or tetak can be used to refer to anyone who is a sister of either of his parents or a hus-

band of any of his parents’ sisters. The third category, tetka or tetak, has no reference to “side” of the

family; all are either tetka or tetak.

These terms are not simply words. They reflect ideas about belonging and include expectations of

behavior. Because of the patrilineage, individuals are more likely to live with their father’s extended

family and more likely to inherit from their father’s family, but mothers and children are very close.

Fathers are perceived as authority figures and are owed deference and respect. A father’s brother is also

an authority figure. Mothers, however, are supposed to be nurturing and a mother’s brother is regarded

as having a mother-like role. This is someone who spoils his sister’s children in ways he may not spoil

his own. A young person may turn to a maternal uncle, or mother’s brother in a difficult situation and

expects that a maternal uncle will help him and maintain confidentiality. These concepts are so much

a part of the culture that one may refer to a more distant relative or an adult friend as a “mother’s

brother” if that person plays this kind of nurturing role in one’s life. These terms harken back to an ear-

lier agricultural society in which a typical family, household, and economic unit was a joint patrilineal

and extended family. Children saw their maternal uncles less frequently, usually only on special occa-

sions. Because brothers are also supposed to be very fond of sisters and protective of them, those addi-

tional associations are attached to the roles of maternal uncles. Both father’s sisters and mother’s sisters

move to their own husbands’ houses at marriage and are seen even less often. This probably reflects the

more generic, blended term for aunts and uncles in both these categories.7

Similar differences are found in Croatian names for other relatives. Side of the family is important,

at least for close relatives. Married couples have different names for in-laws if the in-law is a husband’s

parent or a wife’s parent. Becoming the mother of a married son is higher in social status than becoming

the mother of a married daughter. A man’s mother gains authority over a new daughter-in-law, who

usually leaves her own family to live with her husband’s family and work side by side with her mother-

in-law in a house.

An Example from China

In traditional Chinese society, families distinguished terminologically between mother’s side and

father’s side with different names for grandparents as well as aunts, uncles, and in-laws. Siblings used

terms that distinguished between siblings by gender, as we do in English with “brother” and “sister,” but

also had terms to distinguish between older and younger siblings. Intriguingly, however, the Chinese

word for “he/she/it” is a single term, ta with no reference to gender or age. The traditional Chinese

family was an extended patrilineal family, with women moving into the husband’s family household. In

most regions, typically brothers stayed together in adulthood. Children grew up knowing their fathers’

families, but not their mothers’ families. Some Chinese families still live this way, but urbanization and

changes in housing and economic livelihood have made large extended families increasingly less prac-

tical.

189

A Navajo Example

In Navajo (or Diné) society, children are “born for” their father’s families but “born to” their mother’s

families, the clan to which they belong primarily. The term clan refers to a group of people who have

a general notion of common descent that is not attached to a specific ancestor. Some clans trace their

common ancestry to a common mythological ancestor. Because clan membership is so important to

identity and to social expectations in Navajo culture, when people meet they exchange clan informa-

tion first to find out how they stand in relationship to each other. People are expected to marry outside

the clans of their mothers or fathers. Individuals have responsibilities to both sides of the family, but

especially to the matrilineal clan. Clans are so large that people may not know clan every individual

member, and may not even live in the same vicinity as all clan members, but rights and obligations to

any clan members remain strong in people’s thinking and in practical behavior. I recently had the expe-

rience at the community college where I work in Central Arizona of hearing a young Navajo woman

introduce herself in a public setting. She began her address in Navajo, and then translated. Her intro-

duction included reference to her clan memberships, and she concluded by saying that these clan ties

are part of what makes her a Navajo woman.

An Example from the United States

In many cases, cultures assign “ownership” of a child, or responsibilities for that child anyway, to

some person or group other than the mother. In the United States, if one were to question people about

who is in their families, they would probably start by naming both their parents, though increasingly

single parent families are the norm. Typically, however, children consider themselves equally related

to a mother and a father even if one or both are absent from their life. This makes sense because most

American families organize themselves according to the principles of bilateral descent, as discussed

above, and do not show a preference for one side of their family or the other. So, on further inquiry,

we might discover that there are siblings (distinguished with different words by gender, but not birth

order), and grandparents on either side of the family who count as family or extended family. Aunts,

uncles, and cousins, along with in-laws, round out the typical list of U.S. family members. It is not

uncommon for individuals to know more about one side of the family than the other, but given the

nature of bilateral descent the idea that people on each side of the family are equally “related” is gen-

erally accepted. The notion of bilateral descent is built into legal understandings of family rights and

responsibilities in the United States. In a divorce in most states, for example, parents are likely to share

time somewhat equally with a minor child and to have joint decision-making and financial responsi-

bility for that child’s needs as part of a parental agreement, unless one parent is unable or unwilling to

participate as an equal.

MARRIAGE AND FAMILY

In a basic biological sense, women give birth and the minimal family unit in most, though not all soci-

eties, is mother and child. Cultures elaborate that basic relationship and build on it to create units that

are culturally considered central to social life. Families grow through the birth or adoption of children

and through new adult relationships often recognized as marriage. In our own society, it is only cultur-

190 PERSPECTIVES: AN OPEN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

ally acceptable to be married to one spouse at a time though we may practice what is sometimes called

serial monogamy, or, marriage to a succession of spouses one after the other. This is reinforced by reli-

gious systems, and more importantly in U.S. society, by law. Plural marriages are not allowed; they are

illegal although they do exist because they are encouraged under some religions or ideologies. In the

United States, couples are legally allowed to divorce and remarry, but not all religions cultural groups

support this practice.

When anthropologists talk of family structures, we distinguish among several standard family types

any of which can be the typical or preferred family unit in a culture. First is the nuclear family: parents

who are in a culturally-recognized relationship, …