12.1.2 : what is marriage

 12.1.2: What Is Marriage? We have the same problem in defining marriage. For just about every element you might regard as essential to marriage, some group has a different custom. Consider the sex of the bride and groom. Until recently, opposite sex was taken for granted. Then came the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges 2015 decision, which struck down state bans, and same-sex marriages became legal throughout the United States. Same-sex marriage is not something new. When Columbus landed in the Americas, some Native American tribes already had same-sex marriages. Through a ceremony called the berdache, a man or woman who wanted to be a member of the opposite sex was officially declared to have his or her sex changed. The “new” man or woman put on the clothing and performed the tasks associated with his or her new sex and was allowed to marry. Even sexual relationships don’t universally characterize marriage. The Nayar of Malabar don’t allow a bride and groom to have sex. After a three-day celebration of the marriage, they send the groom packing—and he can never see his bride again (La Barre 1954). This can be a little puzzling to figure out, but it works like this: The groom is “borrowed” from another tribe for the ceremony. Although the Nayar bride can’t have sex with her husband, after the wedding she can have approved lovers from her tribe. This system keeps family property intact—along matrilineal lines. At least one thing has to be universal in marriage: You can at least be sure that the bride and groom are alive. So you would think. But even for this there is an exception. On the Loess Plateau in China, if a son dies without a wife, his parents look for a dead woman to be his bride. After buying one—from the parents of a dead unmarried daughter—the dead man and woman are married and then buried together. Happy that their son will have intimacy in the afterlife, the parents throw a party to celebrate the marriage (Fremson 2006; Tan et al. 2019). With such tremendous cultural variety, we can define marriage this way: a group’s approved mating arrangements, usually marked by a ritual of some sort (the wedding) to indicate the couple’s new public status.