12.1.3: Common Cultural Themes

 12.1.3: Common Cultural Themes Despite this diversity, several common themes run through marriage and family. As Table 12.1 illustrates, all societies use marriage and family to establish patterns of mate selection, descent, inheritance, and authority. Let’s look at these patterns. Table 12.1 Common Cultural Themes: Marriage in Traditional and Industrialized Societies

Mate Selection

 Each human group establishes norms to govern who marries whom. If a group has norms of endogamy, it specifies that its members must marry within their group. 

For example, some groups prohibit interracial marriage. 

In some societies, these norms are written into law, but in most cases, they are informal.

 In the United States, most whites marry whites, and most African Americans marry African Americans—not because of any laws but because of informal norms. 

In contrast, norms of exogamy specify that people must marry outside their group. 

The best example of exogamy is the incest taboo, which prohibits sex and marriage among designated relatives. As you can see from Table 12.1, how people find mates varies around the world, from fathers selecting them to the highly personal choices common in Western cultures. Descent 

 How are you related to your father’s father or to your mother’s mother? You would think that the answer to this question would be the same all over the world—but it isn’t. Each society has a system of descent, the way people trace kinship over generations. We use a bilineal system; that is, we think of ourselves as related to both our mother’s and our father’s sides of the family. This is so obvious. Doesn’t everyone do it this way? Actually, no. Ours is only one way that people reckon descent. Some groups use a patrilineal system, tracing descent only on the father’s side; they don’t think of children as being related to their mother’s relatives. Others don’t consider children to be related to their father’s relatives and follow a matrilineal system, tracing descent only on the mother’s side. The Naxi of China don’t even have a word for father (Hong 1999). Inheritance Marriage and family are also used to determine rights of inheritance. In a bilineal system, property is passed to both males and females; in a patrilineal system, only to males; and in a matrilineal system (the rarest form), only to females. No system is natural. Rather, each way of reckoning inheritance matches a group’s ideas of fairness and logic. Authority Some form of patriarchy, men-as-a-group dominating women-as-a-group, runs through all societies. Contrary to what some think, there are no historical records of a society that was a true matriarchy, where women-as-a-group dominated men-as-a-group. 

Although U.S. family patterns are becoming more egalitarian, or equal, some of today’s customs still reflect their patriarchal origin. 

One of the most obvious is the U.S. naming pattern: Despite some changes, the typical bride still takes the groom’s last name, and children usually receive the father’s last name.