MARRIAGE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Marriage is older than recorded history, and its origins are unknown, though the question has stimulated several theories. These include the sexual promiscuity-matriarchy theory (Bachofen); the theory that monogamy has always been characteristic of human groups, as it is of other primates with whom we share common ancestors (Westermarck); and theories of ubiquitous patriarchy, in which the formal institution of marriage arose from the reciprocal exchange of women (e.g., Levi-Strauss). Although each of these has had its supporters and detractors (Murstein), the last is the most influential today and is worth a closer look because of its implications for the history of relations between women and men and of the development of attitudes about sexuality.
It is Levi-Strauss’s contention that the universally observed incest taboo served to promote exogamy, whose functional value was the formation of alliances between groups through the elaboration of kinship systems. Such alliances were based on reciprocity, the ceremonial exchange of gifts, property, and especially women.
Such is the case with exchange. Its role in primitive society is essential because it embraces material objects, social values and women. But while in the case of merchandise this role has progressively diminished in importance … as far as women are concerned, reciprocity has maintained its fundamental function, on the one hand because women are the most precious possession . . . but above all because women are not primarily a sign of social value, but a natural stimulant; and the stimulant of the only instinct the satisfaction of which can be deferred, and consequently the only one for which, in the act of exchange, and through the awareness of reciprocity, the transformation from the stimulant to the sign can take place, and defining by this fundamental process the transformation from nature to culture, assume the character of an institution
The systematic exchange of women greatly strengthened the original family, bringing it into a cultural kinship system, and ensuring its existence as a group. The giving away of sisters and daughters became an insurance against extinction.
The significance of this theory for our discussion is that an important sex difference is made: it is men who are exchanging women. The opposite, as far as we know, has never occurred in any human society (Mitchell). Levi-Strauss wrote: “The reciprocal bond basic to marriage is not set up between men and women, but between men and men by means of women, who are only the principal occasion for it” (cited in Mitchell).
Marriage, then, was an important link between kinship groups and permitted the establishment of kin lines through which property and power were transmitted from one generation to the next. This being the case, marriages had to be arranged carefully to provide the maximum advantage to all parties. Such a serious matter could not be left to the young, and arranged marriages were the norm until recent times. Such marriages included the payment of a bride price to the bride’s father or, in some cases, the custom of the dowry, valuable goods, which went with the bride to her new home.
*67/187/5*
