Poor suffering bastards

Policy Review, Spring 1994 by Murray, David W

MARRIAGE ECONOMICS

By viewing marriage cross-culturally we learn that marriage is not simply a private matter. Marriage is everywhere, and it everywhere plays a central role in the political and economic life of a culture.

Every society contracts marital unions. Forest villagers such as the Yanomami of Brazil use marriage exchanges as alliances between villages in their constant warring politics. Marriage is pure diplomacy.

Pastoral herders such as the Nande people of East Africa allow young men to marry only after they have served society in the age-set of warriors, defending the camps. Marriage is a reward for social sacrifice.

Desert hunters and gatherers marry. For the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, a male youth is initiated into manhood after he kills a large game animal, then given a child bride shortly after by her parents, whom he must serve. Marriage is a recognition of economic productivity.

For the aboriginal Tiwi of North Australia, marriage involves the promise of daughters yet to be conceived, who are born already betrothed in a complex intergenerational balance.

Pacific island yam gardeners have marriage. In the Trobriands, chiefs alone are allowed many wives. With wives come obliged brothers-in-law, bringing harvests of yams. From this surplus chiefs construct feasts to feed the multitudes. Many wives make a chief great, since religious solidarity and "income redistribution" are accomplished through the instrumentality of marriage.

Hierarchic salmon fishers such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia marry, making contracts for attaining wealth and status through potlatch ceremonies. A nobleman marries a woman to engage in a system of loans and trades between the families, regarding marriage as an institution of banking.

Marriages among the Inuit of Alaska show strikingly why poverty attends illegitimacy, because marriage networks shape the economic success of the couple. Inuit depend for survival upon a principle of reciprocity captured in their saying, "We store food in other people's stomachs." Through spouse-sharing, where a man and a hunting partner exchange wives, a child has two fathers and two mothers, dispersed across the hunting territory. A married couple has a doubled set of obligated parents helping in an emergency. In a society lacking a centralized state for social support, family means life.

From the elaborate formalities of the Japanese to the bargaining negotiations of Yemeni Arabs to the strict purity requirements of Hindu Brahmans, human beings are doing something essential when they marry. Though concubinage, "irregular" marriages, adultery, prohibited couplings, and nose-thumbing resistances to the norms are common the world over, the essential point is not the presence of deviance. Rather, it is the universality of the married state as an ideal for the human condition. The norm for social experience, the cultural target towards which behaviors tend and against which deviance is measured, is some form of morally sanctioned wedded state.