Poor suffering bastards

Policy Review, Spring 1994 by Murray, David W

Marriages can be integrative for our society, if we will let them be. Individual marriages are the rivets of the social order, local-level attachments by which the whole structure is ultimately assembled. When a couple marries, they initiate a series of exchanges between two entire groups of people; that is, the relatives and friends on either side. Two pebbles, as it were, drop side by side into the pool of a community, and the ripples of celebration, concern, and obligation ring wide.

The point where the circles intersect is, of course, the union of the man and wife themselves. As the hand of the bride is grasped by the groom and captured by the ring, an umbilicus of contact is forged between two families. Through that conduit now established will flow gifts, loans, and business opportunities, advice, political alliances, love, sanctions, inheritances, and many children.

Marriage affiliations of this sort are not only horizontal, in the sense of bringing together parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, bridesmaids, and best men of proximate generations into a single gathering of social renewal. They are also vertical, in the sense that several generations of each family are bent into each other, as streams flowing down a hill, at the junction of the couple. Grandparents and parents, children and grandchildren, each set of which may constitute a separate nuclear unit with mate and offspring, are overlapped by the marriage of the present couple.

Multiple nuclear families with their distinct, and centrifugal, residences, attachments, and responsibilities, are imbricated into a structure of extended family. Over time, as the developmental cycle of the family is set in motion down through the generations, these separate reproductive pairs are woven and braided into strands of stability and resilience. The overall structure brought into being by marriage is called by anthropologists the "cognatic web," noting by that term the crisscrossing nature of social life.

OUR BEST ALLIES

Marriage links us to two sets of relatives who are our best allies. Moreover, to the extent that the families invest in us, their own interests, economic and social, become entwined with ours. Just as with the Swazi, the in-laws of our lives find many reasons for reenforcing and stabilizing the couple. Being married may even prove an insurance against abuse, since families exercise more leverage over the partners. Three remarkable things become one at a wedding: love, legitimacy, and property coalesce as social forces upon the legal union of man and woman.

Remember that kinship terms have a striking feature that first names and friendships do not. Kin terms are transitive; if someone is a Mother to my Wife, then that person becomes someone to me. Relationship, like electricity through a proper circuit, is conveyed through all of the nodes of family life. Sex with "friends," however, remains personal, not structure-building. Concubines of the Old Testament brought with them no attachments between the families. And what structure would emerge from same-sex unions is deeply unclear.