Marriage and Families across Cultures

Forming Family through Kinship ANTH 2301 Marriage and Families across Cultures The establishment of a socially accepted connection occurs through marriage. It can be a partnership between a man and a woman, between any two adults, regardless of gender, or, in polygamous communities, between several wives. The primary purpose of weddings is to give birth parents a formal framework for raising and nurturing children, whether they are biological or adopted/foster. However, marriages can have other purposes besides reproduction. Forging relationships amongst people, families, and occasionally wider social networks is one role. There might be political and financial benefits to these coalitions. Although there are cultural differences in marriage, the institution itself is universal, with a few significant exceptions. Marriage is a powerful tool for resolving a number of frequent family issues. It offers a framework for creating, nurturing, and raising children. It lessens the competitiveness between men and women. Additionally, it establishes a long-term, stable socioeconomic home where the family may rely more effectively on pooled resources and labour to survive. Every society has laws governing marriage that specify which groups a person should marry into (known as endogamy rules) and which groups are forbidden and unfit for a married couple (known as exogamy rules). These guidelines represent social norms for behaviour. For instance, in the US, people often marry within their generation (endogamy) and within their language group (exogamy), but they also frequently marry outside of their immediate family. The laws of incest, which define a connection as being too close for sexual contact, forbid those who are deemed to be too closely related to marry. There is a cultural taboo against incest, which forbids parents and their children from having sexual relations, that exists in all societies. Sometimes, relationships that are deemed too intimate for a sexual connection are included in this taboo. This taboo may apply to first cousins in various civilizations. States have different rules regarding first-cousin marriages in the US; for a list of the most recent state legislation, see "Cousin Marriage Law in the United States." Because incest naturally divides people into two groups, those with whom an individual has family ties (also known as biological ties) and those with whom an individual can have sexual relations and form ties, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss contended that incest is the original social structure. Matrimony definitions might be tricky. Indigenous people in the southern Andes of Peru and Bolivia start marriages with a custom called servinakuy (spelt differently). In servinakuy, a man and a woman create their own autonomous home with very little official social recognition. They cohabitate until the birth of their first child, at which point they are recognised as a legally wedded pair. Servinakuy is a long-term marital procedure that creates a family over time; it is neither a trial marriage nor an informal cohabitation. Legal experts from Andalusia contend that from the moment a couple moves in together, they need to have the same legal rights and safeguards as a legally recognised marriage (Ingar 2015). As with all social structures, marriage-related beliefs are subject to change. The idea of marriage is changing dramatically in urban Western nations as new alternatives become available to women and as socioeconomic chances change. In Iceland, committed unmarried couples typically gave birth to about 70% of the country's children outside of marriage in 2016 (Peng 2018). National social policies that offer extensive parental leave to both married persons and those in consensual unions bolster this tendency, but the modern family unit also plays a role in this shift. It would be fascinating to watch if the prevalent kind of consensual partnership that exists now finally becomes approved as a legal form of marriage, given how standards in Iceland are changing with each passing generation.