Marriage

Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognised union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. It is nearly a cultural universal, but the definition of marriage varies between cultures and religions, and over time. Typically, it is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually sexual, are acknowledged or sanctioned. In some cultures, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing sexual activity, and sexual intercourse with others aside from one's spouse may be considered immoral or even illegal. A marriage ceremony is called a wedding, while a private marriage is sometimes called an elopement.
Marriage takes many forms, depending on cultural and religious values of the people involved and the cultural expectations of the society in which they are living.
Marriage may be recognized by a state, an organization, a religious authority, a tribal group, a local community, or peers. It is often viewed as a legal contract.
Around the world, there has been a general trend towards ensuring equal rights for women in marriages with men, and greater tolerance toward non-traditional couples. Debates persist regarding the legal status of married women, leniency towards violence within marriage, customs such as dowry and bride price, marriageable age, and criminalization of premarital and extramarital sex.

Etymology

The word marriage appeared around 1300 and is borrowed from Old French mariage, ultimately tracing to the Latin maritātus 'married', past participle of maritāre 'to marry'. The adjective marītus, -a, -um 'matrimonial, nuptial' could also be used, through nominalization, in the masculine form as a noun for 'husband' and in the feminine form for 'wife'. The related word matrimony is borrowed from the Old French word matremoine, which appears around 1300 CE and is in turn ultimately a learned borrowing from Latin mātrimōnium, which is derived from māter 'mother' with the suffix -mōnium for an action, state, or condition.

Definitions

s have proposed several competing definitions of marriage in an attempt to encompass the wide variety of marital practices observed across cultures. Even within Western culture, "definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between".

Relation recognized by custom or law

In The History of Human Marriage, Edvard Westermarck defined marriage as "a more or less durable connection between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring." In The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization, he rejected his earlier definition, instead provisionally defining marriage as "a relation of one or more men to one or more women that is recognized by custom or law".

Legitimacy of offspring

The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners." In recognition of a practice by the Nuer people of Sudan allowing women to act as a husband in certain circumstances, Kathleen Gough suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons."
In an analysis of marriage among the Nayar, a polyandrous society in India, Gough found that the group lacked a husband role in the conventional sense. The husband role, unitary in the west, was instead divided between a non-resident "social father" of the woman's children, and her lovers, who were the actual procreators. None of these men had legal rights to the woman's child. This forced Gough to disregard sexual access as a key element of marriage and to define it in terms of legitimacy of offspring alone.
Economic anthropologist Duran Bell has criticized the legitimacy-based definition on the basis that some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. He argued that a legitimacy-based definition of marriage is circular in societies where illegitimacy has no other legal or social implications for a child other than the mother being unmarried.

Collection of rights

criticized Gough's definition for being too restrictive in terms of recognized legitimate offspring and suggested that marriage be viewed in terms of the different types of rights it serves to establish. In a 1955 article in Man, Leach argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all cultures. He offered a list of ten rights associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, with specific rights differing across cultures. Those rights, according to Leach, included:

"To establish a legal father of a woman's children.
To establish a legal mother of a man's children.
To give the husband a monopoly in the wife's sexuality.
To give the wife a monopoly in the husband's sexuality.
To give the husband partial or monopolistic rights to the wife's domestic and other labor services.
To give the wife partial or monopolistic rights to the husband's domestic and other labor services.
To give the husband partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the wife.
To give the wife partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the husband.
To establish a joint fund of property – a partnership – for the benefit of the children of the marriage.
To establish a socially significant 'relationship of affinity' between the husband and his wife's brothers."
Right of sexual access

In a 1997 article in Current Anthropology, Duran Bell describes marriage as "a relationship between one or more men in severalty to one or more women that provides those men with a demand-right of sexual access within a domestic group and identifies women who bear the obligation of yielding to the demands of those specific men." In referring to "men in severalty", Bell is referring to corporate kin groups such as lineages which, in having paid bride price, retain a right in a woman's offspring even if her husband deceases. In referring to "men ", Bell is referring to women within the lineage who may stand in as the "social fathers" of the wife's children born of other lovers.

Types

Monogamy

Monogamy is a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse during their lifetime or at any one time. Monogamy may or may not indicate that the spouses have pledged not to have sexual relationships outside of their marriage.
Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas found a strong correlation between intensive plough agriculture, dowry and monogamy. This pattern was found in a broad swath of Eurasian societies from Japan to Ireland. The majority of Sub-Saharan African societies that practice extensive hoe agriculture, in contrast, show a correlation between "bride price" and polygamy. A further study drawing on the Ethnographic Atlas showed a statistical correlation between increasing size of the society, the belief in "high gods" to support human morality, and monogamy.
In the countries which do not permit polygamy, a person who marries in one of those countries a person while still being lawfully married to another commits the crime of bigamy. In all cases, the second marriage is considered legally null and void. Besides the second and subsequent marriages being void, the bigamist is also liable to other penalties, which also vary between jurisdictions.

Serial monogamy

Governments that support monogamy may allow easy divorce. In a number of Western countries, divorce rates approach 50%. Those who remarry do so usually no more than three times. Divorce and remarriage can thus result in "serial monogamy", i.e. having multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. This can be interpreted as a form of plural mating, as are those societies dominated by female-headed families in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Brazil where there is frequent rotation of unmarried partners. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the "monogamous" category.
Serial monogamy creates a new kind of relative, the "ex-". The "ex-wife", for example, may remain an active part of her "ex-husband's" or "ex-wife's" life, as they may be tied together by transfers of resources, or shared child custody.

Polygamy

Polygamy is a marriage which includes more than two spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at a time, the relationship is called polygyny, and there is no marriage bond between the wives; and when a woman is married to more than one husband at a time, it is called polyandry, and there is no marriage bond between the husbands. If a marriage includes multiple husbands or wives, it can be called group marriage.
A molecular genetic study of global human genetic diversity argued that sexual polygyny was typical of human reproductive patterns until the shift to sedentary farming communities approximately 10,000 to 5,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, and more recently in Africa and the Americas. As noted above, Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas found that the majority of Sub-Saharan African societies that practice extensive hoe agriculture show a correlation between "Bride price" and polygamy. A survey of other cross-cultural samples has confirmed that the absence of the plough was the only predictor of polygamy, although other factors such as high male mortality in warfare and pathogen stress had some impact.
Marriages are classified according to the number of legal spouses an individual has. The suffix "-gamy" refers specifically to the number of spouses, as in bi-gamy, and poly-gamy.
Societies show variable acceptance of polygamy as a cultural ideal and practice. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of 1,231 societies noted, 186 were monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 had polyandry. However, as Miriam Zeitzen writes, social tolerance for polygamy is different from the practice of polygamy, since it requires wealth to establish multiple households for multiple wives. The actual practice of polygamy in a tolerant society may actually be low, with the majority of aspirant polygamists practicing monogamous marriage. Tracking the occurrence of polygamy is further complicated in jurisdictions where it has been banned, but continues to be practiced.
Zeitzen also notes that Western perceptions of African society and marriage patterns are biased by "contradictory concerns of nostalgia for traditional African culture versus critique of polygamy as oppressive to women or detrimental to development." Polygamy has been condemned as being a form of human rights abuse, with concerns arising over domestic abuse, forced marriage, and neglect. The vast majority of countries do not permit polygamy.