Roger Lancaster, an anthropology professor at George Mason University, said the
modern idea of marriage is only 200 years ago and was developed at the time of
the Industrial Revolution. (Photo by Leigh H. Mosley)
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ADRIAN BRUNE
Friday, April 16, 2004
Eager boy meets shy girl. Boy proves himself worthy.
Boy and girl fall in love, get married and have children. They all live happily
ever after.
It’s folklore that appeals to many Americans — one that the media
facilitate and many politicians moralize, according to many anthropologists.
They say this timeless tale has one significant problem: In a great many civilizations,
at least until the present era, marriages were arranged in the interests of
kinship networks, not at the whim of lovers. And, throughout history, they
have taken on a wide variety of forms, including same-sex partnerships.
President Bush similarly portrayed the union between male and female as the
only proper form of marriage, calling it “one of the most fundamental,
enduring institutions of our civilization” in his State of the Union
Address. By doing so, these anthropologists say, he ignored a primary lesson
of human culture and further perpetuated the Western marriage myth.
In a statement released last month, the 11,000-member American Anthropological
Association gave Bush failing marks on his understanding of world societies
and criticized his proposed ban on same-sex marriage.
“The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households,
kinship relationships and families, across cultures and through time, provide
no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social
orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution,” the
association’s executive board said.
“Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast
array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships,
can contribute to stable and humane societies.”
Scholars of both texts and worldwide cultures agree that it is nearly impossible
to formulate a precise and generally acceptable way to define the flexible
nature of marriage, according to the AAA.
In his recent book, “The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular
Culture,” George Mason University anthropologist Roger Lancaster argues
that the notion of one-man, one-woman marriage crept into the collective consciousness
of American society only within the past 200 years — a result of both
the industrial revolution, and the media’s influence.
“Leaders often make global pronouncements about ‘marriage,’ as
though it were a self-evident institution,” Lancaster said. “Depending
on its cultural context, marital unions can involve a host of different persons
in a number of possible combinations. People are inventive and creative about
the way they create kinship networks.”
Marriage, as Americans envision it today, didn’t exist during the time
of the Old Testament, or even as the Apostles spread the word of Christianity
across the Middle East and Europe. Rather, marriage has consistently adjusted
to religious, political and economic changes, anthropologists said.
Throughout the pre-Christian world, most civilizations practiced polygamy,
until the Romans systematized marriage by establishing an age of consent and
specifying unions across socio-economic classes, according to Lancaster. The
Roman Catholic Church soon spread the vision of monogamy, but it took hundreds
of years to become the universal axiom, he added. Even then, families arranged
marriages, usually as a business transaction with the bride accompanying a
piece of land to farm, or a livestock inheritance.
A polemical historian, the late John Boswell, concluded that in pre-modern
Europe “marriage usually began as a property arrangement, was in its
middle mostly about raising children, and ended about love.
“Few couples in fact, married ‘for love,’ but many grew
to love each other in time as they jointly managed their household, reared
their offspring and shared life experiences,” he wrote.
Boswell was gay himself, as is Lancaster, who has contributed several opinion
columns to this newspaper.
Other academics didn’t consider Boswell controversial for his inferences
on early marriage, but for his assertions that liturgical ceremonies in the
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches sanctioned gay unions. For a period
of more than 1,000 years, between A.D. 500 and 1500, these churches in Europe
performed the Adelphopoiesis, or “the making of brothers,” he determined
in his 1994 book, “Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.”
Even though these rituals celebrated a life-long union between two men, historians
disagree on the nature of the relationship. Some state they did carry with
them a homoerotic connotation, while others contend they were friendship, or “blood-brother” accords.
Joseph Palacios, a Georgetown professor of sociology, who is gay, said the
more salient proof of same-sex unions in pre-modern Europe lies within the
vows of religious orders. When priests joined a monastery or nuns entered a
convent they organized their lives around each other in a common “marriage” to
Jesus Christ.
“The vows of poverty, chastity and obedience are technically equivalent
to marriage vows, and to me, these single-sex orders provide the larger evidence
of the sanctioning of same-sex unions,” Palacios said. “They also
procured children in the sense of establishing schools, orphanages and hospitals,
which mirrored or paralleled the intent of marriage.”
The American Anthropological Association created its statement denouncing
Bush at the suggestion of Dan Segal, another anthropologist who points to the
application of marriage to same-sex couples in both a classical and modern
context.
Centuries after the Greeks and early Christians sanctified same-sex unions,
Native Americans still practice a widespread same-sex tradition known as the
berdache, in which two spirit males — men who are not tied to one gender — marry,
provided they undergo a social and spiritual transformation, Lancaster said.
One spouse might identify as female, but both remain biologically male.
Many modern societies don’t even draw a distinction between homosexual
and heterosexual in their pairings, Lancaster said, choosing a more free association
regarding sexual or kinship ties. The Nuer of Sudan, as well as other African
societies, institutionalized female same-sex marriages to preserve the lineage
of one woman’s family. These same-sex unions also exist in the form of
cohabitation after an occasional “ghost marriage” of a woman to
a dead man.
Though some conservative politicians decry same-sex marriages as opening the
door to polygamy, polygamy is actually the time-tested method of sexual bonding,
anthropologists said. Outlawed in the United States in 1879, it still survives
among some Mormons and is practiced consistently in the Muslim world.
Bush’s model of marriage — the heterosexual nuclear family — actually
evolved during the Industrial Revolution, as transient populations, mass education,
the women’s rights movement and the creation of leisure time tested marriage’s
tradition, according to Lancaster.
Women also moved up in status from property to partner, and children from
a source of labor to the treasured outcomes of a loving bond. Early 20th century
magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, seized upon this idea and
circulated it through mainstream America, scholars noted.
Though all don’t necessarily support same-sex marriage, most anthropologists
and social scientists agreed that the American Anthropological Association
correctly challenged what many called, Bush’s “ethnocentric view” of
the union. A spokesperson for the association said the president’s narrow
remarks struck a nerve among those who study the culture through time and across
the world.
“What happens in cultures is that people tend to see their culture as
the paragon, and then extrapolate its values out to others,” said Joanne
Rappaport, a Georgetown professor of anthropology. “We see what we do
as the only way to do things, and the president’s narrow views on issues
don’t help in changing that perspective.”
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