What are the historical origins of marriage? Was marriage started (as conservatives would have us believe) as a stabilizing force for children to have mother and father? How does this fit in with polygamy? If it wasn’t started a stabilizing force, why was it started?
My guess is that the origins of marriage are prehistoric. I doubt if we have any record of a society evolving or developing the institutions of marriage. In a hunter-gatherer society some kind of agreed division of labour is necessary if children are to be cared for and adults and children are to be fed. Hence, marriage.
I guess more as a stablising force to enable adults to raise children without starving to death.
Easily. Haven’t you ever heard of polygamous marriages?
I think that marriage was mainly a method of assuring that property, or the succession of rulers, was preserved by assuring that a legitimate, male heir was ready to inherit when the time came.
I doubt that the ordinary, run-of-the-mill, common person without any property or political power in prehistory worried too much about formalizing things.
I’ll bet anthropologist Marvin Harris has something to say about this in the book Our Kind and as soon as I can find my copy I’ll look it up.
David, I’ve heard similar conjectures, before, (with occasional references to the seriously legal contractual marriages of the Roman gentry as opposed to the far less formal relationships of the Roman plebes). However, the number of societies in which there is no formal arrangement for men and women to declare some form of exclusive relationship is vanishingly small. I would be curious to see evidence (not simply speculation) relating to societies in which there is no form of marriage.
I don’t think I wrote that there are now societies with no formal marriage. All of the societies of today have exceedingly long histories behind them with lots property rights and political power to maintain.
And I haven’t yet found my copy of Harris’ book.
I need a historical theologian here to correct me, but I believe that the formal institution of marriage between one male and one female stems from the Marriage of Caana.
What I don’t know is if Jesus actually married the couple, or if this was the wedding at which Jesus turned the water into wine.
Somehow either I hit Submit in place of Preview or the software took Preview as Submit.
Anyway, there has been a tremendous amount of change in the concept of “marriage” since prehistory or even since Roman times or the medieval period.
However, even today the rules and rights in the division and inheritance of property is a major factor in the legal part of the institution of marriage.
The latter – in the NT, NO marriage is depicted as being “celebrated” by Jesus or the Apostles, so we’re left to infer that like all other marriages of the time, it was formalized by the elders of the families.
But you have it a bit off – this and other NT scriptural references (including the Sermon on the Mount and a few of Paul’s letters) are what the Church Fathers based on to declare matrimony as a Holy Sacrament ** in the Church**, and as something indissoluble; but all the NT Scripture on the matter points to monogamous heterosexual marriage being already the usual and customary legal state of affairs among the target audience (by the time it was compiled, Romans and Hellenized Jews). There is no ID of any of the parties at the Caana wedding feast, except that there was “a groom” The Sermon in the Mount takes it as an established given that if you’re married, it is already to one woman, under a revokeable civil contract so Jesus goes directly on to address adultery, divorce and remarriage.
Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you had made that specific claim. However, your allusion to rulers establishing an heir and “other people” being less concerned with “formalizing” the marriage is reminiscent of quite a few different 20th century authors who have proposed that marriage was, indeed, absent in some societies (or some social strata) and I find such claims speculative, at best. (Similarly, there are several authors who have claimed that some societies were matrilineal, and matriarchal, and lacking in marriage. (A point that you have certainly not made.) I have no argument against matrilineal or matriarchal socieites, but the link to a claim that they had no marriage seems to beg for substantiation.) Again, given the pretty much universal distribution of marriage in all known societies, today (including remote migrant peoples of the rain forests, deserts, and tundra along with all settled peoples), I would simply like to see the evidence that leads to the speculation that there has been a society that did not have some form of marriage. (I am not expecting you to provide it–although I am curious about Harris’s thoughts; I am asking the question of the Teeming hordes.)
I agree that property inheritance has a major role in marriage as we know it. However, that does not explain the various pledges of commitment exchanged by the Yanomami or the peoples of New Guinea or the ¡Kung or any of several similar groups.
Well, I found the Harris book Our Kind. Dr. Harris’ credentials in anthropology will be found here.
As to the origins of marriage Harris writes, “I would like to be able to say more about what kind of mating system and family organization prevailed during the formative phases of hominid sociaI life. Over the entire span of four or five.million yeas that separate us from the first afarensis, there is. not a single piece of’ hard evidence bearing on this question. And the record is equally blank when it comes to post-takeoff Stone Age sapiens hunter-gatherers.”
He then goes on to question the view that one man-one woman is the “natural” state of affairs, pointing out that in contemporary societies, polygyny (one man, several women), polyandry (one woman, several men) and polygamy (multiple partners for both sexes) are more common that the so-called nuclear family.
He then adds, “In view of the frequent occurrance of modern domestic groups that do not consist of, or contain, an exclusive pair-bonded father and mother, I cannot see why anyone should insist that our ancestors were reared in monogamous nuclear families…and that pair bonding is more natural than other arrangements.”
He also discounts the idea that a pair is needed to ensure the survival of children. In many, and maybe most, comtemporary, primitive societies, the raising of children is a community responsibility. Everyone tries to make sure that all children are taught the ways of the tribe and are kept as safe as possible regardless of parentage. After all, children are the adults’ social security system for their old age and the continuation of the tribe.
I get the distinct impression that Harris ascribes the institution of marriage to politics and the need of a small, agricultural-hunter-gatherer, society for allies. An agricultural society is tied down to one place for at least the growing-harvesting period even though there might be hunting in addition to agriculture, someone had to take care of cultivating the crops. Such a static group would be vulnerable to attack by nomadic tribes and one way to get allies was to have the children of one town “marry” those of a nearby town. Such marriages for political and defensive purposes were not unheard of down to relatively recent times in nations.
So, I guess my answer to the OP question would be that the origin of marriage is obscure but it probably started as means of trying to ensure the safety and security of the tribe through political unions.
And Harris had a lot more to say about the matter. We’ve not even scratched the surface of this question.
Failure to observe strict monagmy is obviously not rare in many societies. But societies that formally endorse polyandry, polygny and polygamy – that, for example, include these as marriage options – are quite rare indeed. The quoted statement seems silly in the context of a question about the historical origins of marriage.
The quotation and the widespread existence of such behavior tends to foreclose the claim that marriage originated as a “natural outgrowth” of a one man-one woman relationship.
Just like information on how children are raised in primitive societies doesn’t answer the OP but does refute the idea that a one man-one woman system is needed to ensure that children survive to procreate.
Since you seem to have an opinion as to what doesn’t bear on the OP question do you have any information that does?
Since the quoted notion is dubious at best, I’d suggest that it may not do this.
But there’s a rather obvious point that Harris is missing or avoiding with glib comments about what is “natural”: Societies don’t erect ritual and tradition around things that people tend to do naturally. They tend to do this for things that the society (or its leadership) values that don’t come all that naturally – that need the protection of ritual, myth, taboo etc.
Not a great deal. Any cogent answer would need to take account of what tomndebb has pointed out: that some form of marriage is found in the vast majority of human societies throughout the world, and that in the majority of those it involves one man and one woman. This makes it implausible that the concept was “started” at one point in time, as the OP could be taken to imply.
(I’ll also note that I believe calling a posted opinion into question is itself sufficient grounds for a post, and that this is standard SDMB practice.)
Well, I have to say you can do better than this.
You characterize Harris’ comments as “glib” based on a single quote by a secondary source (me)? And neither Harris nor I claim that societies “erect ritual and tradition around things that people tend to do naturally.” Au contraire, what was said is that the existence of polygamy et. al. argues against the claim that the one man-one woman form of marriage is based on a natural cause.
And I think that the real answer was in my quote of Harris’ statement that there is no evidence whatever on which to base a definitive answer. However, the speculation that at least some marriage arrangements could have originated in order to increase the defensive strength of an agricultural village fits your statement that societies tent to do things for the benefit of the society whether or not they “come naturally.”
And in my post I doubtless should not have written that marriage “probably started etc., etc.” since we really don’t have any real way to assess what is or is not probable about this subject.
It depends exactly what you mean by “marriage”, but let us take it to mean a socially recognised pairing of a man and woman. This definition does not preclude multiple pairings (eg polygamy).
In Aboriginal Australian society, they did not have property or estates to hand down. Yet they did have marriage, by the above definition. With ceremonies to match (regard these as religious/civil/what you will). At any rate, the couple were established as a pair.
From what I have read, one of the primary purposes would seem to be to prevent inbreeding, among a people who moved about in small groups over hostile territory, and were quite probably limited with the amount of other tribes they met. By having totems that “grouped” people, and traced back to parents and grandparents, they could keep consanguinity in check, to some extent.
Marriage is simply is best explained in the Judeo-Christian belief system. Where-by God Jehovah explains in the new testament that the the male represents God himself(Christ) and the female represents mankind. Both male and female were called Adam (Genesis)before the fall and the female portion was taken from man (his Rib- cloning?)and the word says for this reason they will rejoin to each other and become one again(or as one). To this day men and women are called ‘Man’. The symbolism of a man and a woman joining together is a strong teaching on how man and God will dwell together (marry) in the after life or Heaven. So when you have any but a man and a woman marrying you pervert the teaching and the defeat the point of marriage. That is to raise Godly (Malichi)offspring.
Believe it or not if you want to it dosn’t cease to be true.
To destroy the sanctity of marriage is what is needed to bring a nation down(to join a one world government ,perhaps?) for a nation cannot exist with out a man and a woman and children - many of them. Think about it!
We also have something called sanctity of Zombie threads. This one seems to date from the the early days of the Gay “Marriage” debate.
Witnessing belongs in the Great Debates forum. In GQ religion is not usually a possible factual response, since by definition it is a set of beliefs that only a small minority of adherents subscribe to.
Your religious sect has a set of rules you agree to abide by. So does the SDMB. By registering you’ve agreed to abide by them. Religion in GQ violates that. Please don’t do it again.
RahjRahj, the General Questions forum is intended for factual information. If you wish to discuss marriage based on your own religious point of view, the best place for that is the Great Debates forum. Since this thread is very old, I am closing it rather than moving it. If you wish, you may open a new thread in GD with a link to this one.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator