3 Helen Fisher, Anatomy of Love (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992). People who argue that pair-bonding in humans springs from the same sources as pair-bonding among birds are making quite an evolutionary leap. Our closest ancestors on the evolutionary ladders are primates, and only 10 to 15 percent of primate species live in monogamous pair bonds. Primate social groups are sometimes organized around females and their young, sometimes around one male with several females, and sometimes around three or more adults of both sexes, but very seldom around the couple. Even among monogamous primates, the pair bond does not organize most food gathering, sharing, or defense. Barbara Smuts, “Social Relationships and Life Histories of Primates,” in Mary Ellen Morbeck, Alison Galloway, and Adrienne L. Zihlman, eds., The Evolving Female: A Life-History Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 64; Augustin Fuentes, “Re-Evalutating Primate Monogamy,” American Anthropologist 100 (1999); Adrienne Zihlman, “Pygmy Chimps, People and the Pundits,” New Science 104 (1984); Susan Sperling, “Baboons with Briefcases: Feminism, Functionalism, and Sociobiology in the Evolution of Primate Gender,” Signs 17, no. 1 (1991); Meredith Small, Female Choices (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 110-13; Linda Marie Fedigan, “The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986), pp. 34-41; Adrienne Zihlman, “Sex Differences and Gender Hierarchies Among Primates: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Barbara Miller, ed., Sex and Gender Hierarchies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 37-41; Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986); Linda Wolfe, “Human and Nonhuman Primates’ Social Relationships,” Anthropology News (May 2004).
4 Meyer Fortes, Rules and the Emergence of Society (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper No. 39, 1983), p. 6.
5 Murdock, Social Structure (see chap. 1, n. 25).
6 For this and the following paragraph, see Guyer, “Household and Community in African Studies,” (see chap. 1, n. 25); Ernestine Friedl, Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975), pp. 103, 122-23; Evelyn Blackwood, “Marriage and the ‘Missing’ Man,” Anthropology News (May 2004); Michael Mitterauer, “Marriage Without Co-Residence: A Special Type of Family Form in Rural Carinthia,” Journal of Family History 6 (Summer 1981); Patrick Beillevaire, “Japan: A Household Society,” in Burguière et al., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds (see chap. 1, n. 11); Françoise Zonabend, “An Anthropological Perspective on Kinship and the Family,” ibid.
7 Edmund Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1961); A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1950); Kathleen Gough, “The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage,” Journal of the Royal Anthropology Institute 89 (1959); Reynolds and Kellett, eds., Mating and Marriage; Leibowitz, Females, Males, Families (see chap 1, n. 28).
8 Royal Anthropological Institute, Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1951), p. 110.
9 Kathleen Gough, “The Nayar: Central Kerala,” in David Schneider and Gough, eds., Matrilineal Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), and Gough, “The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage”; Eileen Krige, “Woman-Marriage, with Special Reference to the Lovedu—Its Significance for the Definition of Marriage,” Africa 44 (1974); Evelyn Blackwood, “Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females,” Signs 10 (1984); E. Evans-Pritchard, Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Alan Barnard and Anthony Good, Research Practices in the Study of Kinship (London: Academic Press, 1984), p. 90; Denise O’Brien, “Female Husbands in Southern Bantu Societies,” in Alice Schegal, ed., Sexual Stratification: A Cross-Cultural View (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987).
10 Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860-1930 (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 92-95; Crapo, Cultural Anthropology, pp. 220-31 (see chap. 1, n. 20).
11 Richley Crapo, Cultural Anthropology, pp. 106-07.
12 Suzanne Frayser, Varieties of Sexual Experience: An Anthropological Perspective on Human Sexuality (New Haven: HRAF Press, 1985), p. 248.
13 Pasternak, Ember, and Ember, Sex, Gender, Kinship, p. 85 (see chap. 1, n. 20).
14 Edmund Leach, “The Social Anthropology of Marriage and Mating,” in Reynolds and Kellett, eds., Mating and Marriage, p. 93.
15 Edmund Leach, Social Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 206, 203.
16 Ibid., p. 210; Nikki Keddie, “Introduction,” in Keddie and Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History, p. 8 (see chap. 1, n. 11); Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam (Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 53; Judith Tucker, Gender and Islamic History (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1993), p. 6; Michael Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 194.
17 Eleanor Leacock, “Montagnais Women and the Program for Jesuit Colonization,” in Mona Etienne and Leacock, eds., Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 30-31.
18 Goody and Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry, p. 14.
19 Akira Hayami, “Illegitimacy in Japan,” in Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen and Richard Smith, eds., Bastardy and its Comparative History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 397.
20 Colin Turbull, “The Mbuti Pygmies: An Ethnographic Survey,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 18 (1965).
21 Maria Lepowsky, “Gender in an Egalitarian Society,” in Peggy Sanday and Ruth Goodenough, eds., Beyond the Second Sex (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 192; Frayser, Varieties of Sexual Experience, p. 27.
22 Leach, Social Anthropology; Friedl, Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975).
23 In many societies, adopting the role of the other sex or blurring elements of each was seen as creating a third gender and conferred high spiritual status. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, pp. 107-08; Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 5; Evelyn Blackwood, ed., The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropological Approaches to Homosexual Behavior (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1986); Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
24 Lucy Mair, Marriage (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1971), p. 78; Friedl, Women and Men; Alan Barnard and Anthony Good, Research Practices in the Study of Kinship, p. 139; Allen Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000); Allen Johnson, personal communication, March 14, 2003.
25 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction,” Burguière et al., Distant Worlds, Ancient Worlds, pp. 4, 25-26 (see chap. 1, n. 11).
26 Edmund Leach, “The Social Anthropology of Marriage and Mating,” in Reynolds and Kellett, eds., Mating and Marriage; Brian Hayden, “Pathways to Power: Principles for Creating Socioeconomic Inequities,” in T. Douglas Price and Fary Feinman, eds., Foundations of Social Inequality (New York: Plenum Press, 1995).
27 Leach, Social Anthropology.
28 Friedl, Women and Men, p. 21.
29 Cai Hua, A Society Without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China, trans. Asti Hustevdt (New York: Zone Books, 2001), p. 146 and passim. For those wondering if this is a reputable source, see the review by eminent anthropologist Clifford Geetz in New York Review of Books (October 18, 2001) and Tami Blumenfield, “Walking Marriages,” Anthrop
ology News (May 2004). See also Yang Erche Namu and Christine Matthieu, Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood at the Edge of the World (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003).
Chapter 3. The Invention of Marriage
1 C. C. Uhlenbeck, A New Series of Blackfoot Texts from the Southern Piegans Blackfoot Reservation, Teton County, Montana (Amsterdam: Johannes Muller, 1912), p. 167.
2 Robin Fox, The Red Lamp of Incest (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), p. 147. For other versions, see Sherwood Washburn, “Tools and Human Evolution,” Scientific American 203 (1960); Sherwood Washburn and Chet Lancaster, “The Evolution of Hunting,” in Richard Lee and DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter (Chicago: Aldine de Gruyter Press, 1968); Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, 1969, 1971); Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (New York: Dell, 1961) and The Hunting Hypothesis (New York: Atheneum, 1976); Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); C. Owen Lovejoy, “The Origins of Man,” Science 211 (1981) and “Modeling Human Origins: Are We Sexy Because We Are Smart, or Smart Because We Are Sexy?,” in D. T. Rasmussen, ed., The Origin and Evolution of Humans and Humanness (Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, 1993); Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); C. Knight, Blood Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). A more recent retelling argues that women manipulated their sexuality because their bodies needed the iron from the meat that the men provided. Leonard Shlain, Sex, Time and Power (New York: Viking, 2003).
3 E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 553.
4 For more work disputing the male protector explanation of either primate or early hominid behavior, see Smuts, “Social Relationships and Life Histories of Primates,” p. 64 (see chap. 2, n. 3); Fuentes, “Re-Evaluating Primate Monogamy,” (see chap. 2, n. 3); A. C. Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution,” p. 366 (see chap. 1, n. 31); Zihlman, “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” in Morbeck et al., The Evolving Female; Jane Balme and Wendy Beck, “Archaeology and Feminism: Views on the Origins of the Division of Labour,” in Hilary du Cros and Laurajane Smith, eds., Women in Archaeology (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1993); Glenn Conroy, Reconstructing Human Origins: A Modern Synthesis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); W. G. Runciman, John Maynard Smith, and R. I. M. Dunbar, eds., Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1996); Dean Falk, “Brain Evolution in Females,” in Lori Hager, ed., Women in Human Evolution (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 128; Sally Linton, “Woman the Gatherer,” in Sue-Ellen Jacobs, ed., Women in Perspective: A Guide for Cross-cultural Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); Zihlman, “Pygmy Chimps, People and the Pundits” (see chap. 2, n. 3 ); Susan Sperling, “Baboons with Briefcases” (see chap. 2, n. 3); Small, Female Choices, 110-13 (see chap. 2, n. 3); Linda Marie Fedigan, “The Changing Role of Women in Models of Human Evolution,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986), pp. 34-41; Zihlman, “Sex Differences and Gender Hierarchies Among Primates” (see chap. 2, n. 3); Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe (see chap. 2, n. 3); Adrienne Zihlman, “Did the Australopithecines Have a Division of Labor?,” in Dale Walde and Norren Willows, eds., The Archaeology of Gender: Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary (Calgary: University of Calgary, 1991), p. 67; Sally McBrearty and Marc Monitz, “Prostitutes or Providers? Hunting, Tool Use and Sex Roles in Earliest Homo,” in Walde and Willows, Archaeology of Gender, p. 74; Conroy, Reconstructing Human Origins; Margaret Power, The Egalitarians, Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Recently, Craig Stanford has revived the notion that meat acquisition was a very important determinant of human evolution, but he emphasizes the high degree of female choice in both subsistence activities and mating. Stanford, The Hunting Apes and the Origins of Human Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Significant Others (New York: Basic Books, 2003). See also Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch-Achermann, The Chimpanzees of the Tai Forest: Behavioural Ecology and Evolution (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000). My thanks to Adrienne Zihlman for pointing me to many of these references and to Peta Henderson for helping me work through the recent work on hunting.
5 For this and the next two paragraphs, see Lee and DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter. Friedl, Women and Men (see chap. 2, n. 22); Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman, “Women in Evolution, Part 1: Innovation and Selection in Human Origins,” Signs 1, no. 3 (Spring 1976); Heather Pringle, “New Women of the Ice Age,” Discover 19 (1998); Richard Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Colin Turnbull, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Clarion, 1962); Richard Lee, “Population Growth and the Beginnings of Sedentary Life Among the !Kung Bushman,” in Brian Spooner, ed., Population Growth: Anthropological Implications (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press), pp. 329-42; Francis Dahlberg, Woman the Gatherer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Linton, “Woman the Gatherer,” in Jacobs, ed., Women in Perspective; Patricia Draper, “!Kung Women,” in Rayna Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Sally Slocum, “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology,” ibid.; Paula Webster: “Matriarchy: A Vision of Power,” ibid.; Eleanor Leacock and R. B. Lee, eds., Politics and History in Band Societies (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1978); Lee and DeVore, eds., Man the Hunter; M. Goodman, P. Griffin, A. Estioko-Griffin, and J. Grove, “The Compatibility of Hunting and Mothering Among the Agta Hunter-Gatherers of the Philippines,” Sex Roles 12 (1985); Agnes Estioko-Griffin and P. Bion Griffin, “Women Hunters: The Implications for Pleistocene Prehistory and Contemporary Ethnography,” in Madeleine Goodman, ed., Women in Asia and the Pacific: Towards an East-West Dialogue (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), p. 70. Meat may be valued above its proportionate weight in the diet, and may create high status for male hunters and in some cases increase male power, but as I explain in the discussion of food sharing, women were seldom dependent on their husbands for all the meat they received, even if they were often dependent on the hunting of men as a group.
6 Christine Gailey, “Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender Hierarchy,” in Beth Hess and Myra Marx Ferree, eds., Analyzing Gender: A Handbook of Social Science Research (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1987); Tanner and Zihlman, “Women in Evolution, Part 1”; Nancy Tanner, On Becoming Human (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Fedigan, “Changing Role of Women.” For debates on the very existence of home bases, see Richard Potts, “Home Bases and Early Hominids,” American Scientist 72 (1984); Lewis Binford, Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Walde and Willows, Archaeology of Gender; Chris Stringer and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993); Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution”; Klein, Human Career; Lisa Rose and Fiona Marshall, “Meat Eating, Hominid Sociality, and Home Bases Revisited,” along with several comments on the paper, in Current Anthropology 37 (1996); Jane Lancaster, “A Feminist and Evolutionary Biologist Looks at Women,” Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 34 (1991); M. Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). See also chapter 1, note 4. A nicely constructed popular critique of the male hunting view of gender roles can be found in Rosalind Barnett and Caryl Rivers, Same Differences (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
7 Lila Leibowitz, “In the Beginning . . . : The Origins of the Sexual Division of Labour and the Development of the First Human Societies,” in Stephanie Coontz and Peter Henderson, eds., Women’s Work, Men’s Property (London: Verso, 1986) and Females, Males, Families (see chap. 1, n. 28); Estioko-Griffin and Griffin, “Women Hunters”; Thomas Patterson, Archaeology: Th
e Historical Development of Civilizations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1993); Rose and Marshall, “Meat Eating, Hominid Sociality, and Home Bases Reconsidered.” Robert Foley argues that early hominids had polygynous mating patterns, or male harems, with a clear division of functions between males and females. But he too agrees that pair-bonding was an outcome, not a cause, of human evolution, and he does not argue that it was a response to female dependence on males for food or child rearing, which no single male could provide for an entire harem. He suggests that the egalitarian sexual relations and pair bonds that emerged among anatomically modern humans were a sharp break—and an evolutionary step forward—from an earlier tradition of male sexual dominance. Many other commentators do not even accept the scenario of early male dominance. Foley, “Hominids, Humans and Hunter-Gatherers: An Evolutionary Perspective” in Tim Ingold, David Riches, and James Woodburn, eds., Hunters and Gatherers 1: History, Evolution and Social Change (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1988). For more on current evolutionary theory, see Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Adrienne Zihlman, “The Paleolithic Glass Ceiling” in Hager, Women in Human Evolution; Tanner and Zihlman, “Women in Evolution, Part 1”; Tanner, On Becoming Human; Fedigan, “Changing Role of Women”; Paul Mellars, “Major Issues in the Emergence of Modern Humans,” Current Anthropology 30 (1989); Olga Soffer, “Ancestral Lifeways in Eurasia,” in Matthew Nitecki and Doris Nitecki, eds., Origins of Anatomically Modern Human Beings (New York: Plenum Press, 1994); Barry Cunliffe, ed., The Oxford Illustrated Prehistory of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Contribution of Southwest Asia to the Study of the Origin of Modern Humans,” in Nitecki and Nitecki, eds., Origins; Controy, Reconstructing Human Origins; Brian Hayden et al., “Fishing and Foraging,” in Olga Soffer, ed., The Pleistocene Old World: Regional Perspectives (New York: Plenum Press, 1987); Patterson, Archaeology; Steven Mithen, “The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour,” in Runciman, Smith, and Dunbar, Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man; Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000); Roosevelt, “Gender in Human Evolution.”
Marriage, a History Page 43