Marriage: Definition, Incest Taboo, Regulations, Forms, Mate Acquisition and Payments

2.3 Marriage: Definition and Universality; Laws of marriage (endogamy, exogamy, hypergamy, hypogamy, incest taboo); Types of marriage (monogamy, polygamy, polyandry, group marriage). Functions of marriage; Marriage regulations (preferential, prescriptive and proscriptive); Marriage payments (bride wealth and dowry)

Official Syllabus: Paper I, Unit 2.3

Unit 2.2 described an institution as an established set of rules for an important activity. Marriage is the institution that regulates sexual unions, the legitimacy of children and alliances between groups; the family it creates is the subject of Unit 2.4.

1. Defining Marriage: The Universality Debate

Example first. Among the Nayar of Kerala, a girl went through a ritual “marriage” before puberty with a ritual husband she might never see again, and later received several visiting husbands at night. They did not live with her or feed her, and her children belonged to her matrilineal household (descent traced through the mother). Was this marriage? The question forced anthropologists to rethink the definition.

1.1 Definitions and where each one breaks

Each definition below was proposed as universal, and each was then tested against ethnography. Read the last column as the counter-case that broke it.

The table shows a retreat: early definitions named forms (a couple, a household), each failed somewhere, so later scholars defined marriage by a function, the legitimacy of children, and Leach gave up a single definition.

Gough (1959): “Marriage is a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides that a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of the relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum.”

• Leach’s bundle of rights: the British social anthropologist Edmund Leach, writing on Sinhalese and Nayar polyandry, argued that marriage is a package of rights that a society may assemble in different ways. Marriage may allocate:
  • legal fatherhood and legal motherhood
  • a monopoly over the spouse’s sexuality
  • rights to the spouse’s domestic and economic labour
  • rights over the spouse’s property, and a joint fund of property for the children
  • a socially significant relationship of affinity (relationship by marriage) between the spouses’ kin groups
• Why this helps: no society uses all of these, and no single one is found everywhere. The question “is X marriage?” therefore becomes “which rights does marriage transfer here?” The Nayar tali rite transferred only legal fatherhood, which explains why Gough could still call it marriage.
• Needham’s scepticism: the British anthropologist Rodney Needham (1971) went further: “marriage” is an “odd-job word” that covers unrelated institutions, so it cannot be a cross-cultural analytic category at all.

1.2 The ethnographic test cases

Five societies broke the universal definitions; the last column says what each proves.

Together the cases show that the elements bundled in Western marriage can be pulled apart; what survives everywhere is a social rule placing the child in a group.

1.3 What every marriage system specifies

Every marriage system answers the same practical questions; the table gives the range of answers.

The dimensions are linked: where residence is patrilocal, the bride’s labour and children leave with her, so her kin usually receive bride-wealth in return.

1.4 So is marriage universal?

• The forms are not universal. Co-residence, a heterosexual pair, economic pooling and lifelong union each fail somewhere. The family (a mother–child unit with its supporters) is arguably more universal than marriage, which is why Murdock’s fusion of the two fails.
• The functions are near-universal. Every society regulates sexual access, assigns legitimate filiation (a recognised link of a child to its parents’ groups) to children, and creates affinal ties. Gough’s Nayar resolution rests here: the tali rite still made children legitimate, so even the Nayar had marriage.
• The rethinking that followed. The comparative record forced three conceptual shifts:
  • Family: the household and the conjugal pair separate. Nayar and Mosuo sibling-based households are fully functioning family units without a resident husband or father.
  • Kinship: the Nuer pater/genitor distinction shows that filiation is jural and social, not biological. The American anthropologist David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), argued that the biological model was a Euro-American folk theory, and the British anthropologist Janet Carsten‘s “relatedness” (2000) widened kinship to shared substance, feeding and care.
  • Social reproduction: marriage reproduces property, status and labour, not just people.
    • Jack Goody: dowry reproduces class position.
    • Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: elders control juniors through control of wives.
    • Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier (1987): gender and kinship are one analytical field.
    • Kath Weston, Families We Choose (1991): gay and lesbian kinship is built by choice rather than blood or marriage.

2. The Incest Taboo

Example first. In much of South India, a man may marry his mother’s brother’s daughter, and the match is often preferred. Yet marriage with his father’s brother’s daughter, who is genetically just as close, is treated as incest, because she is classed as his “sister”. The same genetic closeness carries opposite rules. The incest taboo is therefore a matter of social classification, not biology alone.

• Definition: a prohibition of sexual relations, and hence marriage, between persons classed as close kin.
• Universality:
  • The nuclear-family core (parent–child, brother–sister) is prohibited in virtually every society.
  • The outer boundary varies with kinship classification. Where parallel cousins are called “brother” and “sister”, they are tabooed while cross cousins may be preferred spouses.
• Exceptions are royal and ritual: Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, the Inca, and Hawaiian chiefs. Sibling marriage there kept divine blood and power concentrated. These exceptions confirm the rule, because they mark the ruler as above ordinary humanity.

2.1 Theories

Some theories look for the cause inside the family, others outward to relations between groups; the last column gives each one’s weak point.

• How the biological theory works: close relatives often carry the same harmful recessive genes (genes that cause disease only when inherited from both parents), so their children are more often homozygous (two copies) and ill. Groups avoiding close mating left more healthy descendants, so the rule spread without anyone knowing why.
• How the alliance theory works: the British anthropologist E.B. Tylor saw that a group marrying within itself stayed isolated, while groups exchanging spouses became allies in war and trade; the taboo pushes marriage outward and creates cooperation larger than the family.

2.2 The evidence behind the Westermarck effect

• Israeli kibbutz: Joseph Shepher (1971) found no marriages among the 2,769 he studied between peers reared together in the same children’s house from early childhood. Yonina Talmon (1964) reported similar avoidance.
• Taiwanese sim-pua (“minor”) marriage: the American anthropologist Arthur Wolf found that a girl adopted in infancy and raised with her future husband had markedly higher divorce, lower fertility and more adultery than a bride married in the usual way.
• Counter-evidence: among the Arapesh (New Guinea), Margaret Mead reported girls betrothed young and reared in the future husband’s household, yet these marriages were the norm. Familiarity therefore does not always extinguish desire, and a natural aversion would not need a strongly sanctioned taboo.
• Lebanese FBD marriage: Justine McCabe (1983) found that parallel cousins (children of two brothers) raised in close contact showed lower fertility and more divorce than other couples.

2.3 The incest taboo as the foundation of kinship (Lévi-Strauss)

• The bridge from nature to culture: for the French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the taboo is the one cultural rule that is also universal, so it marks the passage from nature to culture.
• A rule of giving, not only forbidding: the taboo is less a prohibition than a positive rule of reciprocity: renouncing one’s sister obliges another man to give his. This exchange of women creates affinity, the relationship that turns isolated descent groups into a society. This is why the taboo can be called the basis of kinship systems: without it there would be families, but no alliances linking them.
• The atom of kinship: the smallest kinship structure has four relationships: brother–sister, husband–wife, father–son and mother’s brother–sister’s son. The mother’s brother is present from the start because the brother who gave his sister is built into the elementary structure.
• Evaluation: no single theory explains both origin and persistence. The current synthesis pairs a biological aversion (Westermarck effect, inbreeding costs) with its cultural elaboration into rules that serve alliance and family order. Many primates show parallel dispersal at sexual maturity: female chimpanzees and male macaques leave their natal group (Unit 1.5a), so close inbreeding is avoided even without rules.

3. Marriage Regulations

Example first. A Tamil Brahmin wedding obeys three rules at once: the couple must not share a gotra (descent from a common sage), must share a jati (caste), and may prefer a mother’s brother’s daughter. The table names these kinds of rule.

The difference between the last two rows is one of force. A prescription defines the only acceptable category of spouse; a preference states the best choice, which most people may not actually make.

• The prescription–preference debate: Needham (Structure and Sentiment, 1962) held that true prescription is a terminological category (“MBD” means a whole class of women), whereas preference is merely what people tend to do. Lévi-Strauss later conceded the distinction mattered little for his alliance theory.
• Why regulations build solidarity: endogamy keeps a group’s boundary and property intact, while exogamy and cousin marriage tie different groups into lasting alliances renewed in each generation. Both bind members together, inside the group and between groups.

3.1 Endogamy and exogamy

• Origin of the terms: the Scottish lawyer-anthropologist J.F. McLennan, Primitive Marriage (1865), coined both.
• Endogamy means marriage within a group: jati (the defining caste rule), tribe, religious community, and among some tribes, the moiety (one of two halves of a society). It protects ritual purity (Dumont’s purity–pollution axis), property and the group boundary.
• Exogamy means marriage outside a group: clan, gotra (putative descent from a common rishi), sapinda circle, and in North India the village, where all village age-mates count as fictive siblings.
  • Sapinda rule (sapinda: persons linked by descent within a set number of generations): the Dharmashastra tradition barred marriage within seven generations on the father’s side and five on the mother’s. The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 narrowed this to five and three, and permits custom to override the prohibited degrees. This is why South Indian cross-cousin marriage stays legal.
• Indian tribal cases:
  • Todas (The Todas, W.H.R. Rivers, 1906): two endogamous moieties, Tartharol and Teivaliol, each divided into exogamous clans.
  • Santal, Oraon, Munda: tribal endogamy combined with totemic clan exogamy (clans named after an animal or plant, whose members count as kin).
• Why exogamy?
  • Tylor: alliance.
  • McLennan: female infanticide led to a shortage of women, which led to bride capture.
  • Durkheim: a taboo on the totemic blood of one’s own clan.
  • Lévi-Strauss: exogamy is the incest taboo writ large, a rule of exchange.

3.2 Hypergamy (anuloma) and hypogamy (pratiloma)

• Hypergamy: a woman marries up, into a higher caste or sub-caste. It was sanctioned in the Dharmashastras. Hypogamy: a woman marries down. It was condemned, and its offspring were degraded.
• Consequences in India:
  • Brides compete for scarce high-status grooms, so dowry escalates.
  • Top-rank families historically had a daughter surplus, which was linked to female infanticide in colonial records of some Rajput and Jat lineages.
  • Kulin Brahmins of Bengal practised polygyny, with grooms marrying many wives for gifts.
  • The British anthropologist Jonathan Parry, Caste and Kinship in Kangra (1979): Rajput hypergamy creates hierarchy among clans within one caste.
• Nambudiri–Nayar hypergamy (Kerala): among the Nambudiri Brahmins, only the eldest son married a Nambudiri woman. Younger sons formed sambandham unions with Nayar women. This kept Nambudiri land impartible (undivided) and is the same visiting union that defines the Nayar case in §1.2.

3.3 Preferential marriages

Cousin marriage is the most common preferential rule, and the key distinction is between cross and parallel cousins. A cross cousin is the child of a parent’s opposite-sex sibling (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s child); a parallel cousin is the child of a parent’s same-sex sibling (father’s brother’s or mother’s sister’s child). Kin codes are F father, M mother, B brother, Z sister, D daughter, so MBD is the mother’s brother’s daughter.

The structure each form creates was worked out by Lévi-Strauss. The table pairs each form with the pattern of exchange it produces.

Lévi-Strauss thought MBD marriage the most powerful: in restricted exchange two groups simply swap, but in generalised exchange each group gives wives to one and takes from another, so a chain links many groups. Among the Kachin, wife-givers (mayu) rank above wife-takers (dama), so the chain also produces hierarchy.

• The sentiment counter-theory: the American anthropologists George Homans and David Schneider (1955) explained the MBD preference in patrilineal societies by affection for the mother’s side, against Lévi-Strauss’s structural reasoning.
• Indian forms:
  • Dravidian kinship (Louis Dumont 1953; Thomas Trautmann 1981) builds cross-cousin marriage into its terminology: cross cousins are called by terms that mark them as marriageable. Elder-sister’s-daughter marriage (uncle–niece) is also found among some South Indian castes.
  • The Gond call cross-cousin marriage dudh lautawa, “returning the milk“: a girl given in one generation is returned in the next.
• Levirate: a widow marries her deceased husband’s brother. In junior levirate it must be a younger brother. Example: karewa (chadar andazi, “throwing the sheet”) among the Jats of Haryana.
• Sororate: a widower marries his deceased wife’s sister. The term also covers a barren wife being replaced by her sister.
• Function of levirate and sororate (Radcliffe-Brown): the marriage is between groups, so the alliance, the bride-wealth and the children survive a spouse’s death. The sibling group acts as a unit, and widows and orphans keep economic support. Both customs cluster with patrilineal descent, patrilocal residence and polygyny; levirate also secures the dead man’s property for his line.

4. Forms of Marriage

Example first. In July 2025, at Shillai in Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, two Hatti brothers publicly married the same woman, explaining that one wife for the brothers keeps the family land undivided. This is fraternal polyandry, and its logic is economic, not exotic.

The table sets out the four forms with their sub-types and cases.

“Polygamy” is the umbrella term for polygyny and polyandry; the Indian column shows that every form has existed in India.

• Monogamy is the commonest practice even where plural marriage is allowed: a roughly balanced sex ratio, the cost of supporting several spouses, and simpler inheritance and child-rearing. Evolutionists (Morgan) read monogamy as a mark of civilisation; the record shows it at every level of complexity, from Andamanese foragers to industrial states.
• Polygyny is the most widely permitted form. In Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas, over four-fifths of societies allow it, while only a handful (four) allow polyandry.
  • Within polygynous societies, most men are monogamous because of the sex ratio and cost.
  • Polygyny correlates with female agricultural labour (wives as producers), prestige, warfare-depleted male ratios and long post-partum sex taboos (rules against sex for a long period after childbirth).
• Polyandry:
  • Toda of the Nilgiri Hills (Rivers): fraternal polyandry. Paternity is assigned through pursutpimi (presenting a toy bow and arrow in the seventh month of pregnancy). The man who performs it is the father of all children until another brother performs it. Rivers linked Toda polyandry to female infanticide.
  • Khasa of Jaunsar-Bawar (Majumdar): the brothers’ joint household keeps land undivided. A later wife may join the same set of brothers.
  • Ecological explanation (Melvyn Goldstein, Tibet and the Limi valley of Nepal): fraternal polyandry prevents land fragmentation, keeps a large male labour force for agro-pastoral work and trade, and depresses population growth. Local people themselves cite these motives: if each brother took his own wife, the fields would be divided among several households in the next generation.
  • Familial polyandry: a father and son share a wife (reported among Tibetans). The Kota of the Nilgiris also practised polyandry alongside the Todas.
  • Sex-ratio explanation (Westermarck) fails as a general cause: in Ladakh, women outnumbered men. Polyandry also lowers fertility per woman, acting as a population brake.
  • Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, A Study of Polyandry (1963): a comparative survey across India and Tibet.
  • Hatti of Trans-Giri, Sirmaur (Himachal Pradesh; listed as a Scheduled Tribe in 2023): the custom is called jodidara (wedding: jajda) and is recognised in Himachal revenue law. The community explicitly gives land and joint-family reasons.
• Group marriage as an evolutionary stage (Morgan‘s “consanguine” and “punaluan” families) has no ethnographic support. Real “group” arrangements are polygynandrous extensions of polyandry or polygyny.

5. Ways of Acquiring a Mate in Tribal India

Example first. Among the Ho of Jharkhand, the ideal marriage (andi) is arranged with a large bride-price; a poor couple may instead elope, a youth may seize a girl, or a girl may enter a boy’s house and refuse to leave. Each route ends with the community accepting the union after a fine or feast. The table lists the main modes.

• Common logic: most “irregular” modes are ways round bride-price. Elopement, capture and intrusion are later regularised by a fine or feast, so the alliance and legitimacy functions still operate.
• Dhuku in Jharkhand: among Oraon, Munda and Ho, couples cohabit without the wedding feast they cannot afford. Their children face stigma and inheritance problems. NGO-run mass weddings have regularised thousands of such couples. This is a living Indian parallel to the live-in relationship debate (Contemporary Developments).

6. Marriage Payments

Example first. A Nuer groom’s kin hand over cattle to the bride’s kin in instalments, and her children then belong to the groom’s lineage. In a north Indian upper-caste wedding the flow runs the other way: the bride’s family sends dowry with her. The two payments move in opposite directions because they do different jobs.

The central contrast: bride-wealth compensates the bride’s group for losing her labour and children; dowry endows the bride and the new couple.

• Bride-wealth is the commonest marriage transaction cross-culturally (Alice Schlegel and Rohn Eloul, 1988), and is often paid in instalments that are returnable if the marriage fails or is childless.
• Goody’s contrast: the British social anthropologist Jack Goody linked each payment to a type of economy.
  • Bride-wealth goes with hoe agriculture, abundant land, female labour and homogeneous devolution (property passing only within one sex line), as in Africa. Where women are the main farmers and land is plentiful, a wife’s labour is what the groom’s group gains.
  • Dowry goes with plough agriculture, scarce land, stratification and diverging devolution. Where land is scarce and families are ranked, the bride’s family places her, and her share, at its own class level.
• Indirect dowry (Goody): wealth passes from the groom’s side to the bride herself, as in Islamic mahr. Parts of Africa have shifted from bride-wealth to indirect dowry as economies changed.
• What dowry does: it seals the alliance, gives the bride a security fund if widowed or deserted, sets up the conjugal household, and buys status in a hypergamous market.
• Radcliffe-Brown (African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 1950): bride-wealth stabilises marriage, because divorce requires returning the cattle, which the bride’s kin may already have used for their own sons’ marriages. This is why marriage payments are an example of reciprocity between two groups, not a purchase.
• Brahmanical root of dowry: kanyadana (gift of a virgin) is the highest dana (religious gift), and every dana must be accompanied by dakshina (an accompanying fee), so the bride is given with varadakshina (gifts to the groom). Dowry was thus framed as religious merit, not payment, in high-caste Hindu marriage.
• The eight Hindu forms of marriage (Dharmashastras) map onto the cross-cultural modes: Brahma, Daiva, Arsha, Prajapatya (approved; the father gives the daughter, and in Arsha receives a token cow and bull), Asura (bride-price), Gandharva (mutual consent), Rakshasa (capture), Paishacha (seduction; condemned). Detail in Paper II, Unit 3.1.
• India’s shift: M.N. Srinivas (“Some Reflections on Dowry”, 1984) traced a move from bride-price to dowry among lower castes and tribes. He linked it to Sanskritisation (lower castes copying higher-caste customs), to the withdrawal of women from paid labour, and to the cash economy inflating groom-prices. Whether dowry deaths stem from the custom itself or from modern commercialisation of it remains debated (Werner Menski, 1999).
• Law: the Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (in force from 1 July 2024) makes dowry death section 80 (formerly IPC 304B) and cruelty by husband or relatives section 85 (formerly IPC 498A).

7. Functions of Marriage

The table pairs each function with the theorist who stressed it.

The functions work at two levels: legitimacy, sexual regulation, cooperation and socialisation serve the couple and child; alliance, rights and hierarchy serve the wider groups, which is why kin usually arrange marriages.

• Feminist critique: “functions” for whom? Marriage also institutionalises control over women’s sexuality, labour and fertility (Meillassoux; the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women”, 1975, reading Lévi-Strauss’s “exchange of women” as an origin of gender hierarchy).

Key Terms

Contemporary Developments

• Same-sex unions: in Supriyo Chakraborty v. Union of India (17 October 2023), a five-judge Constitution Bench held there is no fundamental right to marry and left recognition of same-sex unions to Parliament. Civil unions were rejected 3:2.
• Live-in relationships:
  • D. Velusamy v. D. Patchaiammal (2010) brought a “relationship in the nature of marriage” under the Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
  • The Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code (rules in force from January 2025) makes registration of live-in relationships compulsory. Scheduled Tribes are kept outside its scope, which preserves customary marriage.
• Polyandry persists where land logic persists: the Hatti jodidara wedding of July 2025.
• Inter-caste marriage remains rare: about 5% of marriages in the India Human Development Survey (2011–12), so caste endogamy remains the most resilient rule.
• Marriage squeeze: skewed sex ratios in Haryana and Punjab drive long-distance cross-region brides (Ravinder Kaur), which reverses the usual hypergamy and caste-endogamy logic.

Diagrams to Master

1. Topic map of the seven themes.
2. Pater–genitor split in Nuer woman–woman marriage (§1.2). Label who pays cattle and whose lineage the children join.
3. Cousin chart (§3.3). Label cross versus parallel, and MBD, FZD, FBD, MZD.
4. Restricted versus generalised exchange. Draw A ⇄ B beside A → B → C → A, and label wife-givers and wife-takers.
5. Forms-of-marriage tree. Monogamy, then polygamy splitting into polygyny (sororal, non-sororal), polyandry (fraternal, non-fraternal) and polygynandry.

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