檳榔嶼

- Some people argue that marriage is universal because it simply expresses the biological urge to mate and reproduce.
  - Animal behaviors are not just about sex.
    - When the female sea horse spots her mate each morning, they engage in an elaborate greeting ritual, wrapping their tails around a branch of coral or a blade of sea grass and rubbing their snouts together, seemingly quivering with joy over their reunion. Then they entwine tails and glide across the ocean floor.
    - One biologist once remarked that she wished her husband would be half that affectionate when he didn't want sex.
- Some people believe that human marriage is simply an extension of the same biological processes that produce pair-bonding among animals.
  - beyond the most superficial similarities, we find nothing in the animal kingdom that remotely resembles human marriage.
  - For thousands of years, in human society, the question of who paired off with whom was not decided solely by the two individuals who ended up together. Families and neighbors almost always had a say.
  - Moreover, through most of human history, marriage united not just two mates but two sets of families.
  - No other animals have elaborate rule about whom one should, must, or cannot marry.  Marriage practices among humans "are universally subject to rules."
- In 1949, George Peter Murdock defined marriage as a universal institution : "involves aman and a woman living together, engaging in sexual activity, and cooperating economically."
  - At first glance, this seems a commonsense definition. In fact, however, there are many exceptions to this kind of marriage arrangement.
  - In many times and places, husbands and wives routinely lived in separate residences.
  - Economic cooperation is not always the rule.
- The Royal Anthropological Institute of Britain 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"
  - There are West African societies in which a woman may be married to another woman as a "female husband"
  - For most of Chinese history the decision to arrange a ghost marriage was made by two sets of parents, without regardd to the youth's wishes.
  - Over the millennia the preferred form of marriage in many cultures was that between a man and several women. More rarely, marriage might unite a woman and several men.
- Suzanne Frayser defined marriage as "a relationship within which a society socially approves and encourages sexual intercourse and the birth of children."
- We can't claim some groups didn't have "real' marriages just because their marriage practices were not "typical".
- Three prominent anthropologists recently argues that while "there are a few exceptions to virtually any definition," the point is that "there are commonly stable, mated relationships between females and males in every human society."
- Edmund Leach : marriage is "the set of legal rules" that govern how goods, titles, and social status "are handed down from generation to generation".
  - Some societies pay no attention at all to "lgitimacy" in determining a child's rights. 
  - In societies where inheritance rights depend upon legitimacy, marriage is usually an elaborate ceremony that confers a whole package of rights and obligations on the partners. 
- For millennia, one reason people married was that an individual simply could not survive trying to do everything on his or her own.
  - But sometimes the division of labor within marriage has been determined by the social role an individual chooses to play rather than by the person's actual biological sex.
    - A man doing "woman's work" could marry a man doing "man's work", similarly, woman too.

The Importance of In-Laws
- Marriage usually determines rights and obligations connected to sexuality, gender roles, relationships with in-laws, and the legitimacy of children. It also gives the participants specific rights and roles within the larger society. It usually defines the mutual duties of husband and wife and often the duties of their respective families toward each other, and it makes those duties enforcable.
- Na, a society of about thiry thousand people in the Yunnan Province of southwestern China. The only society we know of in which marriage is not a significant institution, brothers and sisters live together, jointly raising, educating, and supporting the children to whom the sisters give birth. (society without husband)
  - Marriage is not the only way to impose an incest taboo, organize cihld rearing, pool resources, care for elders, coordinate household producion, or pass on property to the next generation.