Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“Marriage in such societies is generally not, as today’s formulation has it, a ‘relationship between a man and a woman,’ but a relationship between extended families in which the relationship between the particular people married is secondary at best–and often simply irrelevant. Thus, in many societies (such as the Biblical Hebrews), the practice of levirate (in which a man marries his brother’s widow) or sororate (in which a woman marries her sister’s widower) allow the kinship bond between families to remain unbroken regardless of the death of a spouse–structurally equivalent siblings become interchangeable in marriage because their function is identical.”
“It’s easy to see, then,” Wax continues, “why marriage is so important in this kind of society. What is difficult is to understand what function it retains in a society such as ours (‘we’ here being post-industrial Westerners, especially urban Westerners) where labor and trade are organized through market, not kin, relations. Under the logic of industrial capitalism, marriage is not only unnecessary in many ways but can even be counter-productive.” All you veterans of commuter marraiges raise your hands. (There’s more, and the comments are good too.)
