Courtship, Kinship, and Marriage
Courtship, Kinship, and Marriage
How does the Nuer ghost marriage reflect on American marriage customs? Consider the legal standing of transsexual and transgendered marriage in light of the homophilic/pathic distinction.
The United States has been in a tizzy for several years on the subject of same-sex marriage. It has become a political litmus test for conservative and liberal values equal to abortion and reproductive rights. In the summer of 2013, the United States Supreme Court nullified a federal law defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman (Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA) and let stand a ruling permitting same-sex marriage in California. It would seem advocates of same-sex marriage have triumphed, but marriage equality is hardly secure. The nation remains a patchwork of same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or state constitutional prohibitions. A common argument against same-sex marriage is it disturbs and perhaps destroys a centuries-honored institution based on one man and one woman. (Never mind the ambiguity of the labels “man” and “woman.”) Another argument naturalizes heterosexual marriage because from that come babies, but there is no groundswell to define marriage based on couples’ reproductive viability or choices.
Moving away from our own backyard: How do other cultures view the subject of same-sex romance, family, and marriage?
Same-Sex Marriage: Not Invented Yesterday
It is not rare. It is a part of world history. The Greeks and Romans applied the concept of marriage to same-sex couples. It was sanctified in fourth century Christianity. As you read last week, Native North Americans regularly blessed unions between same-sex partners. Many small-scale, agrarian-based cultures have practiced one or another form of same-sex marriage for centuries.
To understand the contexts, a few terms must be presented:
polygyny – marriage between one man and two or more women
monogamy – marriage form that recognizes two people, most often one woman and one man
patrilineal – descent system in which inheritance is passed through the male line
patriarchy – social system in which men have positions of social, economic, and political power
Nuer Female Same-Sex Marriage
The Nuer of the Southern Sudan practiced a unique form of female marriage. Traditionally, the Nuerare intensely patriarchal and patrilineal, i.e., wealth must be passed down from father to son in an unbroken chain. This poses a considerable problem for the Nuer family that is without males in a generation.
Consider this scenario for a Nuer family. A man is married, but dies before he has a son. If he has an unmarried sister, his ghost will possess her. Through her, he announces from the spirit world that he needs a son. To make this happen, the sister will be expected to assume a man’s role in society. She will, in essence, switch hit for her brother in the family line, without becoming her brother. To do this, she must wear men’s clothes, take a masculine name, do men’s work, and marry a woman. The logical choice of marriage partner is her brother’s widow, her sister-in-law. But they still need to produce a son. The gender transformed sister will enlist a man from a neighboring village to impregnate her wife. For the sake of illustration, let us say that she produces a son. The biological father is nothing more than a sperm donor, he has no rights or responsibilities for the boy. The boy’s true parents are his biological mother and the father who is actually a female.
The Nuer female-to-female ghost marriage is remarkable for a number of reasons. Spirit possession becomes a valid form of civil disobedience and information sharing. Furthermore, the patrilineage is maintained by the marriage of two females. Notice, too, that the woman in the family bloodline must not get pregnant, since she is expected to become the husband-father figure in the home. So the son who will inherit the family wealth and name has a complete genetic break from his patrilineal grandparents. Interestingly, the Nuerhave strict taboos against lesbianism. Since there is a gender change, and one woman is occupying a man’s place in the patrilineage, this marriage is not lesbian. Two females living as women, and therefore not part of the partilineage, is culturally prohibited and a sure sign of witchcraft.
Such same-sex marriages, in which someone undergoes a gender change, is called a pathic same-sex marriage. A same-sex marriage without gender change is called a homophilic same-sex marriage. Of course the latter is much more familiar to North Americans.
Two brides atop a traditional American wedding cake. In “anthro-speak,” this represents a homophilic same-sex marriage, not a pathic one.
A European Same-Sex Marriage Tradition
According to Allan Tulchin of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, male couples contracted civil unions in medieval Europe. He found legal contracts from France that cemented a bond of affrerement, or brotherhood, between two unrelated, single men. The two pledged to live together sharing “one bread, one wine, and one purse,” meaning that their wealth would be held jointly. Like a marriage contract, a brotherhood contract had to be sworn before a notary and witnesses. There is “considerable evidence that the affreres were using affrerements to formalize same-sex, loving relationships,” Tulchin wrote in September 2007’s Journal of Modern History.
Polygyny and Same-sex Romance
Polygyny sometimes encourages homosexuality in both men and women, though the cultures that practice such forms of marriage would not necessarily recognize or condone same-sex affection. In those cultures where one man has multiple wives, he is likely to be much older than even his oldest wife. This is simply a factor of demographics. To prevent a sex-ratio imbalance, polygynous societies must postpone a man’s marriage and hasten women’s marriage. For example, young men among the polygynousMasai and Nyakyusa in Africa were expected to spend time away from the community as warriors and informal ambassadors, far from the elder men with their multiple wives. With this ongoing homosocial environment, the young men would enter into long term romantic attachments with each other, sometimes even marrying.
Same-sex affection among women in polygynous societies is harder to confirm, and relies more on anecdote. In a polygynous home, the husband will not necessarily share a bed with his wives in rotation. In fact, a husband and a co-wife may not sleep together at all. Since heterosexual adultery may come with extreme punishment, one option for co-wives is to have discreet relationships with each other or with women in the community.
The United States: Is Lesbian Sex an Oxymoron?
A recent legal ruling in the United States exposed a hierarchy of value we place on different forms of sex and romance. When a New Hampshire couple sought a divorce in 2003, the wife named her female lover as correspondent. The court was flummoxed, since it had never dealt with a homosexual affair at the heart of divorce proceedings. Was this adultery? Since the word was not defined in the state’s divorce law, the court had to look the word up in a dictionary, and found the word “intercourse” in the definition. The court also found an 1878 case that referred to adultery as “intercourse from which spurious issue may arise.” The court ruled that the lesbian relationship was not adultery. Some were outraged at the ruling. “I think the majority opinion is unintentionally trivializing same-sex relations and violating modern notions of the sanctity of marriage,” said Marcus Hurn, a law professor at Pierce Law Center. “A sexual relationship, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is “exactly an equivalent betrayal, and that, I think, is the ordinary meaning most people would give.” (San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 2003) While some states, including Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, have broadened the definition of adultery to include gay sex, New Hampshire had not. Judges there did not want to define which sex acts outside of intercourse amounted to adultery. Would they define male homosexual acts as intercourse? If the answer is yes, then are the New Hampshire judges saying that the love between two women, legally speaking, can’t or doesn’t exist?
In 2004, when President Bush advocated a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, he argued that heterosexual monogamy was “one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization.” In response, Don Segal, professor of anthropology at Pitzer College and member of the American Anthropological Association’s executive committee, said “If [Bush] were to take even the first semester of anthropology, he would know that’s not true.” (San Francisco Chronicle, February 27, 2004)
Matthew Starver, founder of Liberty Counsel, which opposes same-sex marriage, believes that birth sex is non-negotiable. “What you’re born with is what you are,” he said. In 2004, he argued and won a Florida case that nullified a marriage between a female-to-male (FTM) transsexual and a female. The court ruled the couple were of the same sex because they were both born in possession of XX chromosomes. (www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=78) To be consistent, would Starver then endorse the marriage of a male-to-female transsexual (MTF) (XY) and a cis or biological female (XX)?
For Further Reading:
Baird, Robert M. and Stuart E. Rosenbaum.Same-sex Marriage: The Moral and Legal Debate. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Sexual Inversion Among the Azande. From American Anthropologist, volume 72, number six, December 1970.
Richards, David A. J. The Sodomy Cases: Bowers v. Hardwick and Lawrence v. Texas. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.
Vanita, Ruth. Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Weston, Kath. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.