MARRIAGE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 29, 27 April 1927, Page 13

MARRIAGE AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION

HOW DID IT EVOLVE? How did marriage originate? It is partly a question of defining one’s terms. If marriage means merely the habit of male consorting with female until the offspring are reared, then animals marry. Indeed, did not Brehm declare that “real genuine marriage can only be found among birds”? If, however, we refer to the legal institution, it is obvious that the beginnings of customary law fall well within the human period; so that in this sense, and in this sense only, there must have been a time when man was without marriage altogether. Now anthropologists have taken delight in proposing terms to express this prematrimonial condition. “Agamy,” “hetairism,” “communal marriage,” “primitive indifference” are a few specimens. But the chances are that on the day when marriage was first instituted the sun rose very much as usual. In other words, the change occurred without anyone being aware of it at the time. Such at least is the view of Dr. E. Westermarck, who has written a “Short History of Marriage.” Dr. Westermarck, who utterly scouts the notion that absence of legal marriage stood for sheer promiscuity, and argues that a pairing habit already well-established was eventually sanctioned by a law mainly called into existence by the need, not of constraining normal people to do what they would do anyhow, but of preventing departures from:, custom on the part of abnormal people. On much the same principle Dr. Westermarck tries to solve the problem of the origin of exogamy. The Marquis de Brisay, a,n authority on doves, says “two birds from the same nest rarely couple.” That it is indecent for housemates to intcr-marry, a prejudice attributed by Robertson Smith to the ancient Arabs, seems like a human acknowledgment of the same principle. Given such a predisposition on the part of normal persons, law would enhance its validity by punishing occasional breaches of the rule. To say, on the other hand, as the Freudian apparently does, that law had to intervene because we all unconsciously tend toward incest, patricide and so forth, surely proves too much, namely, that a law so universally repressive never had a chance of coming into existence.