Written for Anthro431
In the beginnings of society, the leaders of the “primeval horde” did not sit down and discuss through logical debate what system of marriage (complex, simple, asymmetrical, etc.) or what system of descent (matrilineal, cognatic, etc.) they were going to use. Systems of kinship developed as a result of moral standards, which are most often legitimized through the medium of religion. The origins of the differences in each system of kinship reckoning can be seen by studying the prevailing moral standards of that society. The founders of religion, which is institutionalized morality, often used religion to justify their own views on marriage and the family, the origins of which views often came from personal experiences. Leaders of religious movements that preached new forms of marriage or kinship reckoning could use religious revelations as an underlying moral support to their new kin systems.
The founder of the Shakers, Mother Ann Lee, began her religious life as a troubled soul. Her bad experiences with sex and childbirth led her to become quite terrified of the marriage bed. She turned to religion as a source of solace and escape, searching for the true cause of evil. She found it in a vision while in jail for disturbing the peace: carnal intercourse (1). Her visions of the primal sin that led to the expulsion from Eden became her tool of moral validation for living a celibate lifestyle. Celibacy became the central doctrine of her religion. It was the higher form of living, closer to the way things were in Heaven. Ann began to preach this doctrine to all and sundry, gaining more justification of the practice by the sustaining belief of the community. The organization of the religious community of the Shakers was a new form of kinship in itself. All members were brother and sister in the Lord, devoted entirely to the community where they had once been devoted to small, nuclear families (2). Ann Lee’s own sexual experiences led to the development of a new system of kin reckoning and marriage structures, justified through a religious foundation.
John Humphrey Noyes also experiences sexual and religious turmoil which led to his development of a new marriage and kinship structure, justified by his new religion. Noyes was very shy due to his unemotional and intellectual upbringing, and fell in love with a girl who married another man when Noyes was unable to express his love for her. Noyes began to believe that strong emotional attachments between two people were the root cause of sin, because they led to jealousy. His solution, given as a revelation from God, was the abolition of exclusive emotional bonds and the commencement of complex marriage, in which all are married to all. Like the Shakers, the Oneida colony organized themselves into a community, living as one big family. The Oneida community, however, was not one of children under a Mother. It was one big marriage, with Noyes’s revelation that complex marriage was the way of things in Heaven as their underlying moral foundation.
The Mormons’ plural marriage was a less complicated change from the contemporary institution than either of the new marriage systems put out by the Shakers and the Oneida, for it was not an original idea, nor was it a complete reworking of the present system in America. It was an addition to, not a breaking up of, the nuclear family. Some have argued that Joseph Smith invented the doctrine of plural marriage to justify his own desire for additional wives. Unlike Lawrence Foster’s substantial data on the possible personal reasoning behind the doctrines of the Shakers and the Oneida in Religion and Sexuality, no persuasive argument is set forth for the case of Joseph Smith. Whether it was a conscious manipulation on Smith’s part or a true revelation from God, the doctrine of plural marriage based on the Abrahamic, Biblical model was the justification for the new system of marriage practiced in the Mormon community. Under Mormon polygamy, a man could have two or more wives without invoking God’s wrath. Other than the addition of multiple wives, the contemporary household unit and nuclear kinship structure did not change among the Mormon community.
The Prophet Muhammed, founder of the Islamic faith, also established a new institution of marriage in the form of polygyny (3). His religious reasoning for this new practice was slightly less veiled than that of Joseph Smith and the Mormons. Muhammed was already married to Khadija when he met Aisha and fell in love with her also. In response to a direct question asked of Allah, Muhammed received permission to take Aisha as his wife. The sura that the Prophet received allowed a man to have several wives, but expressly forbade women to have more than one husband. Muhammed and the men of Islam now had their moral foundation, given by Allah, to practice polygamy.
In our “modern” American society, religion has become less and less the governing force in managing one’s existence. Frequently religion is just something to do on Sunday afternoons. With this disappearance of religion as a matter of central import to our lives has come the beginnings of the morality of science to justify marriage institutions and kinship reckoning. People such as Alfred Kinsey, with his (biased) studies on sexuality, have helped to perpetuate the doctrine of individualism, of the mutable nature of morality. Now what is good for one person is his morality, and this claim justifies that person’s lifestyle. Divorce, once a mortal sin under Catholic domination, is now quite common, for many and varied reasonings and justifications. Single-sex households, which few major religions tolerate as a valid moral lifestyle, are considered moral if that is what that couple considers right and moral. Living together without getting married, also once a mortal sin, is now a common practice which is not considered amoral. The traditional nuclear family becomes less and less common as traditional religious values become less and less important in quotidian life.
The advent of democracy in America eliminated the need for kinship groups to serve corporate functions. In a democracy, the distribution of jobs is by a person’s appropriateness to the job instead of by whom he is related to. In many societies in the world, all aspects of life are ordered around kinship boundaries. Business consists of family members who hire other family members. In our society today, nepotism is one of the seven deadly sins of business relations. It is no coincidence that this trend towards the unimportance of kinship and morality has led to the break-up of the traditional family structure. There is a strong correlation between the disintegration of kinship and the preponderance of divorce and lack of morality in society.
The elimination of the need for kinship systems as a means of organizing and managing one’s existence has also eliminated the need for morality, through religion, to justify one system of marriage and kinship as superior over other systems. Morality in societies such as our own, which no longer have a prevailing religion, has become extremely mercurial in its applications. The boundaries between right and wrong have been taken away, and with them have gone traditional kinship systems.
Footnotes:
1. On a side note, it is not difficult to imagine her thought processes while in jail. Upon discovering Ann’s situation, her husband (of whose bed she was terrified, despite his kindness toward her) was sure to grow quite angry. This no doubt led to thoughts of other things associated with her husband, whcih added to the fear she was already feeling, added to her religious mental orientation of the night, and suddenly she had a vision of the primal sin.
2. Another interesting bit of logic. The incest taboo forbade sexual relations with one’s primary kin: one’s brothers and sisters. Therefore the Shakers, as a community of brother and sisters, children in the Lord, there could be no sexual relations because they were now one’s primary kin.
3. Information on the Prophet and on Islam is taken from the book An Introduction to Islam.