From the May 2004 Anthropology News

Marriage and the "Missing" Man

Evelyn Blackwood
Purdue

As any introductory textbook in anthropology will tell you, marriage is an important institution in human societies. Or is it? While in the past, anthropology has been complicit with the dominant Western view in situating the heterosexual couple at the core of kinship, and by extension, all of civilization (as President Bush would have it), a sustained anthropological critique from a number of directions points to the historical and social specificity of marriage and family.

Many Forms of Relatedness
Social groups create meaningful bonds through any number of intimate relationships. Gloria Wekker’s study of the mati work of Afro-Surinamese working-class women in the city of Paramaribo, Suriname is an excellent example of women’s same-sex relations. Mati are women who have sexual relationships with men and with women, either at the same time or one at a time. Mati relationships between women mostly take the form of visiting relationships, although some women couples and their children live together. Whether “visiting” or not, mati relationships constitute and are constitutive of family and extended kin networks in Afro-Surinamese households.

Women at a mati party. Photo by Gloria Wekker.

Not only do “families” come in many forms, they do not necessarily depend on procreation to reproduce themselves. Eric Wolf, in his book Envisioning Power, notes that the “houses” of the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast of North America contained people who shared a multiplicity of links but not necessarily genealogical ties. Reproduction, descent, and succession were achieved through performance validated in ritual, not through sexual propagation. Neither marriage nor family sustained these houses, although both forms of relationship could be found there.

Pointing out that there are many forms of marriage and family is one way to defuse debates about same-sex marriage, and certainly one that media are most open to. But at the same time it only serves to reinforce the very institutions that we are trying to critique. One of the disadvantages with studies that focus on “other” forms of sexualities and families is that such accounts have not successfully destabilized heteronormative models of kinship. Other forms of family in the US, especially gay and lesbian couples, can seem reassuringly similar to normative nuclear couples in their patterns of pairing and householding.

I am not suggesting that gay and lesbian studies do not offer a challenge to heteronormative kinship, but their relatively subdued impact both within and outside of anthropology speaks to the ability of such challenges to be absorbed within dominant ideologies of kinship. And it becomes too easy for conservatives to say, well, you’re just imitating (or deviating) from the real thing, heterosexual marriage and family.

What Are We Trying to Preserve?
The next important step in creating space for many other forms of relatedness seems to me to be located in efforts to decenter marriage and the nuclear family ideologically. One direction to take is for anthropologists to ask what is being preserved in the struggle to shore up heterosexual marriage. Is it the threat to a notion of biologically determined heterosexuality, or something more deeply rooted? What underlying assumptions solidify the heterosexual couple’s status as the dominant form of family arrangement? I would argue that the hysteria about the “decline” of marriage and family in the US, inflected also in concerns about “female-headed households” and “single moms” in the US and elsewhere, is rooted in a perceived threat to the normative position of heterosexual men in marriage and family. To make this argument, I start with the intersections of Western religion and classic kinship theory.

Marriage and family as imagined in the West today have their roots in Christianity, which claims that as God rules over man, so man rules over woman. Carol Delaney’s work has pursued this line of thought to provide an important critique of Western systems of kinship and their relation to the patriarchal myths of the Christian Bible. If Patriarchal Man is the icon of Western marriage and family, his shadow should fall not just across debates about same-sex marriage but over other forms of marriage and family. I am currently working to make this connection by re-examining anthropological debates on matrilineal and “matrifocal” households, precisely those forms of household and kinship in which “marriage” is said to be weakest.

Matrifocality and Matriliny
The categories of matrifocality and matriliny, although by no means similar processes, share some underlying assumptions about the place of the heteronormative conjugal couple and the problem of the “missing” man. The category of “matrifocal” household was developed not simply to mark the absence of a permanent married heterosexual couple, but to mark the absence of a husband. In a similar manner, matriliny was said to be a “puzzle” in part due to the “instability” of the conjugal couple, an instability believed to be wrought by the husband’s subordination to his wife’s kin and thus his “loose” attachment to his wife’s household.

Current definitions and uses of matrifocality (and women-headed households) recall classic kinship theory’s assumptions about the centrality of marriage and the heterosexual couple. The expectation lingers that households should have a normatively married heterosexual couple with a man as “head.” Because matrifocal households are generally not organized around a heterosexual couple, they are viewed as problematic departures from the heteronormative family, or as short-term solutions to men’s absence, rather than as viable forms of household constituted through women.

Likewise, the “headship” women are theoretically accorded in “woman-headed households” is rendered meaningful only in conjunction with men’s absence. National and global concerns about the proliferation of “woman-headed households” then only work to shore up cultural notions of masculinity and heterosexual privilege. With the public policy spotlight on “woman-headed household,” other sorts of constitutive relations within and beyond households are obscured, whether they are comprised of kinswomen, kinsmen, close friends, or same-sex couples.

Assumptions about marriage and the place of the father/husband prompted a line of anthropological questioning about matrilineal kin groups that secured the validity and importance of the husband and the conjugal couple even in its (near) absence. In my research on rural Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia, I found that Minangkabau relatedness was represented primarily by the mother-daughter line and their extended kin, and only secondarily by marriage and conjugal ties.

Assumptions about men’s place as husbands, however, led many an anthropologist to focus on the “plight” of the husband in matrilineal societies. The conjugal bond in matrilineal societies was considered to be “weak” because of the assumed tension and struggle for power between the husband and the mother-in-law’s brother, as well as the “interference” of the mother-in-law and the demands of the husband’s own lineage. Claims regarding the unreliability of husbands or the necessity of husbands’ migrations were used to substantiate women’s control of land. These claims, however, reflect underlying assumptions about normative marriage and family. It is the “missing” man and “weak” husband who provide the rationale for matrilineal practices. In Minangkabau matrihouses (extended households), however, the husband and conjugal couple unequivocally take a back seat to relations moving through and managed by women.

Decentering Marriage
In the current hysteria about same-sex marriage, then, it is fruitful to submit the heterosexual couple to sustained criticism by examining the ideological assumptions that serve to normalize it. As my work on “matrifocal” and matrilineal societies suggests, there is ample evidence of kin practices and intimate relations without marriage or lacking marriage in the normative model of masculine heterosexuality, yet these cases have been consistently reconfigured to reflect normative assumptions about marriage and masculinity. The debates about matrifocal and matrilineal practices expose the way men are foregrounded in couples, while women without men stand in need of explanation.

Efforts to decenter marriage require attention to complex issues of intimacy, relatedness, and interconnectedness as they are manifest in practices and discourses at many different levels. Rather than assuming the centrality of heterosexual conjugal relations, anthropologists are positioned to substantiate whether and how such relations constitute a significant relationship in any particular context. As one starting point, a critique of marriage needs to explore the gendered assumptions that de-normalize other forms of marriage and relatedness. nAN

Evelyn Blackwood is associate professor of anthropology and women’s studies at Purdue University. She received the Ruth Benedict Prize for her co-edited collection Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures (1999) and is the author of Webs of Power: Women, Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village (2000).