MARRIAGE, History of (Latin, marito, from triaritus, husband, from mas, a male). In the natural history sense marriage may be de fined as a more or less durable union between male and female lasting till after the birth and rearing of offspring. In the ethical and legal sense marriage is a union between man and woman living in complete community of life for the establishment of a family. See article on the FAMILY, HISTORY The Origin and Social Function of Mar In the natural history sense of the word marriage may he said to exist among many of the animals below man. Pair marriage is common among the birds and some of the higher mammals. It especially characterizes the anthropoid apes, the pair marriage of the chirn.panzee being monogamous and durable, probably not unlike that of primitive man. The origin of marriage is therefore to he sought in the family, rather than the origin of the family in marriage. See article on family above re ferred to.
The function of marriage in human society is twofold: (I) to regulate the relations be tween the sexes and (2) to determine the rela tion of the child to the community. This latter function is often overlooked, but is quite as important in any scientific consideration of marriage as the former.
Practically all forms of marriage may. be found among human beings if we consider all peoples and all historical ages, although the primitive or original form of marriage seems to have been that of a simple, pairing monogamy, similar to the pair marriage which is common among the higher animals. The reasons for re jecting the hypothesis of a primitive state of promiscuity have already been given in the arti cle on the family just cited. Whether such a form as communal or group marriage (limited promiscuity) has ever existed among any peo ple has been much debated by anthropologists and sociologists. The nearest approach to this form of marriage is found in certain aborigi nal Australian tribes, where a man who takes a wife from a certain group has sexual access to all the other women of that group, though he lives with only one of them. A similar form is to be seen in the Punaluan family of the Polynesians, the marriage of a group of brothers with a group of sisters, though this form was rare even among the Polynesians.
Most anthropologists and sociologists believe that such forms of group marriage were not primitive, but were relatively late historical de velopments. Setting these aside as exceptional forms, the main types of marriage in the human species may be grouped under the heads of polygyny, polyandry and monogamy.
Polygyny (Greek, °many com mon form of marriage in barbarism and lower civilization is the union of one man with sev eral women, scientifically known as polygyny, but popularly called polygamy. It is possible that this form of marriage existed to some extent in primitive times, as the gorilla among anthropoid apes is said to practise it. In gen eral, however, it presupposes a considerable accumulation of wealth and is therefore among strictly savage peoples very rarely practised. As a human institution it received its chief de velopment in the period of barbarism, and seems to have been an accompaniment of the development of dominantly militant life and of slavery in that period of human culture. Among people who practise polygyny, therefore, the practice is largely confined to the wealthy and ruling classes, as only these can afford the luxury of having more than one wife. In polygynous countries of the present rarely over 5 per cent of the families are of polygynous type. Owing to the fact that the number of males and females in any given population un der normal conditions is relatively equal even in polygynous lands, the mass of the families are necessarily monogamic.
The causes of polygyny are complex. Be side the animal instincts of the male we must place especially the military honor of wife cap ture and the economic value of women (or wives) as laborers. In barbarism the outward and visible sign of a man's wealth and power is frequently the number of his wives. A con tributory cause among some peoples is the high valuation set upon children, especially un der the patriarchal system (q.v.). This seems to have been the main cause in the case of the Hebrew patriarchs.