268 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



of these pairs into a cooperating group that forms a 

 community. 



FORMS OF MARRIAGE 



We are often told that society has but two alternatives: 

 marriage or promiscuity. We are also told that promiscuity 

 would prevail if it were not for the restraining hand of 

 society. These statements do not reveal the true status 

 of the human sex problem, but they do bring before us 

 points of regard in contemporary thought. Taking up, 

 first, the matter of marriage, we may select for study any 

 one of several aspects of the subject, confining our discussion 

 to it alone. Thus, we may look upon marriage as a biological 

 phenomenon, solely. On the other hand, we may regard 

 it as a social institution; again, as an economic adjustment 

 to living conditions. Shifting our interest, we may take 

 the ethnography of marriage as our task and so concern 

 ourselves with describing existing forms of marriage and 

 stating in what parts of the world they occur. This can be 

 narrowed somewhat, by making it an anthropological investi- 

 gation, and thus limiting the study to primitive peoples. 

 Finally, one may consider only the history of marriage, and 

 with the data available, attempt to discover the tinie order 

 in which each form of marriage appeared. Also one may 

 specialize in the history of divorce in Europe and America, 

 the history of legislation regarding marriage, the rights of 

 property in the marriage relation, etc. All of which shows 

 how complex marriage is and how deeply rooted in society. 

 It is not a simple phenomenon and there is no ground for 

 expecting its cause to lie in a single controlling factor. 



Naturally, a great deal has been written and said on the 

 subject, too much to be summarized here, but, for purposes 

 of orientation, we may enumerate a few of the important 

 contributions so far made. Turning first to marriage as a 

 social institution, we cite Westermarck's definition: "a 

 relation of one or more men to one or more women which is 

 recognized by custom or law and involves certain rights 

 and duties both in the case of the parties entering the union 

 and in case of the children born of it." While no definition 

 can fully cover all examples of marriage, this one does meet 



