Asymmetric marriages
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES SPRING 2016
Asymmetric marriage , according to structuralists , does more than combine reproductive units in prescribed ways . Lévi-Strauss ( 1963 ) claimed that asymmetric marriages resulted in symbolic systems of “ concentric dualism .” This differs from the more common “ reciprocal dualism ” or “ diametric dualism ” of exchange or moiety systems ( Errington 1987 ). Defining marriage and kinship in the context of houses creates a condition in which one can only marry through the relation of their house ( in East Sumba class is also relevant ). This is unlike in Western Indonesia , where households are less coherent structures and one can marry according to one ’ s status but that status is not completely defined by one ’ s house . Societies that preference the material and moral relationships between “ houses ” through generations over the relationships among people within a generation , have been traditionally called a “ house society ” ( Lévi-Strauss 1982 ). East Sumba fits this category and Eastern Indonesia was one of the places that inspired this conceptual categorization .
At a tangible level , marriage rules also create different forms in which people are socially defined . Shelly Errington ( 1987 ) demonstrated how marriage rules in Western Indonesia created sets of siblings ( cousins and distant cousins ) who are marriageable or not depending on specific idioms of taboo . Social siblings , who may be similar or not in age , are of the same generation within a kinship system ( their extended uncles and aunts were siblings at the same number of generations ). Under this system , people cannot marry outside of their sibling set because their offspring could not properly be placed into a generational grouping or having a sibling set of their own . However , in asymmetric marriage systems , people are not defined by generational associations , but through house relations ; thus , they can marry vertically between what could be described as generations ( pp . 411 ). This means that there are two fundamentally different ways in which people relate to their social world and are constituted by it . Society in a house society with the asymmetric marriage system , instead of being sliced into generations of siblings , which are better described as cousins , is vertically separated between households that span generations .
There is a much more encompassing and profound approach to the asymmetric marriage systems that has implications for the entire structure of reality according to certain theorists . According to Lévi-Strauss ( 1971 ), Fox ( 1980 ), Adams ( 1980 ), Kuiper ( 1987 ), Keane ( 1994 ) and Errington ( 1987 ), asymmetric marriage systems reflect a different type of the universal expression of dyadic oppositions through symbols . Instead of diving straight into the implications of the theory , I will present how asymmetric marriage systems are different than symmetric ones while they also deal with some similar dyadic opposition . In an asymmetric marriage system , male and female siblings begin as opposite yet complementary sets within the household . This unity is broken when sisters are moved from their natal homes to those of the wife-takers . They are replaced with someone else ’ s sisters from the wife-givers . This may appear to be a similar dynamic if people either exchanged women between groups or practiced another form of exogamous / endogamous marriage
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