The Family World System (Page 3)

The first part of Therborn's story is thus eminently political. As he remarks, this is logical enough, since patriarchy is about power. His second part moves to sex. In questions of marriage, Europe--or, more precisely, Western Europe and those of its marchlands affected by German colonization in the Middle Ages--diverged from the rest of the world far earlier than in matters of patriarchy. In this zone a unique marital regime had already developed in pre-industrial times, combining late monogamy, significant numbers of unmarried people and Christian norms of conjugal duty, contradictorily surrounded by a certain penumbra of informal sex. The key result was "neo-locality," or the exit of wedded couples from parental households. Everywhere else in the world, Therborn maintains, the rule was universal marriage, typically at earlier ages, as the necessary entry into adulthood. (He does not make it clear whether he thinks this applies to all pre-class societies, where such a rule might be doubted.)

Paradoxically, although patterns of marriage might be thought to have varied more widely around the world than forms of patriarchy, Therborn has much less to say about them. Polyandry is never mentioned, the map of monogamy is unexplored, nor is any taxonomy of polygamy offered beyond a tacit distinction between elite and mass variants (the latter peculiar to sub-Sahara). The base line of his tale of marriage is set by a contrast between two deviant areas and all other arrangements. The first of these is the West European anomaly, with its subsequent overseas projections into North America and the Pacific. The second is the Creole, born in plantation and mining zones of the Caribbean and Latin America with a substantial black, mulatto or mestizo population, where a uniquely deregulated sexual regime developed.

Some startling figures emerge from Therborn's comparison. If sexual mores in Europe first became widely relaxed in aristocratic circles of the eighteenth century, flouting of conventional norms reached epidemic proportions among the lower classes of many cities in the nineteenth, if only by reason of the costs of marriage. At various points in the latter part of the century, a third of all births in Paris, half in Vienna and more than two-thirds in Klagenfurt were out of wedlock. By 1900 such figures had fallen, and national averages of illegitimacy had become quite modest (Austrians still outpacing African-Americans, however). Matters were much wilder in the Creole system, readers of García Márquez will not be surprised to learn. "Iberian colonial America and the West Indies were the stage of the largest-scale assault on marriage in history." In the mid-nineteenth century between a third and half of the population of Bahia never tied the knot; in the Rio de la Plata region, extramarital births were four to five times the levels in Spain and Italy; around 1900 as many as four-fifths of sexual unions in Mexico City may have been without benefit of clergy.

These were the colorful exceptions. Throughout Asia, Africa, Russia and most of Eastern Europe, marriage in one form or another was inescapable. A century later, Therborn's account suggests, much less has changed than in the order of patriarchy. Creole America has become more marital, at least in periods of relative prosperity, but remains the most casual about the institution. In Asia, now mostly monogamous, and sub-Saharan Africa, still largely polygamous, marriage continues to be a universal norm--with pockets of slippage only in the big cities of Japan, Southeast Asia and South Africa--but the age at which it is contracted has risen. If divorce of one kind or another has become nearly universal as a legal possibility, its practice is much more restricted--in the Hindu "cow belt," virtually zero. At the top end of the scale, in born-again America and post-Communist Russia, any wedding guest is entitled to be quizzical: Half of all marriages break up. But with successive attempts at conjugal bliss, the crude marriage rate has not fallen in the United States. Globally, it would seem, the predominant note is stability.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.