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What I want to figure out re “Western” is what is the thing, or what are the discursive situations, that make us want or need to use the term. Often in anthro it’s in order to make a warning: don’t extend the “Western” concept of X to someplace else. Anyway, maybe one of you all can start a topic on it some time.

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Your comment re: union/marriage is interesting. The way I understand it, in the anthropological sense, is that marriage, in its broadest sense, is a type of union among others. Many unions that fall under the anthro category (as opposed to the lay category) of marriage might not look anything like what a North American would recognize as a marriage (I’m thinking particularly of societies where there may be no ceremony marking the beginning of marriage . . .I can’t remember which, but I know it exists). So when I talk about socially recognised (within a particulat society) union, I’m talking about what an anthropologist might categorise as marriage.

Another example is the common-law arrangement so typical in today’s Quebec where, after 1 year of cohabitation or the birth of a child, two people have pretty much the same official recognition as a couple that gets a civil or religious marriage. I always felt that, from an anthropological perspective, this type of arrangement might fall under the category of marriage, even if a segment of the population does not hold it in the same regard.

And, yes, “gayness” (or lesbianism or bisexuality or transgender) are all terms that become problematic in a cross-cultural and historical perspective. In my forth-coming posts in this “queer” series, I will be touching on that, especially with reference to the Two-spirit identity in Aboriginal North America.

As for the whole “Western” thing; yeah, I have problems with that too and I’m not sure where to begin on that one. I try to avoid it and when I can’t, I try to put it in quotation marks.

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I would still like to trouble the way we slide between “union” and “marriage” in a way that might suggest that we are talking about local variants of a single master pattern. It’s hard — conventions of social science language push us to use general language, and while often you-all may be using that general language in a purely provisional pointing-at way, it still gets heard as though you’re discussing universal categories. Surely it’s clear that what people understand by being married, and what it means in practice vary a lot. E.g. in some situations the main new dyadic social relationship following marriage may be between a young woman and her mother-in-law. Without necessarily going back to full Levi-Straussian exchange-of-women, spotlighting dyadic sexual ties seems questionable.

To extend what I take to be Nancy’s last point, ““gayness” as described in Western terms” should be only a provisional stopping point in understanding places like the United States too. Queer Theory has shown the need to destabilize this and pointed to the various kinds of exclusions that are created by a single notion of gayness. (At some point on this blog we also need to have a go at what “Western” means and what work it is doing in people’s utterances, but probably not now.)

P.S. If anyone would like to have a go at critiquing me, I’d be delighted to get comments (possibly on this forum if directly relevant to Nancy’s original post, else to danby {at} u.washington(.)edu) on pages 8-10 of
http://faculty.uwb.edu/danby/papers/hetnorm.pdf
which attempts a summary of the kin-crit anthro lit, in the course of some remarks on heteronormativity in economics. I’d be happy to get comments on the rest of it too, but it’s kind of a long paper.

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Here’s the thing: same-sex (as opposed to gay) marriage in many of these societies sometimes happen(ed) for economic or practical reasons just like hetero marriages. There might be a lack of a male heir and a woman might take that palce and marry a woman.

However, this does not preclude the sexual nature of the relationship, although I’ve seen examples of scholars who have written that there was no sex in these relationships. I’m suspicious of these claims, though, as I’m very aware of the heterocentrism of early scholars in this area.

There is the example of occasional recognized female unions among Azande co-wives that is of particular interest; I would have to dig up the reference but I remember reading that the union is sometimes made in spite of the husband’s protests.

Then, of course, there are gender variants among Aboriginal North Americans who would occasionally marry someone of the same sex (but of a different gender).

Of course, in all these cases, the meaning and conceptualization of the same-sex relation has little to do with “gayness” as described in Western terms. In most of these cases, people don’t identify themselves according to the sex of the people they have intercourse with or marry in the way that North Americans (and I imagine Europeans) do.

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I know that’s just intro type classes, but its getting taught somewhere. Although, exactly how analogous some of these alleged gay marriages were to western style gay marriage wasn’t made clear. That is, it was explained that in certain listed cultures, two males or two females might link up in some way, but whether that cultural thing in question where two males or females live together and so forth was sexual, was never really addressed.

At the time, I kind of assumed that what was being described was sexual. But in retrospect, it wasn’t explicitly said, and I don’t really know. Unfortunately, I also forget which cultures were being discussed, so I don’t know enough to ask good questions on the subject.

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Mind you, I have only completed a Master’s degree so far so I’m not yet in a position to comment on what it’s like in a doctoral program and when I do it, it will be in a different university so . . . time will tell.

In any case, I remember that in all those discussions of kinship and drawing diagrams with little triangles and circles, the issue of whether two triangles or circles could be placed in a marital relationship came up only once, and jokingly. Our professor had us draw a diagram of our own families and I placed two triangles representing my brother and his partner of (at the time) 4 years in a marital relation. Some people thought that was amusing whereas I was quite serious (especially in Quebec, the land of common-law arrangements, another interesting phenonenon for anthros).

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Ha! … if only it were taught. Fortunately I had some good training on this in undergrad, or I wouldn’t know anything. I think most grad students know more about Zizek than cross-cousin marriage.

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I like Borneman’s work on this. One question to ask first is whether there *exists* a universal category of marriage that one then defines. What you’re seeing in textbooks, I suggest, is not that marriage is being defined through heterosexuality but that heterosexuality is being defined through marriage … along the lines of David Schneider’s _American Kinship_. Incidentally how is kinship taught in grad anthro classes these days?

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