While it would comforting to assign broad motivations to what is in essence a personal choice, are we then ignoring the impact of birth control in allowing individuals to reassign the importance of marriage in their lives?

Some of you whom have read my first article may wonder, what has caused this interest in polygamy? Some may have concluded this is just some Muslim’s way of spreading his culture in America. Others of you may have thought of your own reasons for …

One final comment out of me, re: the narrow picture of marriage pop culture presents. A song occured to me, a single solitary counter-example, but a favourite one. Livin’ On A Prayer, by Bon Jovi. Reading over the lyrics with this discussion in mind, I couldn’t help smiling.

There are some interesting thoughts in what oneman has had to say. I think, in particular, of the idea that what business increasingly wants from both customers and workers is rootless individuals. His last observation that popular culture focuses either on the path to “They lived happily ever after” or the dramas that arise when relationships fall apart but ignore mundane lives is also a line worth pursuing.

Just now, however, over on Anthro-L, Mike Pavik has posted a list of lessons from anthropology that he teaches in his introductory course.

1. Culture is a Total Lifeway – not just a superficial set of customs. It largely shapes how an individual feels, perceives and behaves. It also shapes how an individual adapts to an environment.

2. Every culture is a system – and a cultural system is an interconnected series of ideas and patterns for behavior in which changes in one aspect generally lead to changes in other segments of the system.
3. Every human cultural system is logical and coherent in its own terms, given the basic assumptions and knowledge available to that society.

4. The customs and beliefs of peoples are often more understandable by studying them in the terms of the social interrelations among types of individuals and groups – status and role in social action.
5. The customs and beliefs of peoples are often more understandable if we examine them from individual psychological and cultural perspectives.

6. Analysis of the implications ( or manifest functions ) of cultural behavior must take into account the explicit beliefs and intentions of the people involved; but analysis must also be made of the unnoticed, unintended further consequences ( latent functions ) of particular actions and beliefs. In anthropology, this is called the emic and etic approaches.

7. Humans everywhere shape their beliefs and behaviors in response to fundamental human problems.

8. Explanation of human behavior is essentially one sided and incomplete unless it takes into account the biological, cultural, social psychological,geographical and historical information that surrounds that behavior.
9. There is no evidence of significant differences in abilities or intelligence among the people of the world. We are all anatomically modern humans, of one species.
10. No human biological characteristics are unaffected by lifeway and environment, and vice versa.
11. Practically all significant differences of behavior among human populations are learned cultural patterns.

If items 4-8 are essential for anthropological understanding, our discussion to date has, I submit, failed to reach this standard.

1) I agree, and think I said something to that effect up there somewhere — but the “normal” marriage still assumes the mle breadwinner and female tag-along. Hardly anyone can afford to live like this, but a lot of the public discourse about marriage assumes that people should /want/ to live like this.

2) I was thinking before that a good deal of pop culture, especially movies, that deals with marraige in some way comes in two “flavors”: those that end with a couple getting married, and those that start with a couple already married. In the first, marriage is almost always a Good Thing, the end-all-be-all of human experience, the culmination of the protagonists lives. In the second, marriage is almost always a limitation to be gotten over or around. Sometimes it’s resolved with the marriage intact (e.g. _The Seven Year Itch_, _Casablanca_) and sometimes with a divorce (e.g. _Kramer vs. Kramer_). Some movies integrate all three (e.g. _City SLickers_, where at the end one character seems set to be married, another manages to escape from a horrible marriage, and the third re-embraces marriage.

I would say that the vast bulk of romantic comedies, as well as pop music, chick lit, etc., falls into the first category, but this is not so much about marriage per se as it is about courting and dating and essentially consumption. The protagonist “gets” the pretty girl, or the hunky guy. They don’t even have to marry — marriage is just a good way for popular culture to say “and they lived happily ever after”.

While I agree that a good part of consumption is about making us appear more attractive, I would suggest that it does so in a way that is fundamentally opposed to the requirements of a lasting marriage. Look at those romantic comedies again: if the hero is going to get cold feet, it’s almost always going to be because he cannot imagine spending the rest of his life sleeping with the same woman. Of course, he might substitute other consumer goods in explaining this fear, most likely Corn Flakes (and oh how the marketing folks at Kellogg’s must love that particular brand identity!). As I said above, a big part of consumerism in our society is /not/ having to live with consequences — you just change brands. But marriage strikes me as a choice with major consequences, and a commitment to living with those consequences “for better or worse”. This aspect almost never comes up in popular culture — I very much doubt we’ll see a 4th /American Pie/ movie called /American Divorce/ or /American She-Got-Fat-and-He-Slept-with-Their-Babysitter-and-Now-They’re-Locked-in-a-Cold-Loveless-Marriage-Neither-of-Them-Wants/. And either one of those movies would be about a thousand times more likely than /American Day-to-Day-Life-of-a-Married-Couple/. There’s not a lot of movies about ordinary married couples just getting along — nor many pop songs, or novels, or other pop culture. That doesn’t mean that there’s not much “just getting along” out there, but that it doesn’t fit well in the kind of consumerism that pop culture largely caters to and relies on.