manus, usually reserved for patricians, there was a marriage without manus, practised for the most part by plebeians. In this case the married woman remained under her father’s patria potestas.
These laws evolved considerably up to the end of the Republic and over the duration of the Roman Empire. Women became able to transmit their possessions to their children, who had priority over the woman’s own brothers and sisters, her agnates. But until a very late date, a Roman woman could not testify in court on behalf of someone other than herself, and she was never able to undertake the defence of someone else, or to represent anyone other than herself. The last function remained a male public prerogative. As Yan Thomas stresses, in the political arena as in intersubjective civil relations, Roman women were always prohibited from providing a service that went beyond the narrow sphere of personal interests. Until the very end, the city-state remained a ‘men’s club’, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet termed it. Never did the Roman woman receive authorization to take on the general nature of an ‘office’, a male task par excellence.
This raises several questions. Are there any matrimonial alliances that are contracted without marriage, without a more or less ceremonial act? Indeed, this is the case in many hunter-gatherer societies and among certain agriculturalists. The man and the woman begin by living together, and then their status gradually changes over time. It cannot be said that they go from being not married to being married, since marriage does not exist. What is important is that this union becomes publicly known and no one opposes it, no one finds anything to say against it on either the man’s or the woman’s side or in their respective communities. This is also the case with the millions of couples who live together without being married in the West and who declare their children with the state representatives near their place of residence. Their children automatically become citizens of the country where they were born, members of a nation whose boundaries are broader than those of their family and their local community. The fact of becoming the parents of legally recognized children gives these unmarried parents the rights and duties that the state confers on all relatives in the direct line, whether or not they are married.
If there are alliances without marriage, are there also alliances that are not marked by the transfer of goods and/or services between the families involved? In Western societies, where young people who are of age can marry without their family’s consent, many unions are contracted without an exchange of prestations between the families or between the spouses, except for a few reciprocal gifts. In many nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, which do not amass material possessions – among the Bushmen for instance50 – the young man moves in with his wife’s people until the birth of their second or third child. During this time, he shares the spoils of the hunt with his in-laws and renders them many services. Then, he may, if he wishes, return to his native band where he has kept his rights, taking his wife and children with him. Among the Purum agriculturalists of Manipur Province in India, the husband lives with his in-laws for three years and works off his marriage payment. Then he goes home to his own people.51
Lastly, do these alliances, sanctioned by marriage or not, always produce conjugal families? Among the matrilineal Ashanti, we saw that the husband visits his wife in the daytime, but spends his nights with his mother, his sisters and their children. His own children live with their mother. The couple’s residence is therefore matrilocal for the woman and duolocal for the man.
The Na are a Tibeto-Birman-speaking group, living in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces in southern China, who are matrilineal and matrilocal. Their residence unit is made up of groups of sisters living with their children of both sexes and with their brothers, the children’s maternal uncles. They do not have marriage. The men leave their sisters at night to visit the women in the neighbouring houses who have accepted them as temporary lovers. Even in the case of a long-lasting liaison, each man or woman can have other amorous relations at the same time and can separate when he or she chooses. Conjugal families are very rare, and if their number has grown in the past decades, it is due to pressure from the Communist rulers, hostile to the ‘furtive visits’ and concerned with imposing monogamy, a mark of civilization and of course of the superiority of socialism. Even in this extreme case, though, where there is no marriage or official direct exchange between families, an indirect exchange occurs and an adelphic family is formed in which it is the women who provide the children with their identity. The man is like the rain, a shower that awakens a seed-child in the woman’s womb, where it then develops. In Na society, then, there is no marriage, and therefore there are no husbands and no fathers. But the family exists, an adelphic family where the incest taboo between brother and sister is primordial and where any sexual allusion within the walls of the home is forbidden. The mothers and the maternal uncles exercise their authority jointly over the children engendered by the women of the house.52 The residence pattern is the same for men and for women: matrilocal.
RESIDENCE MODES
A great diversity of family types is engendered by the conjunction of different descent rules and different residence patterns. In matrilineal societies, residence can be matrilocal (Na, Rhades, Tetum), uxorilocal (Hopi), duolocal (Ashanti and Senufo), avunculocal (the family lives with the wife’s mother’s brother: Trobrianders), virilocal (the wife lives with her husband’s family). Patrilineal societies usually have residence patterns that are patrilocal (the family moves in with the husband’s father: Melpa, Baruya, Tallensi) or virilocal (the family settles on the husband’s land: Wolof,53 Tamil54 or Reunion Island). In Dobu,55 in southeastern New Guinea, a couple alternates residence according to years, sometimes patrilocal, sometimes uxorilocal. Cognatic societies often combine these principles, since one can choose to live with one’s maternal or paternal kin. In Samoa, on the other hand, women leave their village for that of their husband (virilocal residence). Finally, in Western Europe, Japan, the United States, but also among the Inuit, residence is neolocal, the couples choosing their place of residence without reference to their parents. It is easy to see that the various forms of residence have different effects on the children’s socialization, as they live closer to their paternal or their maternal kin, or find themselves surrounded by everyone, seeing their father in the daytime, their maternal uncle at night, or their maternal uncle in the daytime but never at night, etc.
| RESIDENCE PATTERNS Matrilocal Uxorilocal Duolocal Ambilocal Avunculocal Patrivirilocal Virilocal Neolocal Natolocal |
POLYGAMY AND POLYANDRY
Lastly we will mention some other principles that also help determine different family and group structures: polygyny and polyandry (the possibility for a man to have several wives – in Islam he is allowed four, plus concubines – or for a woman to have several husbands). Polygamy is widespread in Africa, among the Muslim populations of Asia, and in Melanesia. However, it is lessening with the Christianization of these populations, which imposes monogamy and restricts (the Orthodox Church) or forbids (the Roman Catholic Church) divorce. Polyandry remains limited to certain regions of the Himalayas, India, Amazonia and Oceania. A very rare and perhaps unique case in North America were the Shoshone, who practised both polygyny and polyandry.56 Polyandry can be adelphic (Tibet57) or not (Guayaki58). In the first instance, a woman marries a group of brothers, and the children are attributed successively to each of the brothers, beginning with the oldest, or are all regarded as descendants of the oldest brother. The main reason for adelphic marriages is to avoid dispersing family assets. In the second case, a woman has several husbands who are unrelated to each other, and the children are attributed to each man in succession.
Let us mention also the importance of the age of the persons getting married. Among the Siberian Chukchee59 a young woman can ‘marry’ a three-year-old boy, whom she will raise along with the children she conceives with her ‘authorized lovers’. The young Arapesh girl60 is betrothed at a very early age, around six or seven, and will go to live with her future husband’s family, where she will be brought up by her in-laws. In Australian Aboriginal society, the age difference may be as much as fifteen years or more, and here, too, the husband may raise his wife as his daughter,
