EXOGAMY. - The term e. (exogamy), introduced into sociology by Mc Lennan, means that rule, common to all peoples, by which a wife must be chosen outside that group with which the young man is, or feels himself to be, closely related. Consequently, any sexual relationship occurring between persons belonging to the same group is considered incestuous. The limits of this norm vary across different cultures.
In primitive cultures, exogamy is local, that is, the bride must be chosen in a village different from the one in which the groom lives; this norm corresponds in many cases to exogamy of blood, since the inhabitants of the same village are often relatives. In totemism, where the tribe is divided into different clans whose members believe themselves to descend from a common ancestor, there is clan exogamy. The earlier matriarchate has class exogamy: the tribe is divided into two marriage classes, within each of which exogamy prevails. Nomadic pastoralists have preserved and extended to the large patriarchal family, which characterizes the sociology of these peoples, the exogamy of primitive cultures founded on blood kinship. Clan and class exogamy are the product of a system of kinship constructed artificially and therefore more recent than that founded on consanguinity, which never disappears from any culture and thus remains a characteristic common to all humanity.
Consanguineous are always: parents and children, even merely adoptive ones, brothers and sisters; almost always cousins, sometimes according to the paternal and maternal line, sometimes only according to one of the two (first cousins are often considered brothers, although there is no lack of populations that have a strong predilection for marriage between the son of a sister and the daughter of a brother). Often the prohibition of marriage has a circle so vast as to include persons whom we no longer consider relatives.
The exceptions to exogamy (v. ETNOLOGIA) are so rare and so isolated, truly felt as such and therefore so detested by the other members of the same tribe, that they confirm the universal character of this law, whose study, most interesting, still needs to be deepened.
Evolutionist ethnologists, sociologists and psychologists have given various explanations of exogamy, which however have all fallen because they are in contradiction with the facts. For Morgan it would be the result of successive restrictions, following upon the phase he supposed of unlimited sexual promiscuity (ugamy).
Mc Lennan believes that savages generally practice infanticide, for which reason males would be constrained to steal women from outside their own group. But these observations are entirely gratuitous because infanticide and abduction are unknown to primitive cultures: they manifest themselves in certain younger cultures and have never been general in humanity.
Spencer affirms that the savage steals women from outside his own group because in this way he has the advantage of having at the same time slaves and trophies. But war in primitive cultures is extremely rare and slavery is absolutely unknown. Lubbock and Wilken suppose, as already did Mc Lennan, sexual promiscuity whereby the women of a group would have belonged to all the men of this group. The first wives could therefore only have been stolen women: with them individual marriage would have begun. What has already been said regarding the thesis of Morgan and Mc Lennan (v. ETNOLOGIA) serves equally to refute that of Lubbock and Wilken. Dukhoun founds his explanation on totemism, which he believes to be original: exogamy would have arisen from the sense of fear that the blood of woman causes in man, especially during menstruation. But this thesis too collapses with the observation that totemism does not belong to primitive cultures and has never been general in the history of humanity.
Freud's theory, founded on the erotic element, the basis of all psychoanalysis, is a pure romance. According to him, in the primitive horde the father would have kept all the women for himself, preventing the sons from access to them, so that they would have hated, killed and eaten him. But the parricide would have had as a consequence the antagonism of the brothers among themselves, because each was a rival of the other in the face of the women. In order to live together the brothers had to introduce the prohibition of incest, all renouncing the women they desired, for whose sake they had precisely suppressed the father. The documentation on the family in the already archaic cultures accessible to us absolutely contradicts the existence of the horde conceived by Freud. The treatment inculcated and practiced toward parents is precisely the opposite of parricide. Cannibalism too is foreign to primitive cultures.
Ethnologists have generally been very severe toward Freud: Revers, Bosa, Kroesber, Schmidt and quite a few others have easily brought out the absolute groundlessness of the Freudian theory on the origin of society and of religion. Revers wrote with reason that Freud brought a contribution to pornography more than to medicine. Darwin, Westermarck, Schmidt and quite a few others have brought positive contributions to the study of the problem.
Schmidt's observations are the best known, because they combine positive studies of ethnology with psychology. According to this author, in the small groups that still represent the most archaic cultures accessible to us, the family is the center of ethical and social life: the state is barely at its beginnings. The education that the young receive is substantially directed at forming good fathers of families, according to the ideal of virtue of these populations.
Generally, between young men and girls who have lived together since childhood, no attraction develops such as to lead to marriage: this observation is perhaps even more evident in these small groups, since those who live in the same village are generally consanguineous. In childhood and in the early years of youth the affirmation of the sexes is still very weak and begins only with the onset of puberty and, among persons who live together, is very slow (this fact had already been rightly emphasized by Darwin, Westermarck and others). Moreover, persons who live in the same village know each other too well, even in their mutual defects, and this is not favorable to marriage. Very differently does it happen between young men and girls belonging to families of different villages, who come into contact, without intermediaries, in the period of puberty: there are then awakened all the aspirations, dreams, affections, ideals that lead to marriage. It is especially in this ideal of companion and partner that the young man and the girl have formed for themselves, an ideal that includes all the qualities: beauty, intelligence, character, will, moral life, that the explanation of exogamy is to be sought. In these cultures, where offspring are greatly desired, the young man feels more than in others the responsibility that he incurs with marriage, because an economy founded on hunting and gathering makes him dependent every day on his work. Therefore he desires a girl who gives him assurance of being a good spouse and a good mother of a family and, in order to find her, he goes outside the circle of his village, because it is too narrow. This is exogamy. Its opposite: «the union of one blood with another insufficient» is «incest». From this impulse outward is also born the freedom of choice that, in these cultures, the young man and the girl have. This ideal is not an illusion, but a force that leads to severe duties toward the new family: in man there are latent energies and intellectual and moral qualities that love, confidence and mutual esteem awaken and render active.
E. still requires further study, and perhaps it is more the task of psychology than of ethnology to find a solution that explains all its aspects. The benefits that humanity has derived from e. in every field—biological, economic, social and cultural—can never be sufficiently appreciated. Incest would have caused the most disastrous physical and moral consequences within the family and destroyed the respect and authority of parents. These effects would have made themselves felt even more gravely in the small human aggregates of original cultures, where the only authority truly felt is that of the parents and the only firmly established social organization is the family.
And finally, without exogamy the formation of large social groups, which are necessary for progress, would not have been possible, with consequent involution and perhaps with the end of culture itself.
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Renato Boccassino