MONOGAMY. - I. THEORIES AND RESEARCH ON ORIGINS. - The first to challenge the traditional thesis concerning the monogamous marital institution was the Swiss scholar Bachofen in 1861. Having established the existence of matriarchy (v.) among certain peoples and having judged it as a stage through which all the peoples of the earth must have passed and which preceded patriarchy, he raised the question of how it had come about that, despite the natural superiority of man, woman had been able to head the family before him. To resolve this question he had recourse to the circumstance in which, for the lineage, inheritance, etc. of children, account is taken only of the mother — a circumstance that occurs even today, when children are born outside of marriage. In that case the child does not know the father and perhaps the mother does not know him either. Now, Bachofen believed he could explain the origin of matriarchy by generalizing the case of the child born outside of marriage, and by drawing from it the consequence that before matriarchy there had existed a state of agamy or of promiscuity of the sexes. Since this state of general promiscuity of the sexes would have had to be repugnant particularly, given her psychic qualities, to woman, she would therefore have refused herself to all other men and would have given herself to only one of them. Thus, according to Bachofen, the glory of having founded m. and the monogamous family would belong to woman and not to man.
Bachofen's hypothesis was much debated. Although many data, from the historical-archaeological point of view, could not be denied, nevertheless the postulate of the universality of matriarchy, and even more its derivation from a state of complete promiscuity, came to be fully contested, as Wundt already pointed out. The theory of the Swiss jurist, founded essentially on philological and archaeological arguments, thus gradually receded into the background, until around 1879 it reappeared in ethnology, where it was corroborated by new arguments and based on new foundations. Morgan distinguished six stages in the evolution of the marital institution, Mc Lennan four, though both placed m. at the last stage, brought about by the extreme development of civilization, after polygamy. This history of marriage was accepted by sociologists and jurists, particularly by Marx, Engels, Simons, and popularized by Bebel (v. FAMILY, II).
One of the first studies of great breadth concerning marriage among historical and primitive peoples, which with the eloquence of facts shook the aforementioned theories, was Westermarck's The History of Human Marriage (London 1891). He arrived with certainty at the following results: polygamy exists among many peoples and polyandry among some, yet m. is by and large the ordinary form of marriage. This existed also among the ancient peoples of whom we have direct knowledge. M., moreover, is the only form of marriage that is generally recognized as legal and lawful. The great majority of peoples is as a rule monogamous, and the other forms of marriage have ordinarily been modified and oriented in the monogamous direction. Much more important is the historical evaluation of these facts, which he gave as follows: "With regard to the history of human marriage, two conclusions can be drawn with absolute certainty concerning m. and polygamy: m., which is always the predominant form of marriage, has had a more clear-cut prevalence in the lower strata of civilization rather than in the higher strata; polygamy, moreover, in these strata is significantly oriented anew toward m."
Subsequently, the ever broader, more precise and more thorough exploration of the primitive peoples of the whole world and the surprising development of ethnology have led to the distinction of groups of peoples according to defined types of civilization in a genetic order. This has been advantageous also for the history of marriage, increasingly confirming as erroneous — because a priori and hasty — the historical-evolutionist reconstructions, and refining the above-mentioned conclusions of Westermarck. Today it can be considered definitively proven that the so-called gatherer peoples of Asia, Africa, and America represent the most ancient stage of human civilization, or the one closest to it. After Schmidt in his study on The Position of the Pygmy Peoples in the History of the Development of Humanity (1910) demonstrated, for Africa and Asia, that these peoples practiced m., the celebrated scholar of the psychology of peoples, W. Wundt, wrote: "There is no other discovery in the history of human development that has so surprisingly and persuasively destroyed opinions hitherto very widespread as the ascertainment of the m. of primitive man." And after acknowledging Schmidt for having brought to light a fact of the greatest importance for the history of the development of human society, he added: "The importance lies in the fact that it is not civilization that produced m., but that this was one of the original conditions of civilization." And therefore in the work Elements of the Psychology of Peoples. Outlines of a Psychological History of the Evolution of Humanity (1912), having rejected all the reasons adduced by evolutionist ethnologists in support of their theories, and considering the civilization of the ethnologically most ancient peoples, that is, of the peoples who, as he put it, "stop, so to speak, at the lower limits of human civilization, and probably constitute the primordial state of social institutions and customs," Wundt asked himself: "What, now, are the relations between marriage and family at this stage? The answer, if we consider the widespread hypotheses about the primitive horde, is surprising, and yet it cannot be unexpected, if we regard these hypotheses in a proper light. Everywhere among these stocks we find m., not only as the sole form of union, but so to speak the natural one, that is, m. in the form of individual marriage."
Thus for several decades now it has become a common conviction among experts in ethnology that human life certainly did not begin with promiscuity or group marriage, but with normal family conditions founded on monogamy. Among the more recent authors of particular authority on the matter, K. Birkett-Smith is cited, who in the History of Civilization (Zurich 1946) expressed himself thus: "One therefore starts from marriage as an institution that is entirely human and, moreover, in its most ancient forms not very different from the one we ourselves know." Monogamy is traced back to the stage of nuptial rites among totemist, matriarchal, nomadic pastoral peoples, of mixed civilizations and also of the higher ones, such as the Chinese. Among the ancient Chinese, in fact, the bridegroom and the bride had to drink, during the ritual meal, after having made a libation of it to God, from two halves of a gourd — a rite that had a symbolic meaning, reuniting every marriage with that of the first human couple after the flood. In China and among other peoples of the same linguistic family, marriage has always been recognized as monogamous, although concubinage and sororate were permitted. The children of concubines are considered children of the bride, who call this woman their mother, and the concubine their aunt. The same appears from the nuptial rites in polyandrous marriage, for example, in southern Tibet, the classic land of polyandry. The younger brothers do not take part in the nuptial ceremony at all; it is performed by the eldest brother alone, who is the sole husband of the woman, as Grenard has written, the sole possessor of the land and of everything that belongs to the family, becoming the heir of everything and the head of the family itself; the younger brothers pass under his authority, are maintained at his expense, remain under his guardianship, as they had been under that of their father. As an example of monogamy in a mixed culture one may take the natives of the Trobriand Islands and of other nearby islands in Malaysia, among whom Malinowski, and before him Father Salerio (1855), established that monogamy is the rule.
II. FOUNDATIONS OF MONOGAMY
Why do men follow m.? For the evolutionists m. is due to the progress of civilization, which leads to the refinement of feelings and customs. Thurnwald attributes m. to a biological and economic reason. "This form of marriage," he says, "is to the widest extent the most widespread, because it is the one that corresponds most closely to the average biological number of the sexes. The predominance of this form does not, however, mean its exclusivity. Generally it is the poorest men who content themselves with a single woman."
Schmidt affirms that m. is the only natural form of marriage and proves it by biological law. According to this law, under non-abnormal conditions, an equal number of males and females is born everywhere in general; a few more males, but with a higher mortality of males in the early years, so that there is only one woman for every man and one man for every woman. This biological law is clearly seen in action among many peoples practicing so-called exchange marriage, which the African Pygmies of the Ituri call, as Fr. Schebesta reports, "head for head," since a clan that receives a woman in marriage must assure one of its own to the other clan, as is the rule in this relation of exchange of women.
M. depends, moreover, on a moral law and on a religious belief. The moral law manifests itself especially in the case of adultery, which is judged severely and prosecuted by the penal law, whose sanctions in this regard, particularly among the ethnologically most ancient peoples, extend even to the death penalty (v. INDISSOLUBILITY OF MARRIAGE, II. Among primitives). Many, and especially the most ancient among these peoples (Fuegians, Andamanese, African Pygmies), affirm that God created the first men, that is, the first human couple. Therefore, the institution of marriage and of the family, as Fr. Schmidt has noted, is referred explicitly or implicitly to the Supreme Being. And that this is a question of monogamous marriage is evident from the fact that in none of the legends of the creation of man reported by those same peoples are two or more women given to man, or vice versa. This holds also for the Pygmies of Gabun, who believe in the divine creation not of one couple, but of several couples, which are, however, always monogamous couples.