Exogamy and Endogamy

A widespread marriage practice is the regulation of whether a partner comes from outside or inside one’s own kin group or community. The rule of exogamy requires that the marriage partner come from outside one’s own kin group or community. Exogamy can take many forms. It may mean marrying outside a particular group of kin or outside a particular village or group of villages. Often, then, spouses come from a distance. For example, in Rani Khera, a village in India, 266 married women originally came from some 200 different villages that were, on average, between 12 and 24 miles away. Meanwhile, 220 local women had gone to 200 other villages to marry. As a result of these exogamous marriages, Rani Khera, a village of 150 households, was linked to 400 other nearby villages.⁷⁵ When there are rules of exogamy, violations are often believed to cause harm. On the islands of Yap in Micronesia, people who are related through women are referred to as “people of one belly.” The elders say that if two people from the same kinship group married, they would not have any female children and the group would die out.⁷⁶

People in exogamous societies with very low population densities often have to travel considerable distances to meet mates. A study of foragers and horticulturalists found a clear relationship between population density and the distance between the communities of the husband and wife—the lower the density, the greater the marriage distance. Because forager societies generally have lower population densities than horticulturalists, they generally have further to go to find mates. Among the !Kung, for instance, the average husband and wife had lived 40 miles (65 kilometers) from each other before they were married.⁷⁷

The opposite rule, endogamy, obliges a person to marry within a particular group. The caste groups of India traditionally have been endogamous. The higher castes believed that marriage with lower castes would “pollute” them, and such unions were forbidden. Caste endogamy is also found in some parts of Africa. In East Africa, a Masai warrior would never stoop to marry the daughter of an ironworker, nor would a former ruling-caste Tutsi in Rwanda, in central Africa, think of marrying a person from the hunting caste Twa.

Migrants and Immigrants Arranging Marriages in the Diaspora

These young South Asian Hindus in Great Britain are “speed dating.” They talk with potential spouses for three minutes each. Traditionally, parents arrange marriages.

What happens when people move from a place with arranged marriage to a place where marriage is based on free choice and romantic love? Many people around the world or their parents are from places that reject love marriage because it could fizzle out. Love was not considered a sufficient basis for marriage. So parents and other kin, or hired go-betweens, would select your marriage partner, preferably someone from the same socioeconomic background. For example, in many parts of South Asia, one was supposed to marry someone from the same caste and class until recently. Many immigrant parents still insist that their children’s marriages be arranged. But this is changing. Consider how some young South Asians in England are “arranging” their own marriages.

Go-betweens are replaced by Web sites, chat rooms, and personal advertisements on the Internet. A couple who “meet” first electronically might arrange a face-to-face meeting, in what’s called “South Asian speed dating”; they agree to meet and talk—for just three minutes—at a restaurant or bar, and then they move on. The participants, who are in their 20s and middle class, consider themselves hip. They are quite comfortable blending behaviors from West and East. Is the same true for South Asians in the United States?

Rakhi is a lawyer in New York City. She is the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India. (The Sikhs are a religious group.) As a young girl, Rakhi had built a shrine to an American movie star in her bedroom. But at the age of 27, she decided to marry someone like herself. Because she was focused on her career and didn’t have time to date, her mother enlisted the help of a Sikh matchmaker who had been instructed by the mother of a man named Ranjeet to find a wife for him. Ranjeet also had thought he would marry for love. “But seeing how different cultures treated their families, I realized the importance of making the right match,” he said. When the matchmaker organized a party to which she invited Rakhi and Ranjeet (and their mothers), Rakhi’s mother whispered: “I think he’s the one.” After the two young people dated secretly for two months, the matchmaker was once again summoned, this time to negotiate the marital arrangements. Some time later, Rakhi and Ranjeet were married in a Sikh temple in a New York suburb.

Sources: Alvarez 2003, Section 1, p. 3; Henderson 2002, Section 9, p. 2.