Forms of Marriage

Marriage can be classified along two different axes: how many partners a person may legitimately have, and the rules that govern who counts as an eligible partner in the first place.

On the question of numbers, the two broad forms are monogamy and polygamy. Monogamy restricts each individual to one spouse at a time -- a man may have only one wife and a woman only one husband at any given moment. Even in societies where polygamy is permitted by custom or law, monogamy tends to be the more commonly practised arrangement in actual life. Many societies also permit an individual to marry again after the death of a spouse or after divorce, so long as they are not married to more than one person simultaneously; this pattern -- a sequence of monogamous marriages over a lifetime -- is called serial monogamy. Historically, the norm of remarriage after a spouse's death has applied far more readily to men than to women, which connects to the restrictions on widow remarriage discussed elsewhere in this chapter.

The second axis concerns eligibility: whom is a person permitted, or required, to marry? Endogamy requires a person to marry within a culturally defined group to which they already belong -- caste is the most familiar example in the Indian context. Exogamy is its mirror image: it requires a person to marry outside their own group. Both rules are typically defined with reference to specific kinship units -- a clan, a caste, or a racial, ethnic or religious grouping -- rather than applying to society as a whole in the same way. …