But let’s try, because slippery use of the word marriage in the anthropological literature has resulted in a huge headache for anyone trying to understand how marriage and the nuclear family really fit into human nature—if at all. The word, we’ll find, is used to refer to a whole slew of different relationships.
In Female Choices, her survey of female primate sexuality, primatologist Meredith Small writes of the confusion that resulted when the term consortship drifted away from its original meaning—a striking parallel to the confusion over marriage. Small explains, “The word ‘consortship’ was used initially to define the close male-female sexual bond seen in savannah baboons and then usage of the word spread to the relationship of other mating pairs.” This semantic leap, says Small, was a mistake. “Researchers began to think that all primates form consortships, and they applied the word to any short or long, exclusive or nonexclusive mating.” This is a problem because “what was originally intended to describe a specific male-female association that lasted during the days surrounding ovulation became an all-inclusive word for mating.. Once a female is described as ‘being in consort,’ no one sees the importance of her regular copulations with other males.”5
Biologist Joan Roughgarden has noted the same problematic application of present-day human mating ideals to animals. She writes, “Sexual selection’s primary literature describes extrapair parentage as ‘cheating’ on the pair bond; the male is said to be ‘cuckolded’; offspring of extrapair parentage are said to be ‘illegitimate’; and females who do not participate in extrapair copulations are said to be ‘faithful.’ This judgmental terminology,” concludes Roughgarden, “amounts to applying a contemporary definition of Western marriage to animals.”6
Indeed, when familiar labels are applied, supporting evidence becomes far more visible than counter-evidence in a psychological process known as confirmation bias. Once we have a mental model, we’re much more likely to notice and recall evidence supporting our model than evidence against it. Contemporary medical researchers attempt to neutralize this effect by using double-blind methodology in all serious research—where neither the researcher nor the subject knows which pills contain the real medicine.
Without a clear definition of what they’re looking for, many anthropologists have found marriage wherever they’ve looked. George Murdock, a central figure in American anthropology, asserted in his classic cross-cultural anthropological survey that the nuclear family is a “universal human social grouping.” He went on to declare that marriage is found in every human society.
But as we’ve seen, researchers trying to describe human nature are highly susceptible to Flintstonization: unconsciously tending to “discover” features that look familiar, and thereby universalizing contemporary social configurations while inadvertently blocking insight into the truth. Journalist Louis Menand noted this tendency in a piece in The New Yorker, writing, “The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.” Paradoxically, in each of these cases, so-called natural behavior has to be encouraged and unnatural aberrations punished.
The now-forgotten diseases drapetomania and dysaethesia aethiopica illustrate this point. Both were described in 1851 by Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a leading authority on the medical care of “Negroes” in Louisiana and a leading thinker in the pro-slavery movement. In his article “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” Dr. Cartwright explained that drapetomania was the disease “causing Negroes to run away . the absconding from service” to their white owners, while dysaethesia aethiopica was characterized by “hebetude of and obtuse sensibility of the body.” He noted that slave overseers often referred to this disease, more simply, as “rascality.”8
Despite high-minded claims to the contrary—often couched in language chosen to intimidate would-be dissenters (dysaethesia aethiopica!)—science all too often grovels at the feet of the dominant cultural paradigm.
Another weakness of many of these studies is known as the “translation paradox:” the assumption that a word (marriage, for instance) translated from one language to another has an identical meaning.
