Polygamy In America

Marriage and Kinship:

A marriage is the customs, rules and obligations that establish a special relationship. All over the world there are marriage’s, in America a marriage is shared between two people who vow to stay together until death due them part. A marriage is usually heterosexual and monogamous but as of recently same sex marriages have been legalized in some states across America even though it is seen as taboo.

In other cultures, they practice polygamy which is when a person can have more than one spouse. Majority of the time you will see polygyny which is when one man is married to several women. According to the text “Polygyny has important economic and political functions in some societies.” (Warms, 225) In some cultures they see this as taboo and disagree with it because of things like religion, values and just general opinions.

The people have multiple partners and have a family at home, there are no husbands or fathers just a mother who has kids by multiple men. The next example of marriage that I learned in this course was, in certain cultures people wear certain colors and items to show meaning to something for example in India woman where the color red to symbolize fertility in a marriage ritual and gold indicates her family’s social status. Last but not least is that, in some African societies woman-woman marriages are an alternative to a heterosexual marriage. This is when a woman divorces her husband and marries another woman who then becomes impregnated by another man and instead of being the mother to the child she will now be the father and the families become