In matrilineal Minangkabau society, where the husband is called by an expression that means ‘borrowed man’, the matrimonial prestations give the husband and wife rights in each other and, through them, extend these rights to their groups.
In sum, all these various prestations (bridewealth, groomwealth, dowry, conjugal prestations) establish two kinds of ties at once: conjugality between the spouses and affinity between the groups that become allied through them. In the next generations, the affines are transformed, depending on the type of kinship system, either into consanguines (as in the Western kinship system) or into consanguines and affines (as in the Dravidian system, where the mother’s brother and the father’s sister are affines for Ego and not consanguines).
To conclude this point, let us say that the exchanges that seal an alliance are always fundamentally exchanges that transfer from one group to the other rights in the persons who are detached from one group and attached to the other. But these detachments and attachments are almost never complete.
Jack Goody, following Leach, drew up a relatively exhaustive list of the various categories or rights that can be transferred by these exchanges and which constitute reciprocal or non-reciprocal obligations between the spouses (conjugal rights) and between the allied groups.
• Rights to henceforth officialized sexual relations.
• Rights to domestic services.
• Rights to the men’s and/or the women’s procreative capacities and rights for the allied groups on the children born of the marriages.
• Rights to cooperation in the production and exchange processes if the family, lineage, etc., are production and exchange units; and rights to a share of the things produced by these units or exchanged between them.
• Rights to mutual assistance and to solidarity in the event of political and social strife.
• Rights to mutual assistance in the performance of rituals and other ceremonies concerning ancestors, spirits and gods.
Of course one party’s rights are at the same time the other parties’ duties. This is why it is indispensable to distinguish among these rights those that are reciprocal and non-reciprocal, are identical or different, equivalent or non-equivalent, complementary or opposing. For example, the husband’s right to demand that his wife join him in living next to or with his father is an obligation, a duty for the wife. In other societies it is the husband who will go to live with his wife or with her parents, either during the first years of marriage or definitively.
Such transfers of rights in persons are often the starting point for transfers of material and immaterial goods48 to the individuals that are born to these alliances or who will be integrated through adoption. Lands, names and titles will be inherited by all descendants, male and female, of a union, or by only certain men or women. Standards, values and knowledge will be transmitted, social functions will be transferred. Filiation and descent return in force to unite or divide people according to sex and age, and combine with alliance to ensure the transfer from one generation to the next of a share of the conditions of their physical, material and social conditions of existence. For instance, in a society with a matrilineal descent rule, descent groups give other groups the right to their daughters’ sexual services but keep the children born of their marriages for themselves. In ancient Roman law, girls were exherited en bloc, and the father would choose a single son to inherit his potestas, or authority, and carry on the ancestral cult after his death. For as long as he lived, the father would exercise his patria potestas, the absolute right, recognized by the city of Rome, over the members of his family, including his married sons and even his married daughters, if they were still ‘under his hand’. And yet the authority that prevailed in the everyday domestic life of this ‘family’ was not founded, as Yan Thomas showed, on this unlimited potestas.49
Let us take another look at the notion of patria potestas, the absolute right of the pater familias over his descendants. To be a pater familias in ancient Rome, a man could not be under the control of another, he had to be sui juris, under the control of no other, to have been chosen by his father to inherit his potestas and have received it instantaneously on his father’s death. The pater familias was thus an autonomous subject, whereas all other members of the family were alieni juris, under the control of another. The pater familias thus had control over his wife, his children, his slaves and his goods. It was the fact of inheriting the patria potestas, the father’s power, that made a man a pater familias. Such an heir could be unmarried or be married without children. He was still a ‘pater’ familias. This power lasted all his life, for his sons, even when they married and had children, remained under the control of the pater familias until his death. Daughters too, but in ancient Roman law girls were given in marriage and then passed under ‘the hand’, the manus, of their husband, becoming as a daughter. A wife thus became the sister, as it were, of her sons and daughters. And if her husband was under the control of her father-in-law or an older ascendant, then she came under this man’s control also. But alongside marriage with manus, usually reserved for patricians, there was a marriage without manus, practised for the most part by plebeians. In this case the married woman remained under her father’s patria potestas.
These laws evolved considerably up to the end of the Republic and over the duration of the Roman Empire. Women became able to transmit their possessions to their children, who had priority over the woman’s own brothers and sisters, her agnates. But until a very late date, a Roman woman could not testify in court on behalf of someone other than herself, and she was never able to undertake the defence of someone else, or to represent anyone other than herself. The last function remained a male public prerogative. As Yan Thomas stresses, in the political arena as in intersubjective civil relations, Roman women were always prohibited from providing a service that went beyond the narrow sphere of personal interests. Until the very end, the city-state remained a ‘men’s club’, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet termed it. Never did the Roman woman receive authorization to take on the general nature of an ‘office’, a male task par excellence.
This raises several questions. Are there any matrimonial alliances that are contracted without marriage, without a more or less ceremonial act? Indeed, this is the case in many hunter-gatherer societies and among certain agriculturalists. The man and the woman begin by living together, and then their status gradually changes over time. It cannot be said that they go from being not married to being married, since marriage does not exist. What is important is that this union becomes publicly known and no one opposes it, no one finds anything to say against it on either the man’s or the woman’s side or in their respective communities. This is also the case with the millions of couples who live together without being married in the West and who declare their children with the state representatives near their place of residence. Their children automatically become citizens of the country where they were born, members of a nation whose boundaries are broader than those of their family and their local community. The fact of becoming the parents of legally recognized children gives these unmarried parents the rights and duties that the state confers on all relatives in the direct line, whether or not they are married.
If there are alliances without marriage, are there also alliances that are not marked by the transfer of goods and/or services between the families involved? In Western societies, where young people who are of age can marry without their family’s consent, many unions are contracted without an exchange of prestations between the families or between the spouses, except for a few reciprocal gifts. In many nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, which do not amass material possessions – among the Bushmen for instance50 – the young man moves in with his wife’s people until the birth of their second or third child. During this time, he shares the spoils of the hunt with his in-laws and renders them many services. Then, he may, if he wishes, return to his native band where he has kept his rights, taking his wife and children with him. Among the Purum agriculturalists of Manipur Province in India, the husband lives with his in-laws for three years and works off his marriage payment. Then he goes home to his own people.51
Lastly, do these alliances, sanctioned by marriage or not, always produce conjugal families?