Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy - Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 2:1, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: While the question presupposes that a potential ‘trade’ takes place in marriage payments, I argue in this paper that the preoccupation with the ‘things’ traded in for instance most of the structural-functionalist analysis is mistaken. Much more, marriage payments are about social reproduction as a whole. In the course of the analysis, I want to qualify the manifest idea that things are ‘exchanged’ in marriage payments, either immediately or over time, as developed mainly by structural functionalists. According to the traditional paradigm, the single underlying formula is ‘money versus rights’. Rights in this context can relate to very diverging parts of social life as I will show below. Woman, children, sexuality are often - as structuralists such as Levi-Strauss (1977) argue - part of a wider system of potentially reciprocal exchanges. It is important, however, to not

Originally published in 1951 this book analyses the social values and institutions involved in the establishment and maintenance of marital relationships. Most of the data is derived from Umor, the largest of the five Yakö villages. As well as considering the conventions through which mariatal values are expressed, the relation of marital status to the general structure of Yakö society is also discussed. The book also determines the extent to which the values posited by the Yakö themselves are actually operative and discusses the changing conditions which have modified traditional standars of marital behaviour.

First Published in 1969. Building upon the author's previous work, Survey of African Marriage and Family Life, this title's findings are intended to produce for policy-makers a picture of the forces producing changes in family relationships and the instability of marriage to which legislators, civil or religious, could refer when deciding what practices to treat as permissible and what to forbid. For this reason it has laid more emphasis than is usual in works of theoretical anthropology on specific aspects of African marriage where it has been assumed that the divergence was most marked.