The Gods Must Really Be Crazy

Peter Wood on American anthropologists' latest obsession, the Quest for Gay Marriage:

So offering reckless distortions of the ethnographic record in support of gay marriage may indeed feed into the national debate. Neither the Washington Post nor Nightline is likely to factcheck East African marriage customs. And I would not be much surprised to see the Minangkabau matrifocal family cropping up in future mainstream-media pronouncements to the effect that "marriage" is just one of a myriad of cultural forms, and is of no essential significance. Some tribes shrink heads; some drink reindeer milk; some marry. All is flux.

In her article, Evelyn Blackwood takes a moment to congratulate John Borneman for using "insights from queer theory to destabilize the dualism of married-unmarried." This is the typically obtuse jargon of contemporary anthropology, but surely Blackwood has it right. Borneman aims to knock (heterosexual) marriage out of its "privileged place in the replication of our present social order." But he is one among many anthropologists engaged in this ideologically motivated demolition disguised as social science.

The difficulty they face is that the factual record is overwhelmingly against them. That is why Blackman, among others, are straining after ethnographic gnats and propounding tendentious interpretations of gnat anatomy.

I don't know whether the editors of the American Ethnologist (published by the AAA) or the AAA's executive board really think that "The results of more than a century of anthropological research...provide no support whatsoever" for the importance of marriage as "an exclusively heterosexual institution." Maybe they are so trapped in contemporary ideology that this strange assertion seems plausible to them; or maybe this is just an attempt to throw dust in the eyes of opponents of gay marriage who might think (correctly) that the anthropological record does lend support to the view that heterosexual marriage is very likely a foundational human institution. Perhaps it is best to assume good faith, even though that implies dismal scholarship.

In any case, what the anthropological record really shows is that a society's decisions about marriage are among its most consequential. Political regimes and economic systems are, deep down, the results of particular ways of organizing families. Until Scandinavia and the Low Countries, Canada, and Massachusetts began their experiments with gay marriage, humanity appears to have steered away from this particular option. Possibly gay marriage will be a step forward for humanity; but it is a step into the dark. Civilization as we have known it, even on the western coast of Sumatra, has depended until now on exclusive heterosexual marriage.