ITALY
THE MARRIAGE IN SOCIOLOGY
BY GIULIA AND YLENIA
Initially, the main purpose of marriage was to establish or re-solder alliances between groups.
From this point of view, marriage is a fundamental institution of kinship and its purpose is to promote social interaction relying on the prohibition of incest and the principle of reciprocity : marriage establishes relationships between groups.
Levi- Strauss distinguishes two double exchange systems : systems that have the primary goal of making stable alliances and they clearly define in which group you must marry , and complex systems which indicate only those who you can not marry.
Edmund Leach criticized the prospect of Levi- Strauss , saying that marriage is an institution that involves a set of rights, for example, the legal paternity and therefore the legitimacy of children .
Anthropology speaks of endogamous marriage to indicate the possibility to have marriage within the group , and exogamous marriage when you must marry with a person outside of a group .
There are two kinds of marriage:we talk about monogamy when it is lawful to marry one person and polygamy when you can have multiple spouses. A further distinction is made between polygyny which indicates the plurality of wives and polyandry that means plurality of husbands.
In many societies, marriage provides economic transitions that have an important symbolic meaning.