Marriage is a culturally and often legally recognized union between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between the partners, between them and any children, and between them and their in-laws. Ethnographic survey data covering 1,231 societies recorded 186 as monogamous, 453 with occasional polygyny, 588 with frequent polygyny and 4 with polyandry, and anthropologists have offered competing definitions of its essential features: Edward Westermarck's relational approach (a relation of one or more men to one or more women recognized by custom or law), a legitimacy-focused definition centered on the recognized parentage of children, and Edmund Leach's rights-based framework naming ten distinct rights a marriage can establish. The institution is close to a cultural universal, yet what counts as a marriage varies by culture, religion and era, so the atlas treats the exact boundary of the term as a live definitional question rather than a settled one.
Facts
Disputed
Emergence PeriodDocumented in some form in every known society and treated by most anthropologists as reaching into deep prehistory, predating written records entirely; because the institution is defined differently by competing anthropological frameworks (Westermarck's relational account, a legitimacy-of-offspring account, and Leach's ten-rights account), no single origin point can be dated, since dating an origin first requires settling which definition is being dated. 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountDebated because the disagreement is definitional as much as historical: scholars agree the practice is ancient and near-universal but not on which relational configurations should count as marriage at all. Institution TypeSourced to the subject's own accountKinship institution: the socially and often legally recognized union underlying family formation, distinct from the specific descent, residence and marriage-succession rules (levirate marriage, polygyny, polyandry) already on this atlas, which describe variations within or around it rather than the institution itself. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Cross-cousin marriage is a widely documented rule governing whom one may marry within the institution.
A property transfer practice attached to marriage validation, distinct from the marriage institution itself.
Levirate marriage is a marriage-succession custom operating within the broader institution of marriage.
A rare variant form (4 of 1,231 surveyed societies) within the institution of marriage.
Ethnographic Atlas data records polygyny, occasional or frequent, as the most common marriage form among the 1,231 societies surveyed, a variant form within the institution of marriage rather than a separate institution.
Marriage is the socially and often legally recognized union that most societies treat as founding a family unit, though the two institutions are analytically distinct: marriage is the union, the family is the resulting kinship and residence group.
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