Poor suffering bastards: an anthropologist looks at illegitimacy.

HE HAS NO RELATIVES'

"Bastard" has always been a pejorative term. The word is a Spanish idiom: bastardo, or "pack-saddle child"; the French term is fils de bast, the child of the saddle bag, implying rootlessness. An alternative etymology derived from the Saxon "base" or lowly, and "start" or origin. Being a bastard was to be a "natural" child, lying outside of society.

The name is an insult, "bastard" being associated with mongrel or inferior breeds of animals. The inferiority derived from improper mixture, or blending. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a phrase from 1641, "To beget and bring forth mules, a bastard brood." Spurious, adulterated, debased, corrupt, unauthorized, and counterfeit are other connotations of the word.

Our colloquial language expresses this concern. Consider how the word "bastard" has come to mean someone heartless, cruel, or prone to cheat. We are not alone in this judgment. A Navajo saying captures well the universal stigma that attaches to illegitimate offspring. Do Ahalyada, they call them, "those who care for nothing." The worst social characterization the Navajo can offer of a thoughtless, deviant man is the charge that "he acts as if he has. no relatives." This phrase tells us that being embedded in relationships, in a network of legitimated and recognized kinsmen, is a powerful reinforcement for moral action.

A man with no relatives, the Navajo feel, is a man with no concern for the shame or honor that his behavior might bring upon those he loves. He acts, therefore, without control or humanity. European countries of the Middle Ages felt the same, regarding illegitimate children as virtual outlaws. They called them filii nulii, those "without relatives."

We see a similar phenomenon in modem America. People concerned about the reactions of relatives behave differently than do people who are "atomized" as anonymous strangers. The husband at a distant convention, or the tourist abroad, may do things under the cover of anonymity that would bring embarrassment were they done in front of one's mother, wife, children, or in-laws. A culture of bastards is a world of hardened carelessness.

DOMESTICATE THE MALE

That women domesticate men who marry them has been widely noted; indeed "groom" derives from guma, Indo-European for servant. In addition, children domesticate both men and women. In American cities the presence of children has become a "miner's canary" for social health; where we find children playing, there we find safety for ourselves. Consider how we feel in a potentially threatening neighborhood where two young males approach. There is a relief that comes from seeing them hand-in-hand with a young child. We recognize instinctively that males caring for children are not seeking violence.

Neighborhoods without fathers, by contrast, are seedbeds for predators. Without a female and a male who consider themselves responsible for children, the stable features of social continuity are not constructed. Without marriage, there are fewer relatives--fewer people to help when things go wrong, fewer people to set a moral example. Children are any society's greatest hope, at the same time that they are its greatest threat. Since citizenship, as with any art, is made and not born, children are the most consequential social investment. Bastards are undercapitalized.

And they die for it. Shakespeare's Timon shouts in his rage, "Spare not the babe ... think it a bastard ... and mince it sam remorse." This is not just a Western prejudice. In cultural contexts far removed the vulnerability of the bastard is a troubling theme. For the Nyakyusa of Tanzania, reports Monica Wilson, being illegitimate is dangerous. Nyakyusa ancestors jealously guard procreation, and must sanction childbirth. But if a man fails to legitimate his children, he is powerless to intercede for them when the ancestors cause disease. The agony for a father of bastards is that his negligence may kill them. Legitimate marriage is their protector, as it is ours.

Why do we marry? To have children, of course. But we marry not just to procreate, for children can come forth even without marriage. To the social scientist, the principal function of marriage is to legitimate the children born of the formal union. This turns out to be the only sufficiently comprehensive definition of marriage that anthropologists, confronting the enormous variety of human social forms, have found applicable to all of them. "Marriage is," as a famous manual of ethnography, Notes and Queries, proclaimed, "a union between a woman and a man such that the children born to that union are the recognized, legitimate offspring of both parties."

PATER VS. GENITOR

The legitimacy that comes from marriage is the source of an individual's social identity, and, conversely, the breakdown of marriage is an index of deep social alienation. Legitimacy is so important that in the English common law tradition, men and women were considered to be married after cohabiting for a number of years. Similarly, most cultures try to ensure that every child have a pater, a father who assumes full responsibility for the child, even if he is not the biological genitor who actually sired the child.

Among the Nayar of India, a woman takes several men to wed. Any one of them could be genitor, but only the man who performs the correct ceremony may be pater, or the one who functions in the role of father. The Nuer of the Sudan practice "ghost marriage," which enables a dead child to be a pater after his adult brothers take a wife in his name. They do this so that a patriline will not die out. The Nuer pater may even be a woman of property, who marries wives and "fathers" the children sired by others. Merely having a genitor in society is not enough, for without a pater, a child is not "recognized," nor "authorized" to receive his parent's property offices, or protection.

Here is the pertinent meaning of the "legitimacy" of children: Legitimacy is nothing more nor less than the orderly transfer of social meaning across the generations. Remember that children are the ultimate illegal aliens. They are undocumented immigrants to our world, who must be socialized and invested with identity, a culture, and an estate. By conferring legitimacy marriage keeps this process from becoming chaos.

So legitimacy is not just the concern of judgmental moralists, but a problem for every human group. This is true even in cultures where descent is traced matrilineally, as with the Hopi or Iroquois and many African peoples. All children born of the mother are legitimated through the mother's brother, the real lineage authority from whom they inherit. Children "belong" to the lineage and have additional filiation with their father's lineage. Matrilineal societies can tolerate a high incidence of divorce, but they cannot survive without marriage, for rules of exogamy integrate lineages into political communities. Without marriage, these societies fragment.

Traditional society is composed of only two kinds of people--relatives and strangers. The social world centers around kinship identities, and relatives are those with whom you work, worship, ally, sleep, play, and die. Kinsmen bear you, nurse you in illness, initiate you into adulthood, protect you from injustice, and bury you into the order of the ancestors.

To be a kinsman is to have a human identity; in the absence of kin relations, one is an alien and a potential threat. Often, one's "first name" may be unused in public life, for a kinship title suffices. A man may be known as Faisal Abu Abdullah, "father of Abdullah," or Graham MacGregor, "the son of Gregor," or Alexei Alexandrovich, "son of Alexander." The lifelong friend may be called "Uncle," to teach the children what he means to the family, while old men of the village become the "Grandfathers." Though the dominant pattern in the United States is for people to live among strangers, even American couples will call each other Mother and Father, "naming" themselves as the parents of children.

BADGES OF SOCIETY

Kinship terms are different than personal names. In reality, they are badges or insignia for various offices in society. Appropriate behaviors attach to them which are publicly known. Some terms we acquire by virtue of being born, but those which tie one family to another are constructed only by marriage.

The illegitimate cannot get a position in this system. Because bastards do not have an official status, relationships with them are not marked and choreographed as they are with kinsmen. Their kinship identity is amputated, as it were, and they, like the notorious "half-breeds" of the frontier, stand between two systems of family structure, not at home in either. In the best case, an illegitimate child can still have personal relations with biological relatives, as the research of Carol Stack showed for American black families in 1974. But these relationships are not with formal kinsmen, in the legal sense, and claims upon them are contingent and avoidable.

If, as Navajos say, acting humanely depends upon the presence of kinsmen, then we must have social ties to each other that involve public recognition. We see this need particularly in the contrast of genitor and pater. Sexuality is private. Generative acts are intimate acts, and hence the genitor may decline to acknowledge them. Marriages, however, are public cermonies, beginning with the "publishing of the Banns." The public enactment of becoming a pater makes the role hard to evade. In a private room one may make commitments to deity, to learning, or to a lover. But the ordination of a priest, the conferring of a baccalaureate, or the plighting of a pater make public acknowledgment of rights and duties.

Marriage is the act of creating formal kinsmen who are bound to help us, and the ceremony of marrying, itself, helps to create in us moral sentiments of commitment and formal responsibility. The absence of marriage is not only a major reason why single parents are found so often in poverty, but why their children so often become solitary victims and victimizers.

UPWARD NUBILITY

Children are served by legitimate marriage, but the adults involved are protected as well, especially the elderly. The Chinese aspiration for a son to provide security to the aged parent is a hope found throughout the world. Sons and daughters represent continuity with all the generations of a people, being the parent's duty to their past. The children in turn are tied to parents by bonds of reciprocity which repay the parents' sacrifice.

Moreover, marriage, which creates legitimate children, ties thereby whole families of people together into mutually supportive social and even political relationships, increasing the network of responsibility for the union and its children. As the royal houses of Europe knew, it is families and even nations that wed each other, and not just bride and groom. In fact, ambitious families often regard their young as a resource. Some may literally deploy their offspring in matchmaking, as has been found in history with the dowry. A substantial dowry allowed a girl to elevate her own and her family's status, creating "upward nubility." The dowry was a tactic that families used in the competition for social alliances, and children were regarded as valuable family resources. Parents guarded their daughter's virginity so as not to lose her marital value.

Where European and Hindu society used dowries to construct marital alliances, many traditional peoples used bridewealth, such as sending cattle to the bride's kin. "Cattle beget children" is a famous phrase of the Nuer of the Sudan. By suppressing bridewealth upon the advice of missionaries, colonial administrators found the family system disintegrating. Divorce rates became so high that they restored the practice.

Bridewealth established the legitimacy of children. "Cattle are where the children are not," say the Nuer. A child cannot be an heir unless the cattle have been paid. Once the bridewealth was paid, networks of trade and reciprocity between the marital kinsmen would commence. Significantly, bridewealth was involved in the stability of marriage. Amongst the Swazi of South Africa, the cattle were a security for the good behavior of both spouses. If the wife behaved badly, the husband would divorce her and demand the cattle back. Her kin would be reluctant, and would urge her to mend her behavior. But if the husband mistreated the wife, her family could refuse the return of cattle. Then his kin would pressure him to avoid losing both the wife and the cattle. As the value of bridewealth increases, so does the stability of marriage, since the payment is an insurance against divorce. By "investing in" the marriage materially, the families involved are also vested in the success of the marriage.

MARRIAGE ECONOMICS

By viewing marriage cross-culturally we learn that marriage is not simply a private matter. Marriage is everywhere, and it everywhere plays a central role in the political and economic life of a culture.

Every society contracts marital unions. Forest villagers such as the Yanomami of Brazil use marriage exchanges as alliances between villages in their constant warring politics. Marriage is pure diplomacy.

Pastoral herders such as the Nande people of East Africa allow young men to marry only after they have served society in the age-set of warriors, defending the camps. Marriage is a reward for social sacrifice.

Desert hunters and gatherers marry. For the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, a male youth is initiated into manhood after he kills a large game animal, then given a child bride shortly after by her parents, whom he must serve. Marriage is a recognition of economic productivity.

For the aboriginal Tiwi of North Australia, marriage involves the promise of daughters yet to be conceived, who are born already betrothed in a complex intergenerational balance.

Pacific island yam gardeners have marriage. In the Trobriands, chiefs alone are allowed many wives. With wives come obliged brothers-in-law, bringing harvests of yams. From this surplus chiefs construct feasts to feed the multitudes. Many wives make a chief great, since religious solidarity and "income redistribution" are accomplished through the instrumentality of marriage.

Hierarchic salmon fishers such as the Kwakiutl of British Columbia marry, making contracts for attaining wealth and status through potlatch ceremonies. A nobleman marries a woman to engage in a system of loans and trades between the families, regarding marriage as an institution of banking.

Marriages among the Inuit of Alaska show strikingly why poverty attends illegitimacy, because marriage networks shape the economic success of the couple. Inuit depend for survival upon a principle of reciprocity captured in their saying, "We store food in other people's stomachs." Through spouse-sharing, where a man and a hunting partner exchange wives, a child has two fathers and two mothers, dispersed across the hunting territory. A married couple has a doubled set of obligated parents helping in an emergency. In a society lacking a centralized state for social support, family means life.

From the elaborate formalities of the Japanese to the bargaining negotiations of Yemeni Arabs to the strict purity requirements of Hindu Brahmans, human beings are doing something essential when they marry. Though concubinage, "irregular" marriages, adultery, prohibited couplings, and nose-thumbing resistances to the norms are common the world over, the essential point is not the presence of deviance. Rather, it is the universality of the married state as an ideal for the human condition. The norm for social experience, the cultural target towards which behaviors tend and against which deviance is measured, is some form of morally sanctioned wedded state.

OBLIGATED KIN

Thus every society is threatened by the disappearance of legitimate marriage. Why threatened? What we are losing when we lose legitimate marriages are kinsmen, the necessary social relatives. Kinsmen are the formal actors of the moral order, bound to us by sanctions, duties, and rights that are legal, religious, and ethical. In place of that kinship role we are substituting the indifferent welfare state, now the official pater of vast numbers of children. Women may marry the state, as it were, and for family have case workers and judges.

American men and women today have many sources of personal identity and relationships other than family, of course. We construct ourselves in terms of work, or school, or church, or private associations. Yet it is patterns of kinship which most often cover us in our undertakings, provide us market opportunities, and even shield us from the importunings of the state. We do not hope to receive tuition, childcare, or a kidney from a business associate, but we do from relatives. Marriage is that device which extends to us a social security network of obligated kin. As such, marriages are political and economic affairs, and are regarded by most peoples of the world as far too important to be left in the hands of personal attraction. For many traditional cultures, marriage may contain romance, but the institution serves primarily to "arrange" the structure of society.

Marriage provides a kind of capital. Married couples, more than single parents, have parents and grandparents as a resource. House loans, emergency aid, car payments, cash gifts, and job opportunities come disproportionately from these relatives. Over one-fourth of all new home purchases depend upon gifts from parents. The gifts provided at a formal wedding assist a couple, as will the bestowal of an inheritance upon the eventual death of the parents. There is little question but that having four parents and eight grandparents attached to every marriage broadens the base of economic support, for us as for the Inuit.

But the plight of the single mother, isolated from kin, can be economically grim. One reason is the simple mathematics of relationship. With fewer people tied in a committed and socially-sanctioned way to the obligation of support, the single parent is hobbled from the beginning. Single parenthood that passes through more than one generation, from unwed mother to unwed daughter, results in an almost exponential collapse of the number of supporting relatives.

Note that when relatives make a capital investment in the couple, they have a material stake in their continuity. Land, housing, or family heirlooms might all get sacrificed on the bitter altar of divorce unless relatives take an active role in helping the marriage survive. Such material considerations are not more significant than the emotional investment people make in marital stability, but they provide an incentive to realize our normative duties.

SOCIAL CAPITAL

Marriage, seen cross-culturally, helps us understand urgent American problems, such as the spreading underclass. We should look to kinship. People in poverty lack social capital, or close personal ties. William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago says that strong networks are really "strategies of social mobility." Ghetto residents lack developed networks, and the few ties that are formed have "lesser social worth." How dire is the problem? Black Americans are twice as likely as other Americans to die waiting for kidney donors, says the Journal of the American Medical Association. Organ and blood donors are lacking in the black community, and the absence of networks of close kin, those with the closest physical "match," directly impairs the health of the impoverished.

Having a car helps in finding and keeping a job, but only 18 percent of what Mr. Wilson calls the "hyperghetto" have access to one. People with kin networks "branch out" and find support from relatives, who lend, repair, or help buy an automobile. The married, having more relatives, gain better access to transportation, and are more likely to have steady work. Lack of networks makes inner-city spatial isolation worse.

Mobility out of poverty depends on kinship ties. Sociologist Mark Testa and colleagues, working with the Urban Poverty and Family Structure Survey data, found marriages correlated with employment, because employed fathers are "two and a half times more likely than unemployed" to be married to the mother.

A focused comparison of poverty came from University of Chicago professor Marta Tienda's study of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans in the United States. Puerto Ricans have fallen behind, while Cubans have excelled, in spite of having the most social barriers--that is, more foreign-born who are also weaker in English. What are the Cuban advantages? More education, and a significantly higher percentage of legitimate marital relations.

The pattern is clear. Mercer Sullivan, a Columbia-trained anthropologist at the Vera Institute of Justice, compared three racially distinct inner-city neighborhoods, and found that jobs were located through "neighborhood-based and family-based personal networks." Kinship was even more important than schooling for finding work.

Mr. Sullivan found that fathers who married came from families in which the parents had been married. Males who will assume the responsibility of marriage, then, come from families that have legitimated them. Some genitors of illegitimate children still provided care to the extent that they were able. But not all; those who provided no care or support were those who became heavily involved in crime or drug use. They were known as fathers who had "stepped off" from their children. Mr. Sullivan reports that a strategy for young men evading child-support obligations was to live with families on AFDC, since they were then "automaticalls, excluded from child-support actions." The bastards.

Three social factors cluster together and contribute to mobility. Those who can escape the "hyperghetto" get high school educations, jobs, and marriages. Marriages are means of acquiring social capital, especially structures of kinship. Kinship structures are means of acquiring personal capital, the commitments and capacities to form successful social relationships. Having personal capital completes the circle, leading to education, jobs, and marital unions. In terms of social capital, being born legitimate is, in a revealing phrase, to be born with a "trust fund."

We see that there are two dimensions to the economic consequences of marriage. In the first, the assistance given by relatives provides a social stability to the marriage itself. Because an investment has been made, which might be lost at the dissolution of the marriage, relatives will both exert sanctions on the couple when they waver in commitment and offer support to them in times of stress. The second dimension is that being married strengthens the economic success of the family through the generations. We live in the context of three generations. In the general course of things, we do not borrow from our children. ("When a father gives to his son, both laugh," runs the Yiddish proverb, "but when a son must give to the father, both cry.") So the relevant number of supporting relatives branches upward. If we are married, we have four parents' estates to draw from, and that of eight grandparents. For single parents, perpetual impoverishment is their likely lot.

Marriages can be integrative for our society, if we will let them be. Individual marriages are the rivets of the social order, local-level attachments by which the whole structure is ultimately assembled. When a couple marries, they initiate a series of exchanges between two entire groups of people; that is, the relatives and friends on either side. Two pebbles, as it were, drop side by side into the pool of a community, and the ripples of celebration, concern, and obligation ring wide.

The point where the circles intersect is, of course, the union of the man and wife themselves. As the hand of the bride is grasped by the groom and captured by the ring, an umbilicus of contact is forged between two families. Through that conduit now established will flow gifts, loans, and business opportunities, advice, political alliances, love, sanctions, inheritances, and many children.

Marriage affiliations of this sort are not only horizontal, in the sense of bringing together parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, bridesmaids, and best men of proximate generations into a single gathering of social renewal. They are also vertical, in the sense that several generations of each family are bent into each other, as streams flowing down a hill, at the junction of the couple. Grandparents and parents, children and

David W. Murray is an anthropologist who most recently taught at Brandeis Univeristy. He is a Bradley Scholar at The Heritage Foundation. grandchildren, each set of which may constitute a separate nuclear unit with mate and offspring, are overlapped by the marriage of the present couple.

Multiple nuclear families with their distinct, and centrifugal, residences, attachments, and responsibilities, are imbricated into a structure of extended family. Over time, as the developmental cycle of the family is set in motion down through the generations, these separate reproductive pairs are woven and braided into strands of stability and resilience. The overall structure brought into being by marriage is called by anthropologists the "cognatic web," noting by that term the criss-crossing nature of social life.

OUR BEST ALLIES

Marriage links us to two sets of relatives who are our best allies. Moreover, to the extent that the families invest in us, their own interests, economic and social, become entwined with ours. Just as with the Swazi, the in-laws of our lives find many reasons for reenforcing and stabilizing the couple. Being married may even prove an insurance against abuse, since families exercise more leverage over the partners. Three remarkable things become one at a wedding: love, legitimacy, and property coalesce as social forces upon the legal union of man and woman.

Remember that kinship terms have a striking feature that first names and friendships do not. Kin terms are transitive; if someone is a Mother to my Wife, then that person becomes someone to me. Relationship, like electricity through a proper circuit, is conveyed through all of the nodes of family life. Sex with "friends," however, remains personal, not structure-building. Concubines of the Old Testament brought with them no attachments between the families. And what structure would emerge from same-sex unions is deeply unclear.

When a Husband acquires a Wife, however, he acquires, for better and for worse, all of the entangled wiring that constitutes her structural position as Daughter, Sister, Niece, Aunt, Granddaughter, Heiress, and obligated actress in the domestic rituals of matching, hatching, and dispatching. She, this multiple social "person," also brings into the relationship that complex of relatives "in-law," which we can acquire by no other route than by wedding. This entanglement is stabilizing not only in the life of the couple and their children but in the life of the neighborhood.

Such kinship figures are missing from the lives of the bastard. To be brought up without male authority in the household is a deficit. But what are most keenly missing from the lives of the impoverished, these spouse-less mothers and troubled children, are not just male authority figures, role models, or wage earners. Important though these are for the well-being of society, the absence of a genitor from the home is not the central loss.

What are missing from these families are Fathers and Husbands as well-defined social statuses. Many people, as it were, and not just one, are missing whenever a Father is absent, for Fathers bring Brothers, Uncles, Grandfathers, Sisters, and even Mothers-in-law. And it is this network of attachment and affiliation that finally enables Fathers, and not boyfriends, to transform bastards into Sons. In a home where there has never been a Father/Husband, there is, no matter how valiant and strong the Mother, a crippled unit, condemned to isolation from society's opportunities and to predation from society's brutal.

Boys and girls there may be, but in a sense that matters structurally, there are no Sons and Daughters. Only Mothers and Fathers can make Sons and Daughters, and even they are not alone sufficient to the task. "It takes the whole village to raise a child," runs the African proverb. And it takes an intact, and legitimate, marital union to raise moral and responsible progeny, whose lives are enriched by the structures of opportunity and stability provided therein. In some measure, if we find the fabric of society fraying, it is because we have hindered the weaving of the shuttle. Marriage is that moving shuttle which creates family bonds; as we are prone to say, it is the tying of a knot.

Fathers, much more than Mothers, are culturally contingent, and can disappear. Since we need paters, those men who care for the children, they must continually be remade by ceremonies of commitment. By marrying, we make our children legitimate, as they reciprocally make us safe. They will care for us no more than we have cared for them. This cycle of interrelationship can spiral upward as forcefully as it has spiralled downward. At the intersection of two domains of an individual's life, the moral realm and the social structural realm, stands the legal and ceremonial form of marriage, a hard-working device. To be "minced ... sans remorse" is the social fate of the underclass bastard, and not a few of them mete out as they have been meted.

THE ESSENTIAL WEB

This discussion of kinship, marriage, and the functioning of society has some general lessons. There are no simple dichotomies here that oppose economic analyses to moral ones. Rather, the two are interdependent in that moral commitments structure economic opportunity. Committed patterns of kinship behavior create in us moral feelings of attachment and integration. Feelings of attachment, in turn, structure our social networks of relationship. Concretely put, building a marriage will pattern positive behavior. This patterned behavior rebuilds in us moral commitments and shapes the personal capital of the future generation. Those with moral commitments are able to build social capital, through which they attain jobs and their own marriages. Producing illegitimate children pours both down the drain.

In the social ecology of the human species, marriages will appear wherever the soil and climate are favorable. Creating conditions for the appearance of such vital and valuable forms is perhaps the most effective, and the least intrusive, task of social engineering. Helping people to marry helps society to remake itself, to restore in each generation that delicate but essential web on which our humanness is enacted. As it stands now, the web is shredding, and through its widening holes plunge our own children. We shall surely follow.

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Author:	Murray, David W.
Publication:	Policy Review
Date:	Mar 22, 1994
Words:	4976
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Topics:	Illegitimacy Social aspects Marriage Social aspects