Abstract
The difficulty of grasping the peculiarity of one’s culture from within is overcome by taking a cultural distance. David Maillu, a Kenyan author, deciphers for us imposed Western monogamy from the viewpoint of a polygynous culture. He shows that the secretive wife-plus-mistress system is in the West a concealed equivalent of African polygyny, except that in the wife-plus-mistress model, the mistress’ children are bastards deprived of their birth-status rights, and their mothers are judged as disreputable women. Each year, large numbers of children are made social pariahs for life. Where polygyny is allowed, such social evils do not exist. All children are born legitimate, their mothers respected as official spouses. This chapter then explores the origins of imposed monogamy. It is not an idea from Jesus or the first Christian converts, who were diasporic Jews for the most part. It is hypothesized that it was imposed by second- to third-century Gentile converts safeguarding a core value of the Greco-Roman and Indo-European Pagan religion. While late Rome allowed for a monogamous marriage to be combined with legal concubinage, the Christian Church gradually delegitimized all possibilities of concubinage in addition to marriage, and by the 1500s even monogamous concubinage. Thus arose the wife and secret mistresses practices. Maillu’s critique of that system’s evils is further detailed. His exotopy makes monogamy look abnormal, not to be taken for granted. Nonetheless, Maillu’s analysis is now dated. Starting in the 1970s, granting equal birth-status rights to all illegitimate children has inadvertently made true polygamy possible in many parts of the West, alongside monogamy.
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Notes
- 1.
Conjunction is borrowed from eighteenth-century French legal vocabulary. Conjonction was then the term used to designate any mating between a man and a woman. On occasions, when the conjonction was illicit, the text qualified the word conjonction by adding an adjective such as in conjonction réprouvée (see “De la Bâtardise”, in Dictionnaire de Droit et de Pratique par M. Claude-Joseph de Ferrière, doyen des docteurs-régens de la Faculté des droits de Paris, et ancien avocat au Parlement, 2 tomes, Paris: chez Savoye, 1762; in Livres des sources médiévales at: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/french/batard.htm (retrieved Dec. 16, 2008)). In its primary meaning conjonction remains neutral as to whether the union is legitimate or illegitimate. It merely refers to the action de se conjuguer (from which stem conjugal and conjugial in English), de se joindre, and de s’unir physiquement. Licensed spouses live in complete conjunction, as do unmarried lovers and gay couples (seeTrésor de la langue Française at: http://atilf.atilf.fr/dendien/scripts/tlfiv4/showps.exe?p=combi.htm;java=no (retrieved Dec. 9, 2011). In English, conjunction may retain the French meaning (see “ Male and Female Created He Them,” by Rev. Dr. Erik E. Sandstrom, at: http://lastchurch.com/index1/maleandfemale.doc (retrieved Dec. 18, 2008)).
- 2.
Rabbenu Gershom ben Judah was born at Metz in 960 and died in Mainz in 1028 or 1040 depending on the sources. See Rabbenu Gershom ben Judah and Polygamy in www.JewishEncyclopedia.com (1901–1910 edition).
- 3.
Greer Fay Cashman, Why not Mr… & Mrs… & Mrs…? Jerusalem Post, Apr 3, 2006.
- 4.
Saint Augustine, Of the Good of Marriage (Translated by Rev. C.L. Cornis), Chap. 7. See http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
- 5.
According to Goody (1985), the categories of mistress and bastard were devised by the Church so that when childless couples passed away without legitimate heirs their estate would go to the Church. To preserve the late Roman concubinage system would have put the Church in competition with the children of mistresses defined as legitimate heirs. In so doing, writes Goody, the Church sought to maximize the number of estates, bequests or legacies it inherited each year. The Church devised other institutions to reach the same ends: the prohibition of adoption, of divorce, of endogamy, and so on. Summarized as simply as possible, Goody’s argument makes the Church look quite callous, but readers are encouraged to read his analysis for details.
- 6.
“Sacrament of Marriage.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. At: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09707a.htm (retrieved Dec. 17, 2011). This is why, up to the end of World War II, Jewish marriages were recognized only as mere concubinage in some Catholic countries such as Poland. In the eyes of the Polish State, all Jewish children were systematically declared to be illegitimate ( unehelich). They could bear only their mothers’ last names and had no legal fathers. They could be legitimized afterwards but as the fees were exorbitant for simple villagers in a shtetl, most Jewish parents never bothered to change either their children’ illegitimate status or their own (Mendelsohn 2007: 89).
- 7.
“Are divorced people permitted to receive Holy Communion?” The diocese of Lincoln. At http://www.dioceseoflincoln.org/purple/divorce/index.htm#4. “Today there are numerous Catholics in many countries who have recourse to civil divorce and contract new civil unions . . . The Church maintains that a new union cannot be recognized as valid, if the first marriage was. If the divorced are remarried civilly, they find themselves in a situation that objectively contravenes God’s law. Consequently, they cannot receive Eucharistic communion as long as this situation persists . . . Reconciliation through the sacrament of Penance can be granted only to those who have repented for having violated the sign of the covenant and of fidelity to Christ, and who are committed to living in complete continence.” In Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part Two: The Celebration of the Christian Mystery, Section Two: The Seven Sacraments of the Church, Chapter Three: The Sacraments at the Service of Communion, Article 7: The Sacrament of Matrimony, V. the Goods and Requirements of Conjugal Love, point 1650. Web access at: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c3a7.htm(retrieved Dec. 11, 2008).
- 8.
Some Inuit languages include several different kinship terms to designate ex-spouses; French and English only have “my ex.” They should perhaps develop a more sophisticated terminology expressing gender differences, order of separation, and so on.
- 9.
In cases of incestuous marriages, bigamy, etc., prohibiting all divorces created problems for the Church. As divorce was not allowed, the Church had no choice but to twist its own semantics and it treated all illegal unions as null and void from the initial first step made during the wedding ceremony. In other words, it preferred to establish that one of its religious sacraments was automatically stripped of any divine sanction if it had been used to consecrate an impossible union.
- 10.
These various laws were passed on January 3, 1972 (on parentage or filiation); January 8, 1993 (on children’ rights); November 15, 1999 (solidarity pact between couple not legally married); Dec 3, 2001 (surviving spouse’s and adulterine children’s rights); March 4, 2002 (parental authority); March 4, 2002 and June 18, 2003 (family name); May 26, 2004 (divorce); July 4, 2005 (ordinance on parentage or filiation); Loi no 2009-61 du 16 janvier 2009 ratifiant l’ordonnance no 2005–759 du 4 juillet 2005 portant réforme de la filiation, abrogeant et modifiant diverses dispositions relatives à la filiation.
- 11.
Bauman available at: http://www.bishopaccountability.org/decisions/2011_11_23_BC_Supreme_Court_C_1588_Re_Section_293_Criminal_Code.htm(retrieved March 11, 2013).
- 12.
Berger available at: http://books.google.ca/books?id=iklePELtR6QC&pg (retrieved Dec. 2, 2011).
- 13.
- 14.
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Legros, D. (2014). Monogamy? Exoticizing a 3,000-Year-Old Pre-Christian Western Tradition. In: Mainstream Polygamy. SpringerBriefs in Anthropology(), vol 2. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8307-6_2
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