The Significance of Marriage and Family in Society - Essay Sample

Introduction

Marriage, as an institutionalized relationship within the family system, has great significance for the well-being of an individual. Marriages create families, and these families create societies that make the human race. However, communities around the world reveal significant differences in the cultural understanding of the function of marriage and the family. Fundamentally, some of the functions of the family include fulfilling basic human needs like carrying out parental roles, providing for children, moderating sexuality, and passing of property and knowledge from generation to another.

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Although there are variations from one cultural set-up to the other, rights, responsibilities, statuses, and roles of members of a family, seem to be cut clearly across the cultures. As is seen in titles given to members of the family like 'father' or 'mother' and 'grandmother,' they define how a person fits in a family and obligations they have to others; and the behaviors expected of the individuals bearing them since these titles are culturally designed.

Rules of Marriage and How They Change Around the World

Marriage, as an institutionalized relationship within the family system, performs vital roles for society. Rules govern society in various ways. In society, marriage fulfills many functions attributed to the family in general, which earns it the title of a basic unit of society. Therefore, just like any other social institution, some rules govern marriage. In most cultures, these rules are unwritten. Anthropologists look at these rules as 'status' and 'roles,' which keep changing within cultures over time (Brown, Gonzalez, & McIlwraith, 2017). For example, a few decades ago, in the United States of America, roles associated with the title "mother" in a classic Euro-American family comprised of caring for children and keeping the house, while 'father' worked for wages outside the home. Today, it is more common for the 'father' to be an equal spouse in giving care to the children.

Kinship

The concept of kinship describes customarily recognized links amongst members of a family. It includes the status and role of family members as designed by culture. It encompasses relationships made by blood or marriage connections. When the links are through blood like ones created between parents and offspring, they are known as consanguineal (Brown et al., 2017). Links created through marriage bonds such as in-laws are called affinal. Kinship may also comprise of people that lack formal blood or marriage ties, in exceptional cases like adoption. For example, in the U.S., adoptive parents are customarily acknowledged as parents to the youngsters they bring up even if they do not share blood relations. However, this does not mean that the bonds amongst mothers and children are weak. The other way of forming kinship is of bilateral descent members from the father's side as well as those from the mother's side define the family. It is a popular culture in the U.S., whereby children identify their father's as well as the mother's family members as relatives.

Race and Ethnicity

Whenever the word race is used to refer to humans, an extensive range of feelings, including uneasiness, fear, defensiveness, rage, and insecurity, are invoked in most people. The terms race and ethnicity have some degree of overlap in terms of meaning. They are used interchangeably as synonyms. In fact, both race and ethnicity draw on identification centered on shared ancestry and common cultural traits (Brown et al., 2017). Technically, they are associated with one's heritage, 'subjectively' though. The subjective approaches vary significantly from one person to another and from situation to situation.

Physical appearances lead to assumptions that one's race is "black," "Indian," "white," "Puerto Rican," or "Hispanic," or "Latino." The tendency is so deeply engrained in social believes that an individual's racial or ethnic background is quite apparent and simply obtained from momentary glances and can be used to tell somebody's culture, personality, or behavior, a condition anthropologists call 'racial commonsense.' However, the reality is far more sophisticated. Ethnic or racial background can never be precisely determined based on physical attributes, and a person's "race" will never automatically regulate their "culture" (Brown et al., 2017). Individuals vary in terms of physical and genetic features such as hair texture, skin color, and eye shape. Still, those discrepancies cannot be used as standards to classify racial groups with logical accuracy biologically.

The historic conception that "races" are explicit divisions of humans who share given physical and biological characteristics that distinguish them from other sets of humans is thus misleading. The reality is that human skin color, as a continuous attribute, exists as a spectrum from very dark to very light with so many possible shades, hue, and tone in between. Therefore, skin color cannot be used as a conclusive indicator of racial precincts. If it were the case, there could be a correspondence between skin color and other features like lactose intolerance and blood type. So, race does not mirror biological traits, but socially constructed concepts that are concluded subjectively by cultures to reveal concepts of division that are professed to be more worthy than others.

The anthropologists, who study epidemiology, human evolution, and genetics, explain that biological human races have never existed. Such embrace notions that ethnic and racial groupings are culturally created rather than natural, biological classes of humanity and realization that the present ethnic and racial groupings that exist in the United States today, for example, do not certainly reveal classifications used in other nations. Nevertheless, race and ethnicity continue being used as excuses for exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice well into the twenty-first century. However, cultural anthropologists are playing a fundamental role in informing society how the notion of race originated, and it's shifting over time.

Comprehending the sophisticated nature of clines and constant biological human variation, along with a consciousness of the divergent ways in which race and ethnicity have been created in diverse cultures, will enable people to recognize ethnic and racial labels not as self-evident natural classes of humans, but instead as socially formed groupings that vary cross-culturally.

Gender and Sexuality

Anthropologists believe that culture is designed. Culture has diverse forms in diverse places at different times. Sexuality and gender are intensely embedded in and shaped by culture. It is culture that puts humans in two groupings, "male" and "female." Therefore, human sexuality, instead of being solely natural, is culturally substantial, shaped, symbolic, and regulated (Brown et al., 2017). Gender has a biotic element, unlike other forms of cultural creations. Humans have bodies with male-female variances, including procreative capacities.

However, philosophies that go with being male-born or female-born are extensively generated by culture. Interestingly, something which might be seen as "man's work" in one culture, like ferrying weighty loads, or setting up a shelter for the family, can be a "woman's work" elsewhere. Among the Aka of the Central African Republic, for example, fathers enjoy closer, intimate relations with newborns, play critical roles in all aspects of infant-care, and can occasionally produce breast milk. Therefore, gender is a combination of socially designed expectations which institutes a role one should assume, learn, and perform, more or less willfully.

Gender Binary and Why Anthropology Disagrees With It

It is a common assumption that societies all over the globe group persons in only two genders, male and female. Dividing human beings into only two genders is what is referred to as gender binary. However, Anthropology disagrees with this phenomenon. In fact, anthropologists have identified some cultures which are much flexible and fluid on matters of gender. The cultures are said to embrace people adopting 'the other gender' or even generating more genders whereby persons are free to choose where they wish to belong.

Cultures such as these are said to have a non-binary gender structure. A famous instance of such a structure is one existing amongst the Hijra community of India (Brown et al., 2017). They are referred to as the third gender. Having being born male, the Hijra embrace female characteristics and avoid desiring sex as they pursue divine powers through rituals. Some even undergo rebirth in an exercise known as "nirvana," where genitals are eliminated (Brown et al., 2017).

Through research, anthropologists have also revealed that there exist persons known as intersex. Intersex people have equivocal genitals. Therefore, anthropologists disagree with the idea of gender binary on the informed ground since some cultures have gone further to offer more gender categories. In fact, in some societies, persons assume gender roles that correspond with the opposite sex.

Due to external forces like globalization and mass media, colonialism and immigration, cultures are prone to revolution. Gender prospects also differ as one age or change their social roles, even inside the family. For example, in this era where single parents are a common phenomenon, mothers are taking roles of fathers and vice versa. Therefore, as much as people strive conforming to cultural expectations, they still find means of bypassing or ignore them. Even in exceptionally sexually segregated, patriarchal society, females who are determined to follow their dreams to become pilots and other male-dominated professions, have achieved their goals in spite of limitations by gender binary cultures.

Common Characteristics Shared by All Religions

In all religions, people have always pondered over fundamental questions like 'What is life? Which forces control the universe?' Ideologies about some supernatural form in control seem to be innate across all cultures. Research has revealed that a long time ago, the dead were buried with some items that suggest they were preparing the dead for an afterlife. Although many communities have no word for "religion," their habits exhibit a form of faith in some supernatural being (Brown et al., 2017).

Many religions encompass ideologies that can be termed as "magical," though the connection between the two is sophisticated. Religious beliefs meet psychological needs. Sacrifices and rituals are known to reduce anxiety in several cultures. Sanctified items or ideologies are regarded with pronounced reverence, while irreligious substances or ideologies are usual and are treated with indifference. Sanctified things consist of gods, an animal, or some natural phenomenon. Karl Marx termed religion as "the opium of the people" (Brown et al., 2017). He observed that religion is an idea, a way of reasoning defending disparities of power against status. Sigmund Freud, on the other hand, called religion an organization preventing people from actualizing their deeply manifested appalling desires.

Hinduism observes a cow as esteemed and treats it with reverence because it is tender, and its fertility is associated with some Hindu gods. In India, however, cows have more value alive than dead. From providing milk to working in the farms, cows are so important in human existence. For this cause, they are regarded as sanctified not to be slaughtered for food.

Varieties of beliefs exhibited across several religions around the world share common features. The first element is called cosmology. It is the attempt to explain the origin of the universe and all it entails. Cosmologies across all religions offer...