Federal government minister Eric Abetz is concerned that a move to marriage equality would be offensive to Australia’s Asian neighbours.
‘How many Asian countries have redefined marriage?’ he recently asked.
The answer is ‘none’, but this is not as clear-cut as it seems. In fact, across Asia the definitions of marriage are many and varied.
Abetz believes that marriage, defined in Australian law as ‘a union between a man and a woman,’ is an institution that has existed for a millennia in a single form – a belief he assumes is universally accepted in Asia.
His comments express a common objection of those opposed to marriage equality – that a change in the definition of marriage would disrupt an institution fundamental to human society.
This view holds that marriage is a ‘natural’ institution entered into for the purpose of procreation, and that it always takes the form of a union between a man and a woman. ‘Gay marriage’, in this view, threatens to usher in families based in same sex marriages where children are brought up by two mothers or two fathers, rather than the ‘natural’ heterosexual pair of the conjugal family.
A basic anthropological definition of marriage is : ‘An institutionalized form of a relationship in which sexual relationships and parentage legitimately take place’. While all historical and existing human societies have established practices for the ordering of sexual expression and child-rearing, anthropological evidence shows us the actual arrangements are many and varied. They by no means always take the form of the heterosexual conjugal pair. This anthropological definition highlights what marriage equality proponents are arguing for: the formal institutionalisation of the sexual relationships same-sex couples enter into, and the legitimisation of their rights to be parents.
But what about marriage in Asia? The constituent cultures of our Asian neighbours have numerous ways of legitimating sexual relationships and of nurturing children.
They don’t all take the form of a sanctified relationship between a man and a woman and the nuclear family.
The case that has intrigued generations of anthropology students is the Nayar people of Malabar India where, in the words of one scholar, the nuclear family is ‘nowhere to be seen’.
Traditionally, women lived in their birth families with their brothers, who were also guardians of their children. The women could take as many as twelve lovers and the children thus conceived were the offspring that provided the continuation of the clan.
Closer to home, in Java, divorce rates have been high and it has been the practice for children to stay with the mother (often in her parents’ home). On remarriage, the new husband accepts his responsibilities for his wife’s children.
This kind of ‘matrifocality’, where mothers and their children are the fundamental enduring units, is not unique to Java. In Bali, married sons and their wives live in the family house compound where all members of the household nurture the children.
History teaches us that arrangements for regulating sexuality and parenting are always changing. In the European cultural tradition, the version of marriage as we now know it is a relatively recent phenomenon. Marriage contracts emerged as a way of securing property and inheritance. For the ‘lower classes,’ marriage was a matter of consent, and did not necessarily result in husband and wife co-habiting. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the churches became increasingly involved in regulating marriage, and the common form of marriage emerged in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer in 1549. In the case of Australia, the Marriage Act 1961 was altered as recently as 2004 to include the definition: ‘Marriage means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life’. Prior to the 2004 revision, the Act did not include a definition of marriage, with the definition based in common law.
So what is the importance of marriage as a social institution? Social psychologist Jessie Bernard wrote in the 1970s that the high rate of divorce in the US at the time did not suggest a decline in the importance of marriage. Rather, the institution was so important to providing a refuge from an impersonal, modern industrial society that, if it wasn’t working, it needed to end in order for people to find new partners.
From this point of view, same-sex marriage equality is a logical development in the modern world. People who find their intimate other as a same-sex partner wish to have this significant relationship recognised and valorised.
In the weeks leading up to the cascade of same sex marriages conducted in the Australian Capital Territory in 2013, before the Territory’s marriage equality legislation was struck down by the High Court as unconstitutional, many of the most vocal advocates for marriage equality were the parents of gay Australians. This was also the case in the recent successful referendum for constitutional change to recognise same sex marriage in Ireland.
These parents eloquently express a desire for their children to be able to stand up in front of the people who care for them and profess their commitment, and have this commitment socially acknowledged.
This line of thinking would be highly familiar to many of our Asian neighbours.
Even with the phasing out of arranged marriages in many Asian cultures, marriage is understood to be as much a uniting of two families as it is a union of two ‘souls’.
Many of the countries to our north embrace individuals who do not conform to a binary model of gender difference, in particular men who cross-dress and even live out their lives as women (in some instances, their ambiguity makes them ideally placed to supplicate sacred beings). This tolerance has not been tested in changes to marriage law, but we cannot assume that our Asian neighbours have an iron-clad commitment to the ‘naturalness’ of heterosexual relations.
Even in Australia, marriage is not a static concept. The Whitlam government’s introduction of the Family Law Act 1975, which allowed no-fault divorce, liberated Australia from a lot of problems resulting from the union.
The difficulties of exiting an unhappy marriage were associated with adultery and also bigamy, as people left spouses and contracted new ‘marriages’ that were not legal but were socially acknowledged (much like the way marriages had been contracted in the past). It was not uncommon for married men to have long-term mistresses. This change, which made divorce far more socially acceptable, exemplifies the kinds of changes in state regulation of marriage that respond to social changes in the way we order our personal lives.
In Indonesia, public discussion about marriage currently revolves around whether or not inter-faith marriage is allowed under the marriage law. This reflects a broader change in society from arranged to free-choice marriage.
Marriage is a social institution redolent with cultural meaning. Like all social institutions, it is constantly being transformed along with the broad swathe of social, economic political and cultural changes that are a constant feature of human history.
Kathryn Robinson is based in the School of Culture, History and Language at ANU. This article is from ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
