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In American culture, according to Schneider, sexual intercourse is “exclusive to and distinctive of the husband-wife relationship”. Schneider knows full well that sexual intercourse as behavior occurs outside of marriage, but his point is that it never occurs outside of the marital context. In an important footnote Schneider supports his contention and demonstrates the broad scope of husband-wife sexuality in defining the impropriety, illegitimacy, and immorality of other forms of sexual activity:
Sexual intercourse between persons who are not married is fornication and improper; between persons who are married but not to each other is adultery and wrong; between blood relatives is incest and prohibited; between persons of the same sex is homosexuality and wrong; with animals is sodomy and prohibited; with one’s self is masturbation and wrong; and with parts of the body other than the genitalia themselves is wrong. All of these are defined as “unnatural sex acts” and are morally, and in some cases, legally, wrong in American culture.
With this reasoning Schneider could define the symbolic system of American kinship, consisting of and in terms of the central symbol of sexual intercourse. In later publications Schneider widened his study to additional cultural domains grounded in the same symbolic process.
Schneider’s argument allows a cultural approach to such topics as adultery. If we expand upon Schneider’s argument, we learn that adultery is wrong because it extends to outsiders the order of law, which unites individuals through marriage. Americans also reckon relatives through tracing “blood” ties. The conjugal love of marriage is opposed in the cultural system by the cognatic love between persons related “by blood.” Schneider points out that the product of conjugal love provides the actors who partake of the “blood” relationship. Sexual intercourse, therefore, is instrumental and symbolic in both conjugal and cognatic love.
Adultery, in this analysis, breaks the symmetry and threatens the entire system. Because it is a pivotal symbol, sexual intercourse outside of marriage not only threatens that marriage but threatens personal relationships defined by the “blood” with which it is dynamically associated. Note that the epithet “homewrecker” used to disparage the proverbial “other woman” refers to the total damage done to relations defined both by blood and by law.
Of particular interest to anthropologists are the arrangements of polygamous marriages. Herskovits was somewhat surprised to find that Dahomean polygynyous marriages were not necessarily tense or jealousy-arousing. Cooperative co-wives make adjustments among themselves, should a husband’s four-day cohabitational visit coincide with a wife’s menstrual cycle. She will exchange places in the rotation with a co-wife and not be deprived. Herskovits concludes: “In essence, the great mass of Dahomean matings, either because of complacency, or of human ability to make the best of a situation, are permanent ventures which in terms of human adjustment cannot be called failures”.
Schapera, reporting on the Kgatla, is not as impressed with the way the system works for them, finding jealousy, suspicion and unhappiness among a Kgatla’s many wives. His conclusion differs from Herskovits’s: “Many women grow reconciled and manage to lead a tolerable existence with husbands who are not unduly inconsiderate, others find some sort of relief by being unfaithful themselves, and some are acutely miserable”.
We have a similarly indefinite perspective from the literature on polyandry. Linton reports that jealousy among co-husbands in the polyandrous Marquesas was considered “very bad manners”. This report is contradicted, however, by Suggs, who reports that “sexual jealousy is, and was, pronounced in the Marquesas”.
Little light will be shed on the topic of jealousy in marriage, plural or otherwise, unless some consideration is given to the larger context provided by native conceptions and explanations. One start in this direction is offered by Firth who finds that among the Tikopia, jealousy is something engendered by marriage and is a natural extension of the marital relationship:
Jealousy is a definitely recognized type of behavior in Tikopia, characterized by a special linguistic expression, masaro. It is particularly evident in newly-married people, the natives say, and they regard it as a kind of accompaniment to the recently-wedded state. One of the young pair excites jealousy of the other . . . [Firth asks, "Over what?"] We don’t know; there it is, the co-habitation of a newly-married pair. They dwell together, they become jealous.
For the Tikopians, jealousy is an expectable part of marriage, especially in its earlier stages. It stems from the marriage and not from the predispositions of either mate, either to incite jealousy by behaving in certain ways or to become jealous easily because of personality.
As might be expected, people in various societies seek evidence to substantiate their suspicions of infidelity about a marital partner. Evidence may be as highly conspicuous as the love scars Trukese inflict upon one another (Gladwin and Sarason), or as subtle as a change in eating habits, as among the Tapirape (Wagley). Tapirape men are known to get ill if they eat soon after an adulterous tryst, so a woman would know if her husband had been adulterous if he should eat sparingly on mornings. A recognizable footprint or buttock-print left in the forest surrounding a Mehinaku village can spell trouble for an adulterous couple (Gregor). Suspicious Dobuan men will time their wives when they leave the compound to urinate or defecate. Extremely suspicious husbands will insist on accompanying their wives to the bush just to make certain (Fortune). Tapirape husbands carefully watch the fathers of newborn infants, for these men are liable to consort with other men’s wives, owing to the postpartum sexual prohibition which denies them access to their own (Wagley).
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