Section 3. Outlining, Marriage Customs.
Today we are going to look at the social custom of marriage from a sociological point of view. All societies make provisions for who may may mate with whom.

The benefits of the social recognition of marriage for children are obvious. It gives them identity, membership of a socially recognized group and some indication of who must support them and their mother.

Now then, all societies have marriage, but there are wide variation in marriage systems. I'll give three of the important areas of variation and some details of each area.

The three areas I shall deal with are, firstly, the number of mates each marriage partner may have, secondly, the locality of the marriage that is, where do the newly married partners set up home? and thirdly, what arrangements there are for the transfer of wealth after the marriage. Let me deal with each of these in turn.

First, how many mates? In existing human societies, there are three possibilities, most societies recognize polygyny, that's spelled P-O-L-Y-G-Y-N- Y, polygyny, or the right of a man to take more than one wife.

In a few societies, not in Africa, there is Polyandry, that's spelled P-O-L-Y-A-N-D-R-Y, Polyandry, in which a woman is married to two or more men at the same time.