Review of Marriage Types and Childhood Familiarity Theory (17/11)

Recap on Previous Lecture Content

Hints at continuing the exploration of the universality of the incest taboo.
Discussed inbreeding theory, citing previous research, such as Edward Westermarck's childhood familiarity theory, which posits that close childhood relationships lead to desexualized feelings among peers.

Melford Spiro, an influential figure in anthropology, and his student Yonina Talmon studied kibbutzim in Israel, focusing on the impact of communal child-rearing on relationship dynamics.
Kibbutzim are intentional agrarian communities founded shortly after the establishment of the Israeli state, aimed at creating a new form of communal living following the trauma of the Holocaust.
- The motivation was to build a more harmonious, less competitive society to avoid the social issues that led to the atrocities of World War II.
In these communities, children were raised collectively, fostering a sense of community rather than individual familial ties.

Spiro and Talmon aimed to determine if children raised together in a kibbutz environment would exhibit the same desexualization of relationships as siblings.
Their longitudinal study discovered that none of the 125 married couples sampled were products of the same child-rearing group.
- This indicated that the childhood familiarity theory applied and that individuals tend to avoid romantic relationships with those with whom they share significant past experiences.

The dynamic within the kibbutz showed that social context, rather than genetic relation, plays a significant role in relationship development and mating preferences.
The concept of "familiarity breeds contempt," demonstrated that growing up with peers reduced interest in romantic involvement, as adolescents preferred strangers.
This phenomenon aligns with observations made in primate studies, wherein familiarity within groups led to conflicts, opting instead for relationships with outsiders.

Discusses a cultural custom known as [T’ung Yang His], which involves girls from poorer families being raised within wealthier families as future daughters-in-law.
Arthur Wolf's work in Taiwan (1968) examined the implications of this practice on relationship dynamics and mating patterns.
Findings revealed that being raised together as child and future spouse could lead to similar desexualization as observed in other studies, thus affecting the viability of such matrimonial arrangements.

Emphasizes that experiences during early childhood play a significant role in shaping adult relational patterns.
Wolf found that marriages formed from shared childhood experiences produced significantly fewer offspring and a higher likelihood of infidelity and divorce, supporting the childhood familiarity theory.