|
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
|
|
As Mary Kingsley well expressed it, "affection, with the savage, is not deeply linked with sex[1]". The emotional intensity of affection in the member of an individualistic society is the release of painfully inhibited reactions, an eagerly desired liberation from the strain of self-defence, watchfulness, and mistrustful antagonism which social life among "strangers" imposes.
Monogamic conditions arising from purely economic factors have given rise to monogamic sentiment, in which escape from strife, mistrust, and loneliness is sought in the affection of a trusted companion bound by the ties of common economic interests. The sentimental ideal of connubial union between life-long companions, which is held up as the ideal of sexual union in the exaltation of the paternal family, is in part realised by the long sharing of economic interests and the common battle against individualistic competition. The sentiment is, as in every other instance, the effect, and not, as has been represented, the cause of the economic relation.
When the paternal family became a medium for the consolidation and transmission of private property, marriage acquired a social significance which it did not previously possess. Social sanctions to sexual unions have reference in lower societies to the traditional tribal usages of exogamy and preferential mating. Terms such as "concubinage", "free love", "illegitimacy", are devoid of meaning except in reference to such breaches of tribal usage. Marriage ceremonies are absent and legitimacy does not depend upon them. Marriage becomes an important contract which has to be publicly registered, confirmed, and sanctified, only when important private property is involved. The word "sacrament", which was adopted by the Christian Church to denote sacredness, signified in current Roman legal parlance the sum of money put down as a stake in a court of law as a guarantee of good faith in the fulfilment of a contract[2]. From the earliest stages of propertied society, as in Polynesian society, down to Roman and early Christian society, the celebration of marriage with ceremonial ritual has been confined to the propertied classes. In Hawaii, for example, marriage was confined to chiefs. The bridal couple are in several countries expressly assimilated to a king and queen[3]. In the marriage ceremonials of peasants and poor people, the couple, tricked out in unwonted fancy dress, masquerade for the time being as aristocratic landowners. The sacramental sacredness of the union derives from its original
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 375. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/57&oldid=- (Version vom 9.6.2022)
