The outcomes of the activities comprise the functions of marriage institution.
1. Fulfillment of Bio-psychic needs: The activities involved in marriage fulfill biopsychic needs. The Biological needs are the sexual and reproductory needs. The psychological needs include companionship and the desire to have children. The fulfillment of biopsychic needs paves way for the perpetuation of society.
2. Creation of New families: Marriage creates new families because families are not self-sufficient units. Functions of marriage Obvious representatives of the families join together and create a new family for the mutual benefit of its members – not just the husband and wife but also any children who may be born to or adopted by them. The new grouping usually provides each member with basic needs, such as food and shelter; a socially approved role; and in the case of children, protection, nurture, and enculturation.
3. Specifies rights and responsibilities: Marriage customs are amazingly diverse but in every society marriage creates certain rights and responsibilities for married pair, and often for their families too. At a minimum, marriage establishes that a husband is a legal father of his wife’s children, and she is the legal mother of her husband’s children; that the husband and wife each have sexual monopoly over the Other that the couple have either partial or monopolistic rights to the fruits of each other’s labor; that each has partial or total rights over property belonging to the other; and that a joint fund of property is established for the benefit of the children of the marriage.
Functions of marriage These rights and responsibilities are common to almost all kinds of marriage everywhere in the world. Given such near universality, everywhere the matter of who can have sex with whom is clearly spelt out; everywhere the care of the young is made since human babies and children cannot survive themselves; and everywhere the work of men and women and the property that this work has given is divided up in some suitable way. Marriage helps to solve these problems.
4. Creates alliances: Everywhere marriage creates ties between the affines of a married pair. These ties serve subsistence, political, legal , economic and social functions, to the mutual benefit of everyone concerned, In simple societies, everyone needs to call on some group of people for help. A large group of relatives oblige to help.
- One common affinal obligation is to provide affines with subsistence necessities. For example, gifts of food might be required at the time of marriage, a birth , a death or other occasions. Functions of marriage The custom is highly functional. If one affinal group has suffered a poor harvest but its partner group living in another region has not, gifts of food may tide the hungry group over its period of famine.
- Affines may also be considered to perform essential ritual services for one another. For example: among the Riudi of Indonesia, wife-givers are considered the source of life and spiritual well-being, A man with a long-term illness may move into the house of one of his class wife-givers and place himself symbolically under the spiritual protection of the ancestor of his wife-giver, and stay there until he recovers (Forth 1981: 292). By contrast, wife takers are associated with death , if someone dies away from home, “his claims wife takers may be ‘ called upon to transport the corpse’* (Forth1981:291). Functions of marriage These customs show how descent, marriage, religion and symbols come together in a thoroughly holistic way in Riudi society.
- Another common obligation of affines is mutual defense. For example, among the Tetum of Indonesia, there was inter-class warfare. In such matters not only the class members but also the affines joined in the defence effort.
- Strong affinal alliances perpetuate alliances across generations. For example, exogamy favours such alliances.
- Strong affinal alliances preserve a religious or ethnic tradition or ethnic identity functions of marriage.
- Affinal alliances are so important that when they break down as many occur with modernization, the consequences can be as extreme as they are unexpected. For example, in the New Guinea Highlands before contact with the outside world, stone axe heads were made by tribes living where suitable stones were available, and inter- regional trade saw to them their distribution. At the same time, intertribal marriages created affinal links that made trade easier between these groups. But after steel axes were introduced from the west, local production of stone axes ceased , AS trade declined, so did the opportunities to contract marriages and create affinal ties between tribes, the network of affinal ties decayed, and conflict and full-scale warfare increased(Podelefsky 1984:85)
5. Allocates goods and services: Marriage involves the transfer of goods and services among husband, a wife and members of their families(Goody and Tambiah: 1973).
The goods and services may be distributed at the time of marriage or part of a continuing process that lasts as long as the marriage does. Anthropology use the’ terms bride-wealth, bride service and dowry to distinguish among the goods and services thus distributed In bride-wealth, property is transferred from a groom’s family to his bride’s at marriage. Bride-service is an arrangement in which a son-in-law is obliged to work for his father-in-law for the loss of his daughter’s services. Dowry is goods given by bride’s family to the family of her groom.