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Answer Questions (Session 9)

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Using your own words, provide short answers for the following questions. You may use your book to help you understand, but write your own interpretation and give examples from your own culture (20 points).




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Give Short Answers to the Following Questions:

1. What is marriage? Why the focus on both the sexual and economic aspects of it?

2. Compare bride price to the concept of dowry. Give examples of societies that use each and describe the benefits of both. What kind of gift exchange occurs in US marriages?

3. Describe and compare the family-disruption theory with the cooperation theory for an explanation of the incest taboo. What are the problems with the theories?

4. How does marriage help in the sharing of the products of their labor? Why is marriage important to infants and children?

5. Describe the differences between polyandry, polygyny, and polygamy? Why does polygyny occur more frequently than polyandry? What are the benefits of polygyny? Why do you think one is described as having multiple wives and the other as brothers sharing a sister?

6. Describe a matrifocal family. Why do you think the matrifocal family is increasing in the United States? How can they survive?

7. Describe the major reasons for marriage. Use examples from the families you know in your own culture to support each one of the concepts.

8. What was Sigmund Freud's theory regarding the incest taboo? What are some of the problems with his theory? What do you think of his theory?

9. What does it mean to marry out or die out? Name some groups that insist on marrying within their group.

10. What is the difference between cross-cousin marriages and parallel-cousin marriages?


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