Yangoru Boiken - Marriage and Family

Marriage. Although formal betrothal may occur during a girl's initiation at first menses, nowadays it is often omitted. There always has been considerable freedom of choice in marriage partners, and young people typically enter several "trial" marriages that dissolve before consummation. Once a wife has borne her husband a child, however, divorce is extremely rare. Ideally, a man should marry his father's mother's brother's sister's daughter or, failing that, his mother's mother's brother's sister's daughter, but such marriages are uncommon in practice. Marriage is proscribed with members of one's own hring, most more-distant agnates, and close maternal and affinal relatives. Marriage involves bride-wealth and initiates a flow of shell valuables from wife-receiving to wife-giving hring that is reciprocated with food, labor, and protection. The wealth is said to "buy" the "skins" or "bodies" of the woman's children; the food, labor, and protection reflect the "maternal" obligations of her natal hring toward her children. These exchanges continue until the woman's death. Marriage is usually virilocal, though uxorilocal residence occurs quite frequently. Since the early years of this century, the endogamy rate within Sima village has fluctuated between 38 and 56 percent of all marriages. Polygyny is less common now than in the past: in 1980 only 13 percent of Sima marriages were polygynous.

Domestic Unit. The basic domestic unit is a nuclear family, with the common additions of the father's parents and unmarried siblings. It occupies anywhere from one to all of the dwelling houses in a hamlet. Usually, the nuclear family shares a house, but the father and older sons sometimes live in a small dwelling separate from the mother and the other children.

Inheritance. As each son comes of age, his father usually confers on him an exchange partner together with land and domesticated trees sufficient to support his future family. Pressure on resources is sufficiently high, however, that the father's holdings commonly are exhausted by the time younger sons reach maturity. Consequently, these young men must seek resources elsewhere—usually from a classificatory brother, a mother's brother, or a wife's brother. Shell wealth, utensils, sacred relics, and ritual knowledge are inherited patrilineally by men and from mothers-in-law by women.

Socialization. Children are raised primarily by their mothers. From an early age, girls are taught the virtues of hard work, nurturance, and the care and protection of the hring's children. Boys lead a rather carefree life until their early teens, when their male elders begin to recruit them to men's work and start to inculcate the virtues of energy, strength, calculation, and controlled minacity esteemed in an adult male.