ON WEDNESDAY, the day after President Bush claimed that "ages of experience" support a ban on same-sex marriage, the world's largest organization of anthropologists -- "the people who study culture," as they put it -- responded by challenging the president's support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
According to a statement from the executive board of the 11,000-member American Anthropological Association, more than a century of cross-cultural anthropological research provides "no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution." Instead, anthropologists have concluded that "a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies."
Reached at her office at Albion College, in Michigan, AAA president Elizabeth M. Brumfiel cited the "widespread" Native American berdache tradition (in which males assumed female roles and married other males) and the existence of "sociological males" (women who assume male roles) among the Nuer of Sudan as examples of ways that societies have condoned same-sex marriage without collapsing. "People tend to rank their own culture as best, but anthropologists try to take a broader view," said Brumfiel.
