The Natural Triad in Kinship and Complex Systems

Abstract

only a few of them. The probability that a given person of the opposite sex will be included in that small number apparently depends on the time and energy costs of crossing the intervening distance to engage in interaction rather than on intervening opportunities to interact with other similar persons. But what about normative pressures? These may be less important than sociologists have supposed, and cultural variability with respect to marriage mores may be less significant than it seems. American students, taking a course in marriage and the family, sometimes react ethnocentrically when they learn of such exotic mate selection practices as go-betweens, family-arranged marriages, etc. On the other hand, the sociologist may sometimes overemphasize the cultural relativity of marriage norms by exaggerating the extent of cultural variability. Taking arranged marriage as one extreme and the American image of unrestricted individualism and romantic love as the other extreme, the range of variation in degrees of freedom in mate selection appears to be from one to infinity. The propinquity studies suggest that the actual range from one cultural extreme to the other may be only from one to about half a dozen or so. As to the five scaled types of textbook interpretation of propinquity in mate selection, our findings suggest that Type V merits more serious consideration than it has heretofore received. It is possible that propinquity produces a substantial degree of homogamy, and that the familiarity of homogamous marriages gives rise to homogamy norms. The inference that nonhomogamous marriages are rare because they are taboo may be less accurate than the inference that the taboos are enforceable precisely because the non-homogamous marriages are rare. At a still higher level of abstraction, we might say that a norm (in any realm) is enforceable only to the extent that it prescribes behavior which is likely for other reasons and prohibits behavior which is unlikely for other reasons. We suggest that these are fundamental notions to which sociological research should be specifically addressed.