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Gruppenehe Group marriage or Circle Marriage is a form of polygamous marriage in which more than one man and more than one woman form a family unit, and all members of the marriage share parental responsibility for any children arising from the marriage.
Line Marriage is a form of group marriage in which the family unit continues to add new spouses of both sexes over time so that the marriage does not end.
Group marriage is occasionally called polygynandry, from a combination of the words polygyny and polyandry.
Traditional Cultures
Group marriage is judged by some experts to be rare in traditional societies. Others find this judgement to be unwarranted, since the modern understanding of such societies is less than perfect. Many traditional societies have been nearly or totally destroyed by colonization and other forces. Among the cultures listed in George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, the Caingang people of Brazil practiced group marriage most frequentally as a socially accepted form of marriage, and even among them, only 8% of unions were group marriage.
Modern Culture
Group marriage occasionally occurred in communal societies founded in the 19th and 20th centuries. An exceptionally long-lived example was the Oneida Community founded by the Congregationalist minister John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. Noyes taught that he and his followers had undergone sanctification; that is, it was impossible for them to sin, and that for the sanctified, marriage (along with private property) was abolished as an expression of jealousy and exclusiveness. The Oneida commune practiced sexual communalism and shared parental responsibilities, and in effect functioned as a large group marriage until sometime in the period 1879-1881.
The Kerista Commune practiced group marriage in San Francisco from 1971 to 1991.
It is difficult to estimate the number of people who actually practice group marriage in modern societies, as this form of marriage is not officially recognized in any jurisdiction, and illegal in many; however, it seems likely that its practice is limited to relatively small numbers of people. With the legalization of Same-sex marriage in some parts of the United States and Canada, some members of the polyamory movement are talking about a reform movement to also allow group marriage.
Group Marriage in Fiction
Interest in, and practice of poly relationships is well-known in modern science fiction fandom. Group marriage has been a theme in some works of science fiction — especially the later novels of Robert A. Heinlein, such as Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. MiaHM describes a line marriage; the relationship in Stranger is a communal group, much like the Oneida Colony.
Robert A. Heinlein described line families in detail in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein's characters argue that the line family creates economic continuity and parental stability in an unpredictable, dangerous environment. In Mistress, Manuel's line marriage is said to be over one hundred years old. The family is portrayed as being economically comfortable because the improvements and investments made by previous spouses compounded, rather than being lost between generations. Heinlein also makes a point of telling the reader that this family is racially diverse.
Line marriage is also commonly practiced in Joe Haldeman's 1981 novel, Worlds. Haldeman describes how individual families joined forces, both in bed and on paper, in order to avoid inheritance taxes. Many of these consensual corporations were made up of three-mate marriages called triunes.
References
- Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, derived from George P. Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas.
Footnotes
- , Murdock, 1949, p. 24.
- group marriage or a marital union embracing at once several men and several women.
- , Murdock, 1949, p. 24.
"Group marriage"