PIERRE AVEDIKIAN

Instructor: Dr. Nathalia Geha

Endogamy vs. exogamy

Marriage is life’s most important steps an individual can make, whether it’s about

building a family on the right soil, or choosing wisely the right “life partner”, it actually takes a

lot of time for a person to make up his/her mind and feel ready to take such a step. Usually it is a

persons’ entourage and society where he grew up that helps him through this journey in order to

make the right moves at the right time and give put him sort of on the right track for leading a

rightful life and be head of a healthy family. Most of the time, and because it is important for a

persons’ family to get involved before his/her marriage, a lot of “rules and regulation” are

presented meant to be followed because of the social group where they come from. The most

crucial of these rules must be the endogamy or exogamy rule, which pretty much puts limits to a

persons’ choice when it comes to marrying. Where exogamy is referred to as being a “system of

marriage in which individuals can only marry those from within the same kinship group.”,

(Bernard, 1997), and exogamy being the exact opposite of it, defined as the “act of marrying a

person who belongs to another tribe, clan, or similar social unit.” (Saarela ,2015). Regardless of

the social group, it is important to know whether endogamy, or exogamy, would be more

advantageous for a person, even though each system has its pros and cons, we will analyze more

generally whether it would be better for a person to enroll in an endogamous marriage because, it

can keep wealth in groups, it helps maintain community identity, meanwhile exogamy can help

fight racism and extremism.

 First and foremost, endogamy has tendency to keep wealth in groups, meaning that

groups will expand more and more and get larger in number since the descendants will be part of

that same, original group. Usually this point is most associated with women rather than men. In

fact, women that marry men from other groups won’t be benefitting from their own group where

they originate from as they will be part, from that moment on, of the group of her husband,

therefore loosing entirely or partly contact with her family or her group, and that aspect has to do

with her husband and her “new group’s” mentality and cultural beliefs. We can also pinpoint that

children of women that had engaged in exogamous marriage, and that is the act of marrying

outside one’s group, will be part of the other group, thus the girl’s group won’t be able to benefit

of any kind of increase in number but on the contrary will continue to decrease. And when this

aspect continues on along the generations, it will automatically lead to extinction of groups, since

there will be no men to carry the names of their families. Also, endogamy makes the happier life

for women, (Sandeep, 2017), since they won’t have to deal with their husband’s “new” lifestyle

and will not suffer any problem to getting adapted to some rules and regulations of his religion.

Having an endogamous state of mind means that families have the ability to maintain

community identity, uniqueness and status(Dzimiri,2004). It means that what originally belongs

to the family, stays to the family and does not go through changes with every generation. For

sure every family has their own traditions and special cults, and endogamous marriage helps

families keep their traditions alive for the coming generations, for example in china it one of the

most important aspects of respect is the respect of the elders, as opposed to other cultures, when

exogamic marriage occurs between to individuals, it will be most probable the other half’s

manners won’t be up to the ethics and requirements for the Chinese family. It also keeps families

their statuses. This aspect is very important for the royal families where kings and queens pass
on their power to their sons and daughters, which obviously pushes individuals to marry people

from the same social class as theirs, as well as sometimes being forced to marry cousins just for

the sake of keeping the reputation and staying the reigning power of a country. In other notices,

we may also agree that endogamy supports family businesses as coming generations, of course

being part of their original families (the father owns the business and not the grandfather from

the mother’s side), will be able to continue in their fathers’ footsteps and always have the ability

to have the ability to expand and invest in what came down to the individual as a “descendant”.

Even though endogamy presents so many advantages, exogamy was firstly introduced for one

purpose, and that was prevent marriage between blood relations and to maintain the survival of family

groups, and at the beginning of the 2010s, approximately 15 percent of all new marriages in the United

States were between spouses of different races (Saarela, 2015), and it pushes away the boundaries of

extremism and racism, “acceptance of the family and the society are the most common external factors

that influence exogamous marriages, creating dissonance and disagreement in the relationship” (Saarela,

2015), since it encourages people to stay in contact with people from other races and other nationalities

for example, let’s say you are in a culture where you have the right to have contact with whomever you

want to and don’t pressure you to stay within certain boundaries in your relations, you would be more

pleased by the company of all sorts of people, in contrary of societies where you’re put under a certain

pressure not to socialize with people outside your culture, which will eventually lead you to being racist.

Nevertheless, exogamous marriage may have its benefits, but one of the biggest downsides of it may be

that it may increase the rate of divorce between the couple, “ the divorce risk in exogamous marriages

is higher than that of endogamous marriages (Kalmijn, de Graaf, and Janssen, 2005),mainly

because the difference in mindsets make co-existence harder. Each race and society have their own norms

and values, it is hard for two distinct people coming from two distinct background to easily find a

compromise, which often leads to break-ups or divorces. Meanwhile endogamy cherishes relationships
and makes people a bit more open minded, a healthy marriage is based on communication, and two

people that are not able to find communication patterns and can’t properly organize their needs leads to a

failure of marriage; that is where endogamy exceeds all expectations and does a good job at reserving

good spots for families and couples to grow, because the goals and values are shared between the two

married people and, it makes living and co-existence much easier.

In general, it would be hard for a person to distinguish whether to choose endogamy or

exogamy, because they are both equal it the numbers of benefits and drawbacks, so it would be a

factor depending more on the situation, endogamy protects families, while exogamy assures the

continuity of a family. In the end if two persons truly love each other they should be able to get

along very easily, thus having a successful marriage and building a healthy family, after all, the

new generation is in their hands, and what purpose would they fulfil if that generations would

not be able to make the world a more better place?

References
Saarela, J, 2015, Exogamy

Dzimiri, C, 2014, Marry the Girl Next Door(Endogamy)

Sandeep, 2017, Endogamy