Family+Structure,+Kinship,+and+Marriage

=At a Glance=

Much of the information gathered about the Mayans is gleaned from analyzing the artwork and ruins of the cities found in the heavy foliage of the forest. Artwork such as murals, pottery and tablets serve to provide most of the basic information that anthropologists, historians, and scientists know about the existence of the Maya people, especially regarding social and family life. From the European repetoire of records, there are accounts of many of the battles between the Maya and the Europeans, there are records to the locations of some Mayan cities and occasionally, someone makes note of a ocial or cultural custom. The lack of real, first-hand data from the Mayan peoples directly regarding the probable intricacies of their social customs regarding things such as kinship and marriage leaves anthropologists to make inferences and educated guesses about Mayan lifestyle from a cultural and social perspective through mediums such as artwork and implications from the few records they do possess.

Information regarding Mayan tradtions of kinship structure, marriage customs and family structure is particularly scarce and therefore must be sought through indirect means. Much of the knowledge assumed to be known about Mayan family systems is comprised of a series of conjectures and hypotheses and is often questioned, contested, researched, and then altered with the addition of new interpretations of the existing information. There is much discussion and much disagreement regarding things such as kinship structure and family structure, though marriage is a little easier to learn about directly from the presence of murals and artwork since art would be more likely to commemorate such an custom rather than kinship diagrams and explanations of family names.

=Kinship Structure=

The Mayan kinship structure is an extremely contested piece of cultural information regarding their cultural family customs as very little is recorded bout it and much of the information must be inferred from language clues. For at least the past 80 years, anthropologists have been trying to form a comprehensive, or at least coherent, argument for Mayan kinship structure and a variety of hypotheses have been formed, supported and then rejected. ecent evidence has supported the theory that the kinship system was a "kariera kinship system based on bilateral cross-cousin marriage with cross-cutting patrilineal descent and alternate generation moities" (JSTOR article) though this conjecture is always up for debate and is undoubtedly isregarded but just as many anthropologists as support it.

Original Theories of Kinship
One of the earliest articles attempting to debunk the mystery of Mayan kinship was when "in 1934, Eggan reconstructed a rule of bilateral cross-cousin marriage in the 'ancient' Maya kinship system. He shwed that 'the apparently random nature of [Maya] kinship applications disappears when such a rule is assumed' (Eggan 1934:6). At present there is some uncertainty as to the type of cousin marriage, the rule of descent, and the nature of noble and royal as opposed to commoner marriage practices in ancient Maya society. Lounsbury (n.d.), in a paper which remained unpublished and which I have not seen, evidently reconstructed a system of double unilineal descent in Maya. Coe (1965, 1987), following Lounsbury and Roys (1940), proposed two cross-cutting descent groups: the matrilineage and the patrilineage. Thompson (1982) similarly argued for double descent and cross-cousin marriage. Hopkins (1985), on the other hand, adduced strong evidence for patrilineal but not for matrilineal descent groups, and he argued on the basis of ethnographic evidence that the Maya kinship system was Omaha in type. Omaha systems, however, are not associated with bilateral cross-cousin marriage. J. Fox and justeson (196=86:7) proposed, without much evidence, a system of “matrilateral parallel and/or patrilateral cross-cousin marriage” joining Maya royal families. Joyce (1981) derived an alternating system of descent analogous to Mundugumor 'ropes' (Mead 1935; McDowell 1991)" (JSTOR article). All of these arguments regarding the structure of Mayan kinship met with struggles for acceptance and approval as time and time again theories of kinship were contested and disproved.

=Current Theory on Kinship = The current theory of Mayan kinship structure as discussed by Per Hage relates the system to a type of "Kariera kinship system based on bilateral cross-cousin marriage with cross-cutting patrilineal descent and alternate generation moieties" (JSTOR article). Kariera refers to a system often employed by western Australian people groups that revolves around the concept of ordering things in groups of four. The Mayans' kinship system is believed to be derived from not only Australian-type kinship systems but also from generic Asian systems as well, particularly the early Chinese. The use of the number four to order and categorize things and time periods is a common practice throughout Mayan civilization as shown in how they organize and symbolize colors, myths, birds, celestial phenomena, gods, years, metaphysical ideas, and of course, directions (JSTOR article). They also often divided their cities into four sections, measured important time spans out in four-year incriments and had a four-part socio-cosmological parallel to divide things into which were 1) plants, 2) animals, 3) natural phenomena, and 4) rituals/social functions (JSTOR article). The use of the number four is apparent in the cosmological structures and community divisions of Mayan civilization, linking them to similar structures in Asian and Asia-Pacific cultures whose systems also tended to have Kariera-style kinship structures. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that the Mayans also probably made use of the four-part kinship system. 

In the Kariera system, there are only two generations, the odd and the even. For the ego, there are +1, +2, -1, and -2 generations which account for ego's parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren, respectively. Within those four divisions, there are two odd and two even numbers which serve to further divide theextended family. Especially early on in the Proto-Maya Archaic Period from before 2000 BC when the Mayan peoples tended to still live in small groups instead of in the gargantuan metropolises they eventually would construct and become famous for, this system was important because extended family was a vital function of identity and society.

=Marriage and Family = ﻿Marriage, of course, relates directly to kinship in that marriage ceremonies and practices relate specifically to how the community and network of families interact and intermarry. Bishop Landa in the 16th century stated in his notes and journals that first-cousins were allowed to marry other relatives on the mother's side and that often times, women were married to older men (not significantly older men, but just men that were a few years older) as it was seen to be more socially acceptable. The fact that people were married within their own relative group on the mother's side suggests the bilateral cross-cousin marriages suspected of the Kariera system of marriage. Strangely, even though cousin marriage is thought to have been definitely prominent at one point in time and even with the multitude of words signifying different family members and their relation to the ego (in fact, the list of family categorizations such as father, aunt, grandfather, etc., are so extensive because the name used to describe particular family members is partly dependent on ego's gender), there is not definite term for "cousin." However, this fact is not necessarily as crazy as it may seem because as time goes on and as societies gain complexity, they are more likely to lose some of the more generic terms in their language and only gain complexity.  ﻿ This cross-cousin marriage was occasional, but very important for the nobility. Only very high status people neeed to follow the rules of matilineal cross-cousin marriage and even then, the marriage of that particular Kariera type only had to happen once per generation in order to sustain the legitimacy of the noble line and maintain reputation. Interestingly enough, by around AD 250, there were two different marriage systems for the Mayans--that of the commoners and that of the royalty and nobility. The commoners seemed to partake in bilateral cross-cousin marriage and the nobility seemed to use the matrilineal cross-cousin marriage which, again, is similar to early Chinese civilization practices.  ﻿ Marriages for the Mayans were determined by negotiations of parents and priests. After puerty and the Descent of the Gods rite of passage celebrating that bodily transition, the atanzahab (basically a matchmaker) was hired to examine horoscopes, names, familie, and find a good fit. Most of the couples the atanzahab matched were monogamous, though men could technically be polygamous. Divorce and second marriages were allowed but were not on an extensive large scale level or very common.