ओरिजिन अफ म्यारिज

Attempting to encompass the various types of marriage in various cultures without knowing if they have a common origin,[citation needed] anthropologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage. Edward Westermarck, in his book The History of Human Marriage (1921) had said "The institution of marriage has probably developed out of a primeval habit. The relations between the sexes and parental care among the Invertbrata" including both monogamous and polygamous unions. The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries (1951) defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners" and due to Nuer of Sudan allowing for homosexual marriages (limited only to females), Kathleen Gough suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons." Leach criticized Gough's definition for being too restrictive in terms of recognized legitimate offspring and suggested that marriage be viewed in terms of the different types of rights it serves to establish. Leach expanded the definition and proposed that "Marriage is a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides that a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of the relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum"

Bell also criticized the legitimacy-based definition and has said that some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. In societies where illegitimacy means only that the mother is unmarried and has no other legal implications, a legitimacy-based definition of marriage is circular.Edmund Leach argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all cultures. He offered a list of ten rights associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, with specific rights differing across cultures. Duran Bell proposed defining marriage in terms of sexual access rights