ABSTRACT
Shortly after I entered graduate school, in 1985, I ran across a book by the Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch entitled Why Marry Her? Society and Symbolic Structures . Published four years earlier, it was a significantly revised edition of de Heusch's French book Pourquoi l'épouser? (Editions Gallimard, 1971), and sought to bring the French structuralist views of kinship into dialogue with the functionalist views of British social anthropology. I always thought the title unusually direct, even provocative, though its central argument confirmed what everyone already knew: that kinship affiliations—systems of descent and alliance—prestructured marriage choices, a point the Belgian-born French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had already documented across the ethnographic record, in his magisterial The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1948). Although Lévi-Strauss was primarily focused on marriage and alliance, he was well aware of the importance of descent systems, in particular the patrilineal descent systems of Africa, which formed the basis for British functionalist theory.
