ABSTRACT
The central purpose of this chapter is to describe and analyze sexual behaviour that may carry an elevated risk of HIV infection. The emphasis is thus on sexual behaviour outside of marriage or other regular partnerships, restricting attention to heterosexual partnerships for reasons mentioned earlier. However, to understand, or even to describe, non-regular sexual contacts we have to take into account the existence and nature of regular partnerships. Of course, marriage has been studied extensively by anthropologists, though typically in rather remote, homogenous communities. Anthropologists have viewed marriage as an institution that follows strict rules and performs well defined functions: regulates gender roles, defines offspring rules, legitimizes children, transfers succession rights and so on. Functionalists, such as Radcliffe-Brown and Forde (1987), regarded marriage as an institution that permits the creation of new family units, forms the basis for the kinship structure and ensures the continuity of the lineage. In their view, marriage was also an important guarantor of the permanence and continuity of the juridical-political system.
