Exchange of women

The structuralist view of kinship was laid out in Lévi-Strauss' grand statement: Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary Structures of Kinship). In this, he combined Mauss' ideas about the importance of gifts in primitive societies with the role of the incest taboo in forcing exchanges of mates outside of closely related family groups. The resulting exchange of women is asymmetric in that men have power over women which is not reciprocated. The resulting social structures provide a framework for treating the oppression of women as a social construct rather than being a matter of biology.{{citation|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=trxGYWX_XNgC|title=Feminist Anthropology|chapter=4 The Traffic in Women|author=Gayle Rubin|pages=92–95|year=2006|publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-1-4051-0196-7}}

In "The Traffic in Women," Gayle Rubin articulated a feminist analysis of kinship, gender roles, sexuality, the incest taboo and taboo against homosexuality, as part of a historically evolving "sex/gender system."Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Towards a Political Economy of Sex.” In Towards an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiterc. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Men in ancient Hebrew culture established and negotiated their relations with other men through the exchange of female relatives. This is seen in Old Testament narratives such as the stories spread across the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings.{{citation|title=Sex, Honor and Power in the Deuteronomistic History: A Narratological and Anthropological Analysis|author=Kenneth A. Stone|publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group|year=1996|isbn=1-85075-640-6}}

In Afghanistan and remote areas of Pakistan, women may be exchanged in compensation for a debt or offence such as murder. This practice is known as swara. Pakistan's constitution prohibits this with a penalty of 3 to 10 years of imprisonment but the custom still persists.{{citation|url=http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C07%5C16%5Cstory_16-7-2008_pg11_1|title=Trapped by traditions|author=Sohail Chaudhry|date=July 16, 2008}}

The exchange of women in the course of male bonding appears as a theme in the novels The Great Gatsby and Tropic of Capricorn.{{citation|chapter-url=http://www.henry-miller.com/narrative-literature/a-generalized-exchange-of-women.html|title=Henry Miller and the Rise of New Critical Modernism|chapter=7. Desire in the Waste Land A generalized exchange of women|author=Raoul Ibarguen|year=1989}} Indecent Proposal and other female-barter movies were criticized for promoting this theme.{{citation|work=Los Angeles Times|author=Patrick Goldstein|date=April 18, 1993|pages=8|title=A flurry of recent women-as-barter movies looks like a disturbing trend to feminists ... Are these movies merely a manifestation of the fantasies of the men who run the studios-or do they represent something much more serious?|url=https://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/60244545.html?dids=60244545:60244545&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Apr+18%2C+1993&author=PATRICK+GOLDSTEIN&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(pre-1997+Fulltext)|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090916182502/http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/60244545.html?dids=60244545:60244545&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Apr+18%2C+1993&author=PATRICK+GOLDSTEIN&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(pre-1997+Fulltext)|url-status=dead|archive-date=September 16, 2009}}

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• Arranged marriage
• Bride kidnapping
• Forced marriage
• Hostage
• Mail-order bride
• Marriage of convenience
• Placement marriage
• Raptio
• Sister exchange, form of exchange of women
• Secrecy
• Watta satta, exchange matters in Indian subcontinent
• Wife selling

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Category:Violence against women

Category:Structuralism

Category:Women in society