Marriage

===Legitimacy of offspring===
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."<ref name="Notes">{{cite book|title=Notes and Queries on Anthropology|publisher=Royal Anthropological Institute|year=1951|page= 110}}</ref> In recognition of a practice by the [[Nuer people]] of Sudan allowing women to act as a husband in certain circumstances (the [[Ghost marriage (Sudanese)|ghost marriage]]), [[Kathleen Gough]] suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons."<ref name="Gough">{{Cite journal|last=Gough|first=E. Kathleen|title=The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage|journal=Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland|year=1959|pages=23–34|volume=89|issue=1|doi=10.2307/2844434|jstor=2844434}} Nuer female-female marriage is done to keep property within a family that has no sons. It is not a form of lesbianism.</ref>

In an analysis of marriage among the Nayar, a polyandrous society in India, Gough found that the group lacked a husband role in the conventional sense. The husband role, unitary in the west, was instead divided between a non-resident "social father" of the woman's children, and her lovers, who were the actual procreators. None of these men had legal rights to the woman's child. This forced Gough to disregard sexual access as a key element of marriage and to define it in terms of legitimacy of offspring alone: marriage is "a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum."<ref>{{cite book|last=Gough|first=Kathleen|title=Marriage, Family and Residence|year=1968|publisher=Natural History Press|location=New York|page=68|editor=Paul Bohannan & John Middleton|chapter=The Nayars and the Definition of Marriage}}</ref>

Economic anthropologist [[Duran Bell]] has criticized the legitimacy-based definition on the basis that some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. He argued that a legitimacy-based definition of marriage is circular in societies where illegitimacy has no other legal or social implications for a child other than the mother being unmarried.<ref name = "Bell" />