Friday, January 7, 2022

Ross Hassig on Concubines and Concubinage

  

. . . concubines are not simply sexual outlets, and in monogamous societies that permit concubines, the resulting sons are often recognized as heirs when the legitimate wife fails to produce any, as in traditional China and ancient Israel (Goody, The Development, 76).

 

Concubinage offers the possibility of a relationship that is less than marriage and yet is socially recognized as legitimate and, presumably, exclusive, at least on the woman’s part. In some societies, ties of concubinage were at made with women who would not be socially suitable wives, such as lower-caste women in Hindu society and vice versa. As concubines, such women allow rulers to establish connections and perhaps even alliances to groups with which formal marriages are prohibited or at least socially or religiously ill advised (Dickemann, “Female Infanticide,” 336). But prohibited status does not necessarily distinguish concubines from wives, and the nobles of some societies drew upon the same social group for both (Van den Berghe, Human Family Systems, 168). So while concubinage offers the possibility of legitimate sexual access to additional women in monogamous societies, why would polygynous societies permit absence of some social, ethnic, or religious status that prohibited the formal marriages of some women? (Ross Hassig, Polygamy and the Rise and Demise of the Aztec Empire [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016], 41-42)