More cows, more wives

This article is part of Issue 22 of Works in Progress. Subscribe to the print magazine before the end of February and get a copy of Issue 22 sent immediately, and further issues every two months.

In the 1930s in the Upper Nile region of what is now South Sudan, anthropologist EE Evans-Pritchard met a Nuer woman sitting by a thatched hut with her children. In the distance, the father of her children tended the cattle. They looked like an ordinary family. But this man was not her husband. The Nuer woman was married to a ghost, and her children were officially the children of this ghost.

Among the Nuer, if a man died without leaving any heirs his kinsmen would find him a wife, in order for his name to live on. They worried that otherwise his ghost would grow restless, haunting and bringing sickness upon them. ‘A ghost likes to think of people asking, “whose son is that?” and being told in reply that it is the son of so-and-so’, the Nuer say. ‘Thus, his name continues on the lips of men’.

Evans-Pritchard, who lived with the Nuer for a number of years, observed that ghost marriages were nearly as common as those between the living. Warfare and disease often claimed young men before they became fathers; childhood mortality sometimes carried off any sons they did have. In such cases, a brother, son, or nephew might marry in their name – ‘kindling the fire of the dead’. As in any marriage, cattle were paid as bridewealth to the bride’s family. The difference was that children born of the union would legally belong to the ghost, carry his name, inherit any cattle he had had while living, and, when grown, assume the ritual privileges appropriate to their ghost father.

This arrangement could lead to a curious cycle. Because the man marrying on behalf of the ghost gained a wife and children in all but name, the family’s cattle would be used next to secure marriages for his younger brothers. In some cases, the living husband died before ever contracting a legal marriage for himself. And so, in turn, his kinsmen found him a wife after death. Ghost marriage begat ghost marriage.

The variety of marriage customs

The Nuer example presents just one of a wide variety of marriage customs. For much of history, this complexity was invisible ...