> > Next question for the greybeards: homosexual relations - if they
>are
> > within the clan, how is that seen, given one is supposed to look
> > outside the clan for spouses...?
Hey! It's only grey-flecked. Honest. :)
In ancient of days, the repetitive mantra of my anthropology kinship seminars was
SEX AIN'T MARRIAGE or a little more expansively, never confuse a society's formal rules, aspirations and normative codes with actual behaviour, and never confuse formal institutions, laws, morals and their expression with actual behaviour in informal situations. It's a hooman thing.
Every society has rules for 'proper behaviour' and a majority of that society's members may actually believe (or want to believe) that those rules are applied in most situations. But when you look at actual behaviour, people are doing their own thing, and hang the rules. This goes for kinship and religion as much as sexuality and marriage.
(Our western 'norm' is monogamous, heterosexual, religiously-sanctioned marriage for life, right, with 2.3 kids, a cat, a dog, a mortgage, 1.7 cars and a broadband connection. In fact, our behavioural norm is serial monogamy, often informal liaison, frequent divorce, less frequent kids, increasingly polymorphous sexuality, with single-parent and other family types constituting a significant minority of families.)
This is getting long-winded, but I thinks its important to view Sam's question in its total context.
Heortling marriage is primarily a corporate alliance and contract between two groups of people (clans) for the purposes of exchange, future reciprocity, and mutual security. Goods, people, children, animals and good will are exchanged back and forth between two groups in a series of ritual exchanges at propitious times, including engagement, marriage, birth of first child, fostering, initiation, and at the death of key participants. The attraction, affections and even love of the bride and groom may enter into the equation, but feelings are usually secondary. "Why wait till the water is boiling to put it on the fire?' And the amount of formality and ritual involved seems to be in direct proportion to the visibility and social class of the alliance and the amount of goods exchanged in dowry, brideprice or bride service and associated secondary giftings. A tubmasher/stickpicker bonding between Braggi Bentbow and Nalda Mudshins will pay less attention to the niceties of dowry, alliance and even *gasp* kinship prohibitions than the peacemaking bond between Kierston the clan lawspeaker and Hargan ElmalThane, war leader and first son of the Balkoth chieftain.
Now Heortling society is used to minority or unusual sex and gender roles - Helerites, Nandans, Yelmalians, Humakti, Gori, and even by some counts and some measures, Vingans. Sexual magic, ritual and sacred marriage (often in violation of kinship taboos), spirit marriage, daimon marriage, polygamy and even group marriage are all known and practiced. "Not by us of course-- 'part from the sacred marriage of the descendant of the Sacred Spring gyrda and a green-eyed spearman from the Shieling folk--but them Black Oaks got big barns for a reason you know. And have you seen the faces on their sheep.?")
Heortling sexuality is relatively free, with no particular value or judgement placed upon chastity, and no particular taboos placed on sexual play outside of marriage. Once married however, the going gets tough, for lots of reasons, most of them more to do with clan alliance than sexual morality..
'Year-marriage' can be very informal, and in fact can be little more than a labour contract involving sexual favours. I suspect that 'year-married' is a term used to describe almost any relationship that is out of the ordinary.
Children belong to the clan, and tend to be raised communally anyway, so there's no stigma placed on children born out of wedlock. If there is in a particular case, its because of ongoing hurts and tensions among adults, and the child will be quietly fostered to a friendly clan.
There will always be resentment, suspicion and an amount of unease engendered in some folk by contact with people who are 'different', be it accent, sexuality, cult affiliation or hair style, (sadly also a hooman thing), but its fair to say that most Heortlings have a fairly broad acceptance of sexual and gender diversity. Just don't joke about sheep.
Every human society seems to have some sort of kinship taboo, orbiting about the twin (and often contradictory) axes of 'forbidden fruit tastes sweetest' and 'you're not sexually attracted to people you grow up with' (the kibbutzum corollary). Having said that, the actual taboos (and the pattern of their breaking) in any given society tend to be quite unique, and no easy generalisation is possible. Social rules are essentially a way of imposing order on the universe, and grounding human custom in a sense of the natural and universal.
And finally, there is no 'law' inside a clan, which is itself the legal 'atom'. Bloodlines compete to a certain extend, and tend to look out for their own, but a clan's internal administratation of justice and conformity to social mores always depends on the elders, the moot and what people want to see or not see happening. The usual operating rule tends to be, ''whatever stokes your hearth, just be discrete'.
So, tieing all these together, and finally getting back to Sam's question:
Do elders turn a blind eye to sexual experimentation among the young that violates kinship rules or incest taboos? I think, usually, yes, as long as it is discrete and seen as a passing phase.
Do couples, of whatever sexual preference, form long-lasting partnerships that may break clan marriage or incest rules? Again, I think yes, as long as they're discrete, and the kinship bound is not too close. (Heortlings have a *very* finely tuned kinship radar). They may tend to live relatively apart in those small nuclear-family type lodges that Thunder Rebels got so confused about. (Most lodges are bloodline lodges, large, housing several extended families, but for a variety of reasons smaller dwellings also are used.) These couples are probably publicly referred to as 'clan-sisters', 'spear-brothers', or that vague, universal, meaningless, catch-all term, 'cousins'. Given the lack of privacy and coresponding lack of embarassment so characteristic of the Heortlings, however, everyone in the clan will know exactly what's going on. If the kinship bond is too close, they may go to live in a non-clan area such as a city - though even in those places clan networks are strong and enduring. If it gets really bad, there's always Tarsh, which is full of very strange people anyway :)
So I don't think couples of any sexual minority are that uncommon or cause particular problems to the clan. In fact, its only when the folk involved are from different clans that trouble may brew. They don't 'marry', except in unusual ritual or magical situations, but are free to set up households and live by the bonds of their heart.
YGMV. Cheers
John
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