Marrying a Culture When You Marry a Person

This is a review of the book, "Cross-Cultural Marriage: Identity and Choice" (see record 1998-06071-000). This book about cross-cultural or "out-marriage" purports to address three questions: What does out-marriage mean (to those married, to family and neighbors, or to larger social institutions), who is most likely to out-marry, and what happens in these marriages? The perspectives taken on these questions are primarily from social anthropology. All of the authors (except one second author) are female, and the vast majority of those people who were interviewed are female. Consequently, this book presents a fairly one-sided perspective on cross-cultural marriage, and often with feminist overtones and a dose of deconstructionist metascience popular in social anthropology these days. Because of the descriptive and case history nature of the book, one often gets private glimpses into the lived daily reality of cross-cultural marriage. Additional issues, such as, children of cross-cultural marriages and larger structural features (e.g. the legal system, immigration, and systems of kinship recognition) are discussed. The strengths of this book are in the sociological and social anthropological interpretations, not the systematic observation of individual differences. This book might best be viewed as a potential source of ideas and hypotheses for more systematic and psychologically based research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)