The History of Human Marriage is Edward Westermarck’s influential study of the origins, forms, and evolution of marriage across human societies. The Finnish sociologist and anthropologist surveys courtship, kinship, incest avoidance, and marriage customs worldwide, drawing on a vast body of ethnographic evidence to challenge then-popular theories of primitive promiscuity.
A foundational work in the anthropology of the family, the book is especially known for the “Westermarck effect,” the idea that close childhood association tends to dampen later sexual attraction. Westermarck’s careful, comparative method made the work a landmark of social science. It remains an important source for the study of kinship, marriage, and the evolution of human social institutions, and a classic of nineteenth-century anthropology.