Joseph Henrich

And certainly not your brother's wife.

So that would be a kind of leveret marriage.

And the church banned that pretty early on in the history of the Catholic Church.

Two brothers can marry two sisters.

So that was okay.

Yes, and in general, there's a lot of progress on people officially accepting Christianity.

Lots of people have been baptized, but there's still problems around what they describe as incest, by which they mean cousin marriage of various kinds, and also polygyny.

So elite men are taking one primary wife, but they're also marrying other women as secondary wives and concubines.

Yeah, so the question was, is how do we put an end to this?

You know, we like the idea that the church is spreading and these people are becoming Christians, but these forms of family weren't acceptable.

So one of the things that the Christians really pushed, the church leadership really pushed—

was the notion of illegitimate children.

So the lever they used was that unless you were married in an official Christian church, then you're an illegitimate child, which meant secondary wives in this system, like in many places around the world, their children still had some inheritance rights.

They were still recognized by the community.

But the church tries to put an end to that to prevent not only inheritance of wealth, but succession.

And this is going to affect the royalty a lot because that means the church controls who gets to be the next leader when you have dissent of power down the bloodline.

Yeah, that's right.

So that's called neolocal residence, and it's very rare in a global and historical perspective.

So when young couples will marry, typically they would live either with the groom's family or the bride's family, depending on whether they're patrilocal or matrilocal.

So that's the anthropological terminology.