One of the founding graybeards of anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski (1927), believed that “the principle of legitimacy” is one of the pillars upon which the organization of the family was built.
Malinowski stated that “the most important moral and legal rule concerning the physiological side of kinship is that no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the child and the rest of the community...” Hartley (1975) echoed Malinowski: “With hundreds of societies in the world having varied beliefs and customs, different environmental problems, and differences in group size and organization, the principle of legitimacy comes as near as any social rule to being truly universal.” In turn, “legitimacy” is derived from “marriage,” another cross- cultural universal (Brown 1991, Van den Berghe 1979, Stephens 1964, Levinson and Malone 1980, McCary 1975; cf Gough 1968).
“Marriage,” inter alia, serves to legitimize the wife's children (see Fisher [1983] for a complementary discussion predicated on The Sex Contract). Once married, the man is expected to provision and to protect his children: the children who had become his through the ritual of “marriage.”1 Accordingly, the role of “fathers” is to nurture his young to independence. It should be noted that, for the discussion here, it is irrelevant whether fathering is strictly a “social invention” (Mead 1949; cf Harlow 1971, and Smuts and Gubernick 1992), which exists only as part of the thin veneer of civilization, or whether fathering exemplifies an independent affiliative bond “built” into our species (Mackey 1985, 1996. cf Lovejoy 1981). What is relevant is the putative impact that the presence/absence of an on-going social father may have upon the level of violence within his community.It is argued below that, in addition to the more vegetive function of keeping his children alive, “fathering” may play a more subtle role in enhancing the viability of the father's community. Framed a little differently, the social father may be an invisible prophylactic in minimizing violence within his community.