Kinship, Marriage, and Divorce in Comparative Family Law

Abstract

Sociological studies of the family, ethnographic studies of kinship and marriage, and legal accounts of family law have been neither clear nor comparable in explaining how members perceive and interpret arrangements such as “marriage” or “divorce.” These comparative studies invariably include case materials, and accounts which presuppose various linguistic and para-linguistic phenomena, meanings, and unexplicated usages. The precise character of comparable behavior remains obscure. Truncated categories translated from one language to another become verbal signals disengaged from the actual perception of social behavior and its interpretation in subsequent descriptions. The categories of different scholars are presented as equivalence classes in which the adequacy of the descriptions is never an issue because the author assumes that the reader “knows” what the author “means.” Although the categories employed describe general routine practice of members, there is little concern with the language, gestures, voice intonation, and body posturing accompanying the action scenes to which general categories refer.