Le mariage mixte comme indicateur social de l'adaptation : le mariage franco-arménien [Mixed marriage as a social indicator of adaptation : French-Armenian marriage

Abstract

The definition of mixed marriages must be divorced from collective feeling to be of scien¬ tific value. Research will then no longer be focused upon a social and concrete fact but upon a phenomenon which subjacent laws will participate in explaining. After having postulated that the notion of mixed marriages no longer corresponds to a condensed heterogeneity, which is socially intolerable, but to a scattered homogeneity, a typology, designed to be experimentally validated, will be elaborated. The concept of adapta¬ tion and the notion of entropy will be employed at a theoretical level in order to show that mixed marriages are the result of complex processes tending to homogenize populations who are from different cultures but who live in permanent contact. According to a first approximation, the experimental results would demonstrate that mixed unions, as a social phenomenon, obey in part an adaptation process and are in conflict with the entropy of a cultural system which develops amidst a minority group whose original culture differs from that of the neighbouring society.