| In many societies around the world today, to be "married" is assumed to mean "legally married." State law has become the taken-for-granted basis of everyday understandings of marriage. But it was not, and is not, always so. The state's imaginative dominion over marriage has been socially and historically produced, yet surprisingly little scholarly work examines how these processes work.;This dissertation explores this question by traveling to South Africa, unique among the world's jurisdictions for having recently incorporated not one but two social categories of people into its marriage laws. These categories include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, eligible for state marital recognition since the Civil Unions Act (CUA) of 2006; and residents of communities governed by indigenous or "customary" law, marriages under such systems becoming eligible for state recognition with the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act (RCMA) of 1998. Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork among members of these two groups, this dissertation argues that the state's imaginative dominion depends on the varying modes of engagement people enact with the state. In other words, state authority is not a unidirectional but a dialogic process.;I reach this conclusion because participants in each group exhibited very different relationships to state marriage law. Residents of the customarily governed community where I conducted fieldwork did not much engage the law unless they had a practical need to do so. They instead relied on existing cultural practices as their main source for meaning in marriage. LGBT people, by contrast, heavily relied on both the enforcement power and the symbolic majesty of the state to secure recognition for their relationships by important others in their lives. That said, the two groups did share an emphasis on notions of marriage as an individual choice, a notion I trace back in part to understandings of democracy as primarily about defending individual choice.;I thus argue that the state has been influential at a very broad, semiotic level over the ways people in both communities understand marriage, but that this semiotic influence has triggered different engagements with state power by the two groups. This is so because members of the customary community found themselves able to live out notions of marital choice within existing, largely non-state marital-recognition regimes, while LGBT people needed state power in order to foster recognition by others of their dreams of marital choice. |
