Law Commons^™

Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski

Anthropology

Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …

Resurrecting Islam Or Cementing Social Hierarchy?: Reexamining The Codification Of 'Islamic' Personal Status Law, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

There is a regrettable tendency to equate social conservatism with religious adherence. Nowhere does this occur more than in the Muslim world, where conservatives are closely associated with adherence to shari’a. The more unyielding the conservative, the “stricter” the supposed adherence to shari’a, or, alternatively, the more “literal” the version of shari’a adhered to.

While almost any social conservative movement in the Muslim world or otherwise professes adherence to religious doctrine as being the core of its ideological commitment, and while there are important ways in which Muslim social conservatives insist on adherence to religious rules in their most traditional …