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Introduction Introduction ANNA’S WEDDING Lifting her veil and smiling gratiously, 25-year-old Anna was leaving the Fransfontein Lutheran church. With badly concealed envy and grim faces, several young women stood outside the church and watched her. Anna’s expensive silvery satin wedding dress, with beautiful embroidery and lace, blazed in the bright midday sun. Josef, now her husband, walked by her side, not as triumphantly as she looked and clearly ex- hausted, but with a content gaze. The wedding party slowly streamed out of the church and into the courtyard outside. Four couples of bridesmaids and groomsmen, all dressed in shades of glittering purple, followed the newlyweds. Behind them walked the bride’s and groom’s parents. The humble dress of the husband’s mother stood in sharp contrast to the luxurious textiles worn by the wedding couple and their brides- maids and groomsmen. Anna’s wedding in late April 2004 was the fifth wedding that my husband, Mi- chael Schnegg, and I attended in Fransfontein, a rural community of 137 households located in the semiarid former Damaraland, today Kunene South, northwest Namib- ia, where we conducted field research from May 2003 to September 2004 and from July to September in both 2005 and 2006. As at the other weddings before, the mo- ment when the newlyweds left the church and proceeded into the courtyard was filled with relief, joy and triumph. They had made it! Anna’s wedding pictures, my field notes and my memories of the day once again revive the exhausted happiness that reflected in the newlyweds’ faces. A few months later, Anna agreed to a life story interview. During the interview we talked about Anna’s wedding day and what happened after she left church as a married woman. As is common in Fransfontein, the newly- weds proceeded to the Fransfontein fountain to take wedding pictures. Water is not only the most important resource in arid Namibia. It is also loaded with symbolic meaning and value (Hoernlé 1923). On their way to the fountain, Anna and her hus- band Josef passed several groups of spectators who commented on the wedding. 16 | The Decline of Marriage in Namibia Anna described the scene in the following way: “While we were passing, I heard one of my mother’s sister’s daughters tell another girl watching: ‘Oh, Anna, she is so young, and she wants to marry! She is too young! I can’t see why she should marry. I am not married.’” Like the unfriendly gazes of the women watching Anna and Josef leaving the church after their wedding ceremony, the envy of Anna’s mother’s sister’s daughter was hardly hidden. The likelihood that she might ever marry herself was small. Today, only about 30 per cent of the Fransfontein population 15 years and older is or has been married. Yet, of those 60 years and older, the overwhelming majority (more than 70 per cent) was married. It is only with the men and women who were born in the mid-20th century that marriage rates started to decline, resulting in less than 20 per cent of men and women in the age bracket of 20 to 50 ever having mar- ried. One explanation for this change might be a steep rise in the age at marriage. We saw above that Anna’s mother’s sister’s daughter, who is several years older then Anna, was convinced that Anna was too young to deserve marriage. Yet an elevated average age at marriage is only a partial explanation and, by itself, is of rather limited explanatory power. Demographic variations like a later average age at marriage have to be understood as expressions of more profound underlying societal changes (Antoine 2006). Trans- formations in Namibian marriage practices have been framed and structured by dra- matic political economic changes in the 20th century, roughly ranging from the crea- tion of reserves by German colonialists early in the century, over the establishment of homelands during apartheid and the South African annexation of Namibia, to the celebration of independence and freedom from colonial rule since the 1990s. During this time frame, marriage has changed from an almost universal practice and collec- tively experienced rite of passage, creating social cohesion and community, to a cel- ebration of difference and distinction by a small elite. Importantly, the appropriation of weddings for class distinctions commenced long before the end of apartheid and colonial rule. Since approximately the late 1960s and during the 1970s, marriage rates in Fransfontein started to decline while wedding practices became increasingly elab- orate and expensive. Substantial political changes at that time, especially the estab- lishment of homelands, resulted in an array of new constraints and burdens for the great majority of the population while the agency of a small minority was signifi- cantly enhanced and extended. This minority rather rapidly consolidated and formed a local elite. It is this book’s central aim to describe and explain these multiple transformations and their interplay (i.e. changes in marriage rates but also political, material and ide- ational transformations) and to reflect on their consequences for the already large but nevertheless still growing group of non-married (and probably never-to-be-married) Fransfonteiners. The book’s theoretical and methodological frame draws on practice Introduction | 17 theory and recent reflections on the dialectics between structure and agency with Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing on the reproduction of inequalities through mechanisms of distinctions (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]). Building on the work of practice theorists, I define agency – thus an actor’s ca- pacity to reinterpret and transform relations to some degree – not as opposed to struc- ture but as a constituent of structure (Bourdieu 1977; Johnson-Hanks 2006, 2007b; Ortner 1984, 2006; Sewell 1992, 2005). Structure – very loosely defined as the re- production of patterns of relations including both ideational and material dimensions (Sewell 1992, 2005) – is thus to a certain degree always contested. Because structure both empowers and constraints agency, this dialectic dynamic continually questions the reproduction of structure and can modify structure and agency. Consequently, a focus on social practices is key for an understanding of structure and agency as well as their transformations. Approaches informed by practice theory focus on the asymmetrical relationships of power (Ortner 1984: 12; Wardlow 2006: 5). Sewell (2005: 145) stresses that “struc- tures, in short, empower agents differently, which also implies that they embody the desires, intentions, and knowledge of agents differently as well. Structures, and the human agencies they endow, are laden with differences of power”. To understand the interplay between the changes in wedding practices and marriage rates on the one hand and, on the other hand, the establishment of apartheid’s homelands and the emer- gence of localized elites, a closer look at the varying degrees of empowerment for different actors and groups of actors within specific structures and time periods seems to be especially important. By combining participant observation (which elicits in- formation on how actors maintain, transform and reinterpret relations within struc- tures) with life narratives (providing insight into women’s and men’s motivations, perceptions and legitimizations of their actions and life events), I grasp central facets of actors’ agencies. I also reflect on how life narratives are not “objective” sources on the course of people’s lives but are always framed by processes of memory and the current lifeworlds of the narrator. Structures that frame the agencies elicited in such a way are multidimensional, that is historical, economic, political, social, normative, demographic and ritual. The attempt to pay attention to multiple structures and their entanglements has been in- spired by Bourdieu’s (2008) analysis of French bachelors in rural Béarn and their difficulties of marrying. I try to capture the historic dimensions (and the differences of power within these) through the elicitation of the political economic history of the region and of how these macrostructures are reflected at the level of the household and the individual as, for example, in terms of the distribution of wealth and educa- tion. I also consider normative and social structures, especially in terms of gender, reproduction, family and kinship. Further, and in this I follow Emile Durkheim (1930) and Jennifer Johnson-Hanks (2007a), demographic rates like marriage rates are also 18 | The Decline of Marriage in Namibia considered as structures “evoking certain forms of action from individuals without individuals necessarily being aware of the rates or explicitly orienting their action toward them” (ibid: 3). However, similar to all other structures mentioned above, the reproduction of demographic structures is again dialectically interwoven with agency, thus demographic structures both shape and are shaped by individual agency. Conse- quently, my differentiation between the information I explicitly elicited on agency and the data I gathered on structure is somewhat artificial. Lastly, I carefully analyze ritual structures. Wedding practices have changed tre- mendously in Fransfontein over the past 40 years.1 Until the late 1960s, wedding and engagement practices had a relatively simple and inexpensive structure. From the 1970s onwards, these ritual structures have been successively appropriated by emerg- ing elites and thoroughly transformed in the process. Today, engagements and wed- dings have become the most important social sites to publicly demonstrate class dis- tinction. Weddings are now indicators of social class and stratification. SOCIAL CLASS AND CLASS DISTINCTIONS Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) has thoroughly analyzed the mechanisms of distinction used to sustain the reproduction of ruling classes, especially in his “ethnography of France”, a book on “distinctions” based on expressions of “taste” in France. Bourdieu distinguishes social position based on both cultural and economic capital and ex- pressed through different types of occupation from what he terms lifestyles.
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