Abstract
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 benefits as spouses. Rather, in a context of patriarchal relations, gender-based violence and economic dispossession, women seek to maintain potential financial grounds through insurance resources, acknowledge their children’s paternity, and fulfil enduring obligations to in-laws by partially contributing to the eventual funerals of their spouses and kin.
Department
Anthropology
Publication Date
8-2016
Journal Title
Social Dynamics
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Golomski, Casey, "Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement in an African Insurance Market" (2016). Social Dynamics. 9.
https://scholars.unh.edu/anth_facpub/9
Included in
African Languages and Societies Commons, African Studies Commons, Civil Law Commons, Domestic and Intimate Partner Violence Commons, Family Law Commons, Family, Life Course, and Society Commons, Insurance Law Commons, Law and Gender Commons, Law and Society Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Women's Studies Commons
Comments
This is an Author’s Original Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in X in Y, available online: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2016.1197510