Search Results (5)

During the pandemic, Hungary was the only country in the world where the number of marriages not only decreased but also increased. Parallel to this, in the five years prior to the pandemic there were not as many divorces in Hungary as afterwards. Every year since late socialism, there were at least 10,000 fewer new marriages than marriages ending in divorce or death; a trend that was broken in 2019 when the government introduced new loans for married people at a favorable interest rate, representing a quasi-money injection to support people officially getting married (instead of merely cohabiting). Based on my digital anthropological research, I focus on the complex relationship between getting married and the end-of-marriage rituals. I found that the changes in the meanings of marriage influenced not only getting married but also the eventual end-of-marriage rituals. All these factors, as well as the specific reasons for divorce and separation (e.g., the desire to remarry), are related to the way in which end-of-marriage rituals are scripted and interpreted. Full article

Scholarship in pilgrimage studies suggests that people use travel to sacred sites to mark life transitions such as moving into adulthood, retirement, the death of a loved one, or the ending of an intimate relationship. This research has also illustrated how walking pilgrimage can provide physical and symbolic structures for individual therapeutic and spiritual practice. However, pilgrimage scholars have not put the experience of ending long-term partnerships at the center of analysis, and family scholars have yet to explore how people might use extended walking pilgrimage as ritual when relationships end. Recent scholarship in pilgrimage studies has called for a more dynamic and inclusive approach that highlights the multiple and varied social forces at work in travel to and around sacred spaces. I draw from existing empirical studies, recent theory in pilgrimage studies, the literature addressing divorce rituals, and my qualitative document analysis of published narratives of extended walking after ending long-term partnerships to identify important sociological questions, methods, and perspectives for future research. Full article

In Western culture, divorce is becoming a transition event in individual life courses. As a result, it starts to be celebrated in ritual forms. In Italy, divorce is still a highly deritualized event from both civil and religious perspectives, although the transformations that make divorce a transition event have been occurring in recent years. This article depicts the complexities of divorce in a society such as Italy, where instances of social change coexist with strong elements of tradition. Emerging cultural practices related to couple dissolution in both formal and informal contexts are discussed. Structural determinants emerge as a force that can contribute to shaping the divorce rite as a new rite of passage. Full article

Divorce emerges as a phenomenon in counterpoint to marriage, both terms representing processes or phases of interaction punctuated by moments of completion and transition to further phases. We can make an initial distinction between divorce, viewed as undoing of preceding phases, and marriage, viewed as prospective of moving into a new relationship. Both divorce and marriage may carry different meanings depending on the wider culture in which they occur. Where marriage comes into being via a series of reciprocal transactions of wealth objects, divorce correspondingly consists of the undoing of such transactions, with the aim of creating a new order of relationships. This process can, in turn, itself vary as it turns on emotional manifestations between the parties involved, sometimes connected with the presence of offspring, as in the case of the Nuer people of South Sudan, among whom a wife does not shift to her husband’s settlement place until the couple have a child. The question of transactions goes with the significance of the wider kin networks in which marriages and divorces are regulated. All in all, our paper examines a counterpoint between legal and emotional aspects of both marriage and divorce, raising issues about what a marriage is and what constitutes a divorce, together with nuances of ritual processes that mark pathways between these categories. We draw on ethnography from Pacific cultures, especially Papua New Guinea, and from Africa, to explore these processes. Full article

End-of-relationship rituals are not respected within Protestant churches. Therefore, many church websites emphasize that there are no official divorce rituals to this day. This is despite the fact that there are numerous impulses for divorce rituals, some of which are also firmly established in church practice. Practitioners who devote themselves to these rituals often have to be innovative. This article presents three unpublished drafts for separation rituals, which are understood as expressions of ritual design. Experiences from academic teaching show that the field divorce rituals is particularly suitable for initiating learning processes on ritual design, a skill of great importance for future pastors. Although divorce rituals are unpopular now, they are likely to become part of the standard repertoire of churches soon. Full article