| Titre | La traversée du champ matrimonial : un exemple alpin | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Claude Macherel | |
 |
Revue | Etudes rurales |
| Numéro | no 73, 1979 | |
| Page | 9-40 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Going through the Marriage Field: an Alpine Case Study.
The marriage field is that portion of social space where marriageable people move about. These suitors are at one and the same time the stakes economic and sexual of the competing desires which polarize the field, and the competitors on these stakes. The first part of the paper describes this field, as it was until the Second World War, in an European peasant society, the Loetschen valley, in the Upper-Valais. Its demographic and eco nomic aspects are broadly outlined. The detailed study of its ritual frame brings out two features of courtship (which was highly stylised, experienced in common and hence socially denned): flexibility and strain. These features were both from a symbolic and a practical point of view central to the periodical transformations imposed upon the Loetschen society by its three-stage seasonal morphology and by the sexual division of pastoral labour inherent to it.
The second part describes how the field was gone through, i.e. the sequence about ten years long, of initiatives and rites by means of which a man and a woman went from the state of frolicsome adolescents to that of settled adults. The changes of position of the actors passing through the rite were spelled out in the spatio-temporal structure of the matrimonial script. The analysis shows that these variations have to be precisely grasped in order to get at the rational of customs characteristics of a society where each marriage was contingent on the particular point of view of each party involved, the triple result of a one-way conquest, of a gift, and of a mutual preference. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
|
| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/rural_0014-2182_1979_num_73_1_2436 |
