Is it enough to talk of marriage as a process? Legitimate co-habitation in Umlazi, South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some 65 years ago Radcliffe-Brown wrote that marriage is “not an event or a condition but a developing process.” This position became modified two decades later when John Comaroff and Simon Roberts demonstrated the ambiguity of the process of marriage in order to challenge the dominant “jural” view. This article argues that these insights still hold well, but that in an era of very low marriage rates in Southern Africa the processual approach is in need of revisiting. Based on research in Umlazi township, Durban, it explores the rise of legitimate co-habitation whereby relatively small amounts of bridewealth-related payments can enable a couple to live together. Such relations are located in what appears to be a growing social space between “full” marriage and ukukipita, a term suggesting illegitimate cohabitation. Instead of evaluating legitimate cohabitation in terms of whether or not it represents a road to marriage, the article stresses how it reconfigures gender and family relationships and enables access to land and housing. The article concludes that marriage remains a critical symbolic marker in all relationships, but that South Africans are finding innovative ways to cohabit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".