- The Decline of Marriage in Namibia: Kinship and Social Class in a Rural Community by Julia Pauli
In the last sentence of her book, Julia Pauli says it all, albeit too modestly: "… the vantage point of marriage has enabled me to understand how, over the last 60 years, class formation has been entangled with a decline in marriage in Namibia" (18). This book is a veritable tour de force through the analysis of marriage in African Studies, which Pauli resuscitates from its image of being an outmoded genre and builds onto by providing the latest theoretical addition. It is an intricate analysis of how transformations in Namibian marriage practices have been framed and structured by dramatic political and economic changes in the twentieth century, and thus how the vantage point of marriage is a productive tool from which to study how personal experiences reflect larger social shifts. In 2004, Pauli and her young family left for Fransfontein, a typical Namibian town, to study the vast difference in the number of marriages between the younger generation, of whom 30 percent were married, and those sixty years and older, of whom 70 percent were married.
Namibia has perhaps a different kind of status compared to many countries in Africa, as it gained independence relatively late, in 1990. From the early twentieth century, when German colonialists created reserves and forced the local people to live there, to the creation of homelands during apartheid and the South African annexation, to the freedom from colonial rule and participation in the post-Cold War globalization and liberalization of the economy, Namibia's social fabric has absorbed many political, economic, and social shocks, generating a wide range of outcomes for it citizens. Across these eras, marriage has changed from an almost universal practice and a collectively experienced rite of passage to a celebration of difference and distinction by a small elite. Since the 1960s, people have increasingly delayed marriage, and with regard to the current era, Pauli speaks of a "growing group of non-married (and probably never-to-be-married) Fransfonteiners" (16).
Methodologically the book is exceptional; it combines qualitative longerterm fieldwork that captures people's life histories with quantitative household surveys. It is a pleasure to read this mix of methods and the insights it generates, [End Page E57] and it is a great example of resuscitating another forgone scholarly practice, the use of mixed methods for generating knowledge to write a monograph.
The book is divided into three parts. Part I provides the outline of the study as well as the historical, political, and economic contexts of Namibia, and Pauli eloquently describes societal changes from the perspective of three generations. Part II zooms in on marriage practices and how the marriage rates of poorer people and wealthier people have grown apart. It analyzes how marriage has become a manifestation of class distinction. Part III tackles the main consequences of the decline of marriage and how marriage, sexuality, and reproduction have been entangled and disentangled across time.
The decline in the rates of formal marriage is of course food for thought about the definition of marriage. From the intimate meeting of partners to the formal conclusion of such a union, marriage has (always had) different meanings for different people in different contexts. Pauli's book is an important addition to the literature on marriage in Africa, as she analyzes how marriage has never been the stable foundation of kinship and society that earlier scholarship believed. Pauli distinguishes four meta-narratives on marriage in African Studies and adds a new one based on her own work: the idea of the stable African marriage; the dissolution of the "African" marriage; change in African marriage and kinship; the fluidity and plurality of African marriage; and lastly, Pauli's addition, an emerging narrative on the dramatic increase in wedding expenses with the parallel decline in formal marriages. This conclusion calls for more comparative research, as the decline in formal...