“Many Divorces and Many Spinsters”: Marriage as an Invented Tradition in Southern Malawi, 1946-1999

Abstract

In the author’s 1999 interviews, elders in a district of southern Malawi insisted that the marriages of their children and grandchildren are a weakened and degenerate form of the marriages of their own youth. However, data from the 1940s shows that identical beliefs about marriage were held even then. Marriage is thus constantly presented as an institution in crisis, deteriorating from an Arcadian form located in the ever-receding past. The author uses an expansion of the notion of invented tradition to describe this historically consistent rhetorical presentation of marriage and suggests questions that this invented tradition presents for family historians.