ABSTRACT
The institution of marriage has always, almost everywhere had its outlying areas, without obvious, demarcated and guarded borders. Terrains of marriage have not seldom been contested, and representatives of other institutions – political, religious, economic have at times been at a loss how to tread. In some parts of the world, with no religious interest in marriage and no civilian bureaucracy, like Siam and Burma a century or less ago, most people’s marriages were no more than actual cohabitation. The African practice, still in use if no longer generally accepted, of protracted negotiations and payments of bridewealth, leaves a large number of relationships on a contestable ground between marriage and non-marriage. The colonial invention, and the postcolonial legacy, of legal pluralism, between statutory law and ethno-religious ‘customary’ law, give rise to possible rival claims of marriage and non-marriage, on occasions of separation or death. The concubine of the Sinic civilizations was a sexual role, less than a married wife but (usually) more than a mistress, not to speak of a side affair, with certain publicly recognized rights. Post-colonial Latin American law accommodated from early on the widespread custom of informal unions among the popular classes and the subordinate ethnicities.
