Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the social, political, intimate, and ritual dimensions involved in the practices and representations of Lebanese couples who celebrate civil marriages out of Lebanon. This approach aims at shedding a new light on civil marriage beyond the dichotomy sectarianism/secularism.

Paper long abstract:

In Lebanon, the demand for civil marriage has ceaselessly generated conflicting feelings of hope and frustration. Because of a pluralistic system of personal status codes meant to guarantee sectarian difference, marriage in Lebanon can only be contracted religiously. Nevertheless, couples can marry civilly overseas (Cyprus being the preferred destination). This solution has contributed to shape collective practices of what I call a “deterritorialized marriage”. At the same time, civil marriage has become an important ground for a struggle between supposedly antagonist visions: sectarianism and secularism. The legalization of civil marriage has therefore been at the core of different civil society initiatives whose goal is to put an end to the confessional system and civil marriage winded up embodying the imaginary of a unified society to come. Nevertheless, it is also at the core of a social and commercial phenomenon, which deserves attention. How does the representation of civil marriage change when we move from activists to “moral activists” and regular people? What does civil marriage tell us about the transformation of intimate relationships, social change, and the invention of wedding rituals? Practices of civil marriage provide insights into the complex mechanisms of social reproduction and change. Rather than answering civil right activists’ expectations, they underlie the existing tensions between individual’s and families’ expectations, different moral orders, different ritual patterns and models of family-making, and the co-existence of different temporalities. Along with reproducing social differences, civil marriage represents an “infrastructure of possibilities” for new imaginaries of conjugal intimacy, gender and family-making.