Paper short abstract:

Marriage is not the same everywhere. However they are interpreted, conjugal ties as a mechanism of social reproduction can be used innovatively but can also prove to entail constraints whose violence can endure for a lifelong.

Paper long abstract:

Marriage is an institution that is not the same everywhere so that the concept of marriage used in different countries does not overlap homogeneously. Yet, however they are interpreted, conjugal ties as a mechanism of social reproduction keep being important elements of individual’s life and can be used innovatively to image lives completely different from those otherwise foreseeable in a given socio-economic and cultural context but can also prove to entail constraints whose violence can endure for a lifelong. This paper shall discuss different forms in which marriages have been seen as social ties crucial to social mobility and to mobility. Some examples will be discussed of southern Somali refugees in Tanzania, Kenya and the USA and their marriages. While, boys and girls refugees in Tanzania spent much effort to avoid the usual practice of arranged marriage to find ways to keep studying; others, as resettled refugees in the USA, do the same but with completely different results. If some refugee women in the USA tended to refuse arranged marriage and to follow their individual loving desires, a certain number of ex-refugees girls and boys, nowadays turned into American citizens, come back in Tanzania to look for their spouses. The panorama of choices made by a number of boys and girls of this group of refugees, part of whom resettled in Tanzania and part in the United States since the 2013, shows how powerful conjugal ties still are not only in the imagery of an African group but even more in the context of border regimes in which marriage is the only legal status that allows for an easier travelling across the borders. Conjugal ties being powerful factors of social change may also carry enduring structural violence.