Performing Marriage : Marriage Renewal Rituals as Cultural Performance

This interpretive study examined how the marriage renewal ritual reflects the social construction of marriage in the United States. Two culturally prominent ideologies of marriage were interwoven in our interviews of 25 married persons who had renewed their marriage vows: (a) a dominant ideology of community and (b) a more muted ideology of individualism. The ideology of community was evidenced by a construction of marriage featuring themes of public accountability, social embeddedness, and permanence. By contrast, the ideology of individualism constructed marriage around themes of love, choice, and individual growth. Most interpersonal communication scholars approach the study of marriage in one of two ways: (a) marriage as context, or (b) marriage as outcome. In contrast, in the present study we adopt an alternative way to envision marriage: marriage as cultural performance. We frame this study using two complementary theoretical perspectives: social constructionism and ritual performance theory. In particular, we examine how the cultural performance of marriage renewal rituals reflects the social construction of marriage in the United States. In an interpretive analysis of interviews with marital partners who had recently renewed their marriage vows, we examine the extent to which the two most prominent ideological perspectives on marriage—individualism and community—organize the meaning of marriage for our participants. B AXTE R AND B RAITHWAITE , SOUTHE RN C OM M UNICA TION J OURNA L 6 7 (2 0 0 2 ) 2 The Socially Contested Construction of Marriage Communication scholars interested in face-to-face interaction tend to adopt one of two general approaches to the study of marriage, what Whitchurch and Dickson (1999) have called the interpersonal communication approach and the family communication approach. The family communication approach, with which the present study is aligned, views communication as constitutive of the family. That is, through their communicative practices, parties construct their social reality of who their family is and the meanings that organize it. From this constitutive, or social constructionist perspective, social reality is an ongoing process of producing and reproducing meanings and social patterns through the interchanges among people (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1994). From a family communication perspective, marriage is thus an ongoing discursive accomplishment. It is achieved through a myriad of interaction practices, including but not limited to, private exchanges between husbands and wives, exchanges between the couple and their extended kinship and friendship networks, public and private rituals such as weddings and anniversaries, and public discourse by politicians and others surrounding family values. Whitchurch and Dickson (1999) argued that, by contrast, the interpersonal communication approach views marriage as an independent or a dependent variable whose functioning in the cause-and-effect world of human behavior can be determined. For example, interpersonal communication scholars often frame marriage as an antecedent contextual variable in examining how various communicative phenomena are enacted in married couples compared with nonmarried couples, or in the premarital compared with postmarital stages of relationship development. Interpersonal communication scholars often also consider marriage as a dependent variable in examining which causal variables lead courtship pairs to marry or keep married couples from breaking up, such as the extent to which such communication phenomena as conflict or disclosive openness during courtship predict whether a couple will wed. Advocates of a constitutive or social constructionist perspective argue that the discursive production and reproduction of the social order is far from the univocal, consensually based model that scholars once envisioned (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). Instead, the social world is a cross-current of multiple, often competing, conflictual perspectives. The social order is wrought from multivocal negotiations in which different interests, ideologies, and beliefs interact on an ongoing basis. The process of “social ordering” is not a monologic conversation of seamless coherence and consensus; rather, it is a pluralistic cacophony of discursive renderings, a multiplicity of negotiations in which different lived experiences and different systems of meaning are at stake (Billig, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton, & Radley, 1988; Shotter, 1993). As Bakhtin (1981) expressed: “Every concrete utterance . . . serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processes of centralization and decentralization, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance” (p. 272). Thus, interaction events are enacted dialogically, with multiple “voices,” or perspectives, competing for discursive dominance or privilege as the hegemonic, centripetal center of a given cultural conversation in the moment. Social life is a collection of dialogues between centripetal and centrifugal groups, beliefs, ideologies, and perspectives. B AXTE R AND B RAITHWAITE , SOUTHE RN C OM M UNICA TION J OURNA L 6 7 (2 0 0 2 ) 3 In modern American society, the institution of marriage is subject to endless negotiation by those who enact and discuss it. Existing research suggests that marriage is a contested terrain whose boundary is disputed by scholars and laypersons alike. One belief is that marriage is essentially the isolated domain of the two married spouses, a private haven separate from the obligations and constraints of the broader social order. The other belief is that marriage is a social institution that is embedded practically and morally in the broader society. Bellah and his colleagues (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985) have argued that this “boundary dispute” surrounding marriage reflects an omnipresent ideological tension in the American society that can be traced to precolonial times—a tension between the cultural strands of utilitarian/expressive individualism and moral/ social community. The marriage of utilitarian/expressive individualism emphasizes freedom from societal traditions and obligations, privileging instead its private existence in fulfilling the emotional and psychological needs of the two spouses. Marriage, according to this ideology, is not conceived as a binding obligation; rather, it is viewed as existing only as the expression of the choices of the free selves who constitute the union. Marriage is built on love for partner, expressive openness between partners, self-development, and self-gratification. It is a psychological contract negotiated between self-fulfilled individuals acting in their own self-interests. Should marriage cease to be gratifying to the selves in it, it should naturally end. Bellah et al. (1985) argue that this conception of marriage dominates the discursive landscape of modern American society, occupying, in Bakhtin’s (1981) terms, the centripetal center. By contrast, the moral/social community view of marriage emphasizes its existence as a social institution with obligations to uphold traditional values of life-long commitment and duty, and to cohere with other social institutions in maintaining the existing moral and social order. According to this second ideology, marriage is anchored by social obligation—expectations, duties, and accountabilities to others. In this way, marriage is grounded in its ties to the larger society and is not simply a private haven for emotional gratification and intimacy for the two spouses. Bellah et al. (1985) argue that this view of marriage, although clearly distinguishable in the discursive landscape of modern American society, occupies the centrifugal margin rather than the hegemonic center in modern social constructions of marriage in the United States. These two cultural ideologies of marriage also are readily identifiable in existing social scientific research on marital communication (Allan, 1993). The “private haven” ideology is the one that dominates existing research on communication in marriage (Milardo & Wellman, 1992). In this sort of research on marital communication, scholars draw a clear boundary demarcation around the spousal unit and proceed to understand how marriage works by directing their empirical gaze inward to the psychological characteristics of the two married persons and the interactions that take place within this dyad (Duck, 1993). By contrast, other more sociologically oriented scholars who study communication in marriage emphasize that the marital relationship is different from its nonmarital counterparts of romantic and cohabiting couples precisely because of its status as an institutionalized social unit (e.g., McCall, McCall, Denzin, Suttles, & Kurth, 1970). Scholars who adopt the latter view direct their empirical gaze outside marital dyads to examine how marriage is B AXTE R AND B RAITHWAITE , SOUTHE RN C OM M UNICA TION J OURNA L 6 7 (2 0 0 2 ) 4 enacted in the presence of societal influences, such as legitimization and acceptance of a pair by their kinship and friendship networks, and societal barriers to marital dissolution (e.g., Milardo, 1988). A third approach to the study of marriage is identifiable in the growing number of dialogically oriented scholars interested in communication in personal relationships who are pointing to the status of marriage as simultaneously a private culture of two as well as an institutionalized element of the broader social order (e.g., Brown, Airman, Werner, 1992; Montgomery, 1992). According to Shotter (1993) and Bellah et al. (1985), couples face this dilemma of double accountability on an ongoing basis. Although the ideology of utilitarian/expressive individualism is given dominance, “most Americans are, in fact, caught between ideals of freedom and obligation” (Bellah et al., p. 102). For example, Shotter