Original scientific paper
EXAMINATION OF THE APPROACH IN THE RESEARCH OF IRREGULAR FORM OF PRE-NUPTIAL AND NUPTIAL LIFE FROM THE EXAMPLE OF KRIVI PUT
SANJA LONČAR
Abstract
This paper is a result of the classification and interpretation of data about the irregular forms of pre-nuptial and nuptial life, which were collected during field research in the area of Krivi Put (Alan, Podbilo, Krivi Put, Mrzli Dol, Veljun) during 2003-2005. The following events were focussed on in the research: the kidnapping of a girl, agreed taking away or running away of a girl, co-habitation and common-law marriage, trail marriage, a girl who is a refugee, public disgracing and buying of girl. Field research showed that the understanding and interpretation of these events demands knowledge of a wide, historical-cultural context inside which they existed. They also showed that recorded examples from the field are almost impossible to ‘fit in’ into existing expert terminology and categories. In this way the new data served as an instrument for the examination of old interpretation. In this paper the author examined the way of data collection and correct use of expert terminology related to irregular form of pre-nuptial and nuptial life. Attempts of defining the data led to a conclusion that systemizing and interpretation are inevitable and necessary in any scientific work, but they are not everlasting and universal. Therefore a non-critical taking and implementation of data collected in any locality and any time period is unjustified. The sayings collected in the research led to a conclusion that the carriers of the culture already have local names and their own division which needed to be recognised and that it would be wrong to take data and distribute it automatically in a pre-existing form which is brought from outside i.e. from some other culture. These were the exact reasons to represent this data collected during the fieldwork like stories while they were recorded. In this way storytellers could speak and interpret some events from the history of their own community. Data from the area of Krivi Put confirmed the existence of an agreed kidnap of a girl or a running away of a girl, a common-law marriage and some sorts of trail marriage (proba). A list of variation in the local names for the mentioned events was also recorded. Collected data about existence of a form of pre-nuptial life in which the quality of a girl was examined, and which were called proba, can be related to data collected in the areas of Senj Bilo, Lika and Novska. Therefore we can conclude that the presumptions about the existence of a phenomena which in expert literature was most often mentioned as a probation marriage, cannot be completely ignored. Other phenomena, which were also researched as irregular forms of pre-nuptial and nuptial life (kidnapping, co-habitation, a girl as a refugee, public disgracing and buying of a girl), were not confirmed but they were important stimulation for sayings, which completed the picture of sociological and cultural contexts. Amongst other problems in the work are co-habitation and common-law marriages. Although some authors have emphasised the introduction of a civil wedding as an obligatory form of marriage conclusion, in 1946, in defining and interpreting unmarried marriages, here it is necessary to emphasise that the problems of relations between unmarried marriages and (official) marriage had appeared before. In 1946 in Croatia there did not exist any unified family law. In this way even the members of the same religion had to pass through different laws related to any marriage conclusion in different areas. It is necessary to take into consideration such facts in research of this kind of subjects.
Keywords
pre-nuptial and nuptial life; Krivi Put
Hrčak ID:
17766
URI
Publication date:
30.12.2005.
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