Narendra Subramanian
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804788786
- eISBN:
- 9780804790901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804788786.003.0002
- Subject:
- Law, Family Law
Centralizing states appropriated the authority of kin groups and ethnic and religious institutions over family life to varying degrees. The ways they regulated family and intimacy did not depend on ...
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Centralizing states appropriated the authority of kin groups and ethnic and religious institutions over family life to varying degrees. The ways they regulated family and intimacy did not depend on whether they claimed commitments to secularism or whether family laws were framed in culturally specific discourses. Salient discourses about nations and their constituent cultural groups and traditions interacted with social structure, the nature of state-society engagements under predecessor regimes, the coalitions regimes aim to build, and regime projects to change state-society relations. These interactions influenced approaches to form citizens, recognize cultures, and make families. The chapter demonstrates that this new version of the state-in-society approach to social analysis explains the extent to which regimes changed the personal laws they inherited, the effects of these changes on women's rights, the autonomy of individuals, the nuclear family, sources of family law, and the extent of legal pluralism.Less
Centralizing states appropriated the authority of kin groups and ethnic and religious institutions over family life to varying degrees. The ways they regulated family and intimacy did not depend on whether they claimed commitments to secularism or whether family laws were framed in culturally specific discourses. Salient discourses about nations and their constituent cultural groups and traditions interacted with social structure, the nature of state-society engagements under predecessor regimes, the coalitions regimes aim to build, and regime projects to change state-society relations. These interactions influenced approaches to form citizens, recognize cultures, and make families. The chapter demonstrates that this new version of the state-in-society approach to social analysis explains the extent to which regimes changed the personal laws they inherited, the effects of these changes on women's rights, the autonomy of individuals, the nuclear family, sources of family law, and the extent of legal pluralism.
