Abstract
This chapter challenges the view that the persistence of macro-social division is a product of unchanging identities. It presents a type of experiment. It takes very similar mixed marriage individuals who are as if immune to ethnic solidarity in three contrasting research sites and compares their narratives of identity change. If division is a product of unchanging ethnic identities, then these ‘non-ethnic’ respondents should narrate similar processes of change in each research site. If it is due to socio-cultural obstacles to sustaining change, then the Northern Ireland respondents should narrate much greater difficulties than the others. The latter is the case. Identity change is difficult to sustain in divided societies even for the most open of individuals because it involves challenging and changing basic values and assumptions without institutional support or cultural signposts. Social division persists not because identity is static but because it changes, and the identity changes cannot be sustained.
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Notes
- 1.
JF2CB01.
- 2.
JJM2CN05; JJF2PN05.
- 3.
LF1WPC1.
- 4.
I do not here enter discussions of concepts of intermarriage, mixed marriage, mixité (Rodrigues Garcia 2015). For the purposes of this book—which is concerned with major socio-cultural divisions—it is marriage or partnership across such division. In Ireland and in the Gard Protestant-Catholic marriage is mixed, although in the Gard the salience of these identities and the related division is decreasing.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Statistics are difficult because census and survey questions capture at once too few mixed marriages (they miss those where one partner has converted) and too many (they capture some interdenominational marriages between for example Episcopalians and Presbyterians). See Compton and Coward (1989) and Moxon Browne (1983), pp. 129–130. Those reporting a spouse of a ‘different religion’ rose from 9% to 12% between 1998 and 2005, with 8.5% in the 2001 census. One expert estimate in the mid 2000s was at 11%: thanks to communication from Peter Morriss.
- 10.
On the importance of this for the meaning and social impact of mixed marriage, see Medding et al. 1992, who take as example Jewish/non Jewish mixed marriages.
- 11.
Otherwise they did not see themselves, nor were they seen, as in a mixed marriage and thus were very difficult to access.
- 12.
Particularly in the Gard, some mixed marriage partners were also children and/or parents of mixed marriage partners.
- 13.
JM2BPD01.
- 14.
For more detail on these interviews, interview schedule and interviewers, and the differences between cases, see Appendix, pp. 242–249.
- 15.
Ruane 2014a. It is not possible to be more precise. The wider sample was not designed to access identity change, nor has it been analysed with this question in mind. The wider population includes many who have totally distanced themselves from religion and for whom identity and identity change is not focused on Protestant/Catholic difference.
- 16.
The distinction is between those who change in a major, significant, or major-significant way (boxes E, F, I in Table 5.1, p. 106) and those who change in a minor or minor-significant way (boxes A, B, D in Table 5.1, p. 106).
- 17.
JF2CB01.
- 18.
In the Republic of Ireland, LF1WPC1, LM1WCC1; in the North, TF1MCA15.
- 19.
JJM2PN03.
- 20.
JJM2PN03, JJF2CN03.
- 21.
The flexibility of the Irish churches varies by local area and by cleric, but even in the 2000s there was significantly less openness than in France. See Garrigan 2010.
- 22.
JF2CB01.
- 23.
3 couples and one individual respondent used phrases like ‘en recherche’, spoke of refashioning values in evangelical activity, or rediscovering and refining truths from their heritage. JJM2CN01, JJF2PN01; JJF2PN05; JJM2CN05; JJF2PN06 JJM2XN06; JF2PA01.
- 24.
JF2PCD01; JM2BPD01.
- 25.
JF2PPBO1; JM2PCB01.
- 26.
JF2PB03.
- 27.
Of course individuals in France experience tragic events and undergo moral crises, but these were not presented as an inherent part of their journey of reflexive change.
- 28.
3 couples took this route in the Gard: in one of these interviews there was ongoing dialogue where one spouse questioned some of the universalistic claims of the other.
- 29.
The exact phrasing, translated in the text above, was as follows: ‘.. je pense que ça répond à des valeurs qui, pour moi, ont été données par des ancêtres qui étaient protestants. Alors est-ce que j’ai assimilé ça à la religion protestante ou est-ce que c’était les valeurs de mes grands-parents en tant qu’êtres humains? Je sais pas. Mais moi, c’est comme ça que je le traduis, c’est comme ça que je le ressens’ JJF2PN04.
- 30.
JJM2CNO4.
- 31.
Similarly a working class couple find the same universalistic principles in one spouse’s Protestantism and the other’s trade union values. JJM2CN06; JJF2PN06.
- 32.
This is comparable to the Quebec case, see LeGall and Meintel 2015.
- 33.
JM3SBP01.
- 34.
Such terms were common in the narratives of a third of mixed marriage respondents in Northern Ireland, none in the Gard. In the Irish state, Protestant-English/Catholic-Irish mixed marriages occasionally came close to the Northern Irish model. The difference is specific to these respondents. In general, Northern Irish respondents reported and expressed no more anguish than did respondents elsewhere; only those undertaking the most change did so and only when describing the process of identity change.
- 35.
So for example Susan, in Chap. 4, finds herself questioning the choices she had made and the values she had held for over 30 years.
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Todd, J. (2018). Situated Cosmopolitans: Mixed Marriage Individuals and the Obstacles to Identity Change. In: Identity Change after Conflict. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98503-9_7
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