A Family Without Marriage - Marriage Without a Family: The Transition of the Institutional Foundations of the Family and Diversification of Social Reality

Abstract

This article explains the relationship between practices of marriage and family partnership and fatherhood and discursive self-referential identities. Self-reference of identity is considered as a way of self-expression of one’s personality in interpersonal relationships. The task is to comprehend the post-modern filling content of the studied practices, where the discursive of the self-referential identity plays a key role. The above, according to the author, allows to explain the social transition of the institutional foundations of the family and the diversification of social reality. The practices of marital and family partnership and parenthood reproduce the intentional meaningful motives of the subjects of practice and reveal the distinctive identities in them. According to the results of the analysis, there is a multidimensionality of studies, which proves the importance of clarifying both the reasons for their transformation and the social effect of their transformations. The “grounded theory” method was chosen to comprehend and select the tools for cognizing the studied practices as objects of analysis. The expediency of choosing a method is argued by the fact that data on nuclear categories are structured and elements that fit the goals of theoretical validation are built. A description of explicit models of self-referential identities is given, the functioning of which in the studied practices indicates the destruction of normativity. The essence of the transition of the institutional foundations of the family and the diversification of social reality is revealed. It is concluded that the paradigmatic transformation of the practice of marriage and family partnership and paternity significantly affects the structuring of sociality. Keywords: partnership practices; semantic polyphony; discursive self-referential identity; socio-cultural singularity.