Preliminary Programme

The common notion is that non-marital and pre-marital cohabitation are relatively recent phenomena even in the Northern European Countries where pre-marital cohabitation is presently a norm. The notion has been supported in Finland by referring to the few existing twentieth century studies which indicate that non-marital cohabitation was rare until the late 1970s. Much of the available evidence supports the idea that non-marital cohabitation has indeed not been common since the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, there is at least one remarkable exception. In Kitee, an eastern Finnish church parish, a conflict emerged in the late eighteenth century between the rector of the parish and a relatively large number of couples who were cohabiting without being married. Based on existing documents a sizeable proportion of all the couples living in the parish appeared to have been unmarried. Some of them had a large number of children indicating that cohabitation had already continued for a longer period of time. This paper gives first on account of what is known about non- and pre-marital cohabitation in historical Finland. Second, the case of the parish of Kitee will be analyzed in greater detail focusing on the number of cohabiting couples and their socio-economic characteristics. Third, the reasons for non-marital cohabitation will be examined, and lastly, the attempts of the Lutheran state church to uproot this sinful and illegal habit will be discussed. (Show less)

Pre-marital cohabitation, often called “Trial Marriage,” has been widely observed by ethnographers among the contemporary Indian population of the Bolivian Andes. Yet, the existence of such a phenomenon during the period of Spanish Colonial rule (XVI-XVIII centuries) has not been proven due to the lack of available sources. The earliest colonial censuses did list “non-married” couples as part of the tolerance towards “non-Christian” practices that prevailed until the 1570s. But after that date, conformity to Catholic norms became officially compulsory. Thus, censuses, drawn up for tax purposes, begun to list “households” assuming that all couples were actually married by the Church.
As a by-product of an on-going research into Indian Marriage strategies in terms of kinship, carried out in collaboration between the PROHAL (University of Buenos Aires) and the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale (Collège de France/EHESS/CNRS), we came across a new type of source in Bolivian archives. These were the individual marriage dispensations applied for by Indians. These sources, well-known in Europe and extensively used by Social Historians, had been ignored in Latin America by historians, anthropologists, and demographers. One of the reasons why they may have been overlooked was the general dispensation granted to Indians by the Pope in 1537 that lowered the marriage prohibition level from the fourth to the second degree of consanguinity and affinity. Thus, social scientists assumed that individual Indians, as opposed to Spanish colonists and their descendants, had no need to apply for individual dispensations.
These dispensations discuss at length individual practices of pre-marital cohabitation. In many cases, those practices constitute the very reason why the dispensation is sought, i.e. one of the would-be spouses had lived with a relative of the other (sibling, cousin, uncle,, etc.) and he/she requested the dispensation ex fornicatione or ex copula illicita. In other cases, the would-be spouses tell about the years they had been living together, the number of children they had, etc. as a way of emphasizing the benefits the whole “family” would receive from a grant to get married.
Our paper will attempt, through a qualitative analysis of these sources, to shed light on the reasons for pre-marital cohabitation among the Indian population of the Bolivian Andes during the colonial period. (Show less)