Challenged manliness: A social and symbolic perspective on sexuality and divorce in Puerto Rico. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

This study is constituted, from a broad theoretical perspective, as an ethnographic exploration of the interaction between the social and the symbolic order, the way ideologies and symbolism inform and explain social actions as well as events, and how they are accommodated within the sociocultural field. The ubiquitous communion of the social and the symbolic order in gender organization and disorganization, and in society at large, is here established. Taking divorce and sexuality in Puerto Rico as paradigms of those broad interests, and illuminated by an exhaustive amount of data giving equal emphasis to both genders--15,000 survey-interviews around the island, hundreds of recorded life-stories, laws, judicial decisions, diverse unorthodox methods, procedures and sources, and related literature from Puerto Rico and abroad--gender organization, divorce, "divorcehood," and the place and meaning of sexuality in Puerto Rican culture are explained in non-traditional ways. For the extrication and resolution of these central issues, a theory of interconnected social and symbolic structural tensions, contradictions, and disfunctions operating in the gender structure was developed. This theory, based on overwhelming data, promises to have cross-cultural validity, and to be able to resolve the classic problem of the disjunction between norm and reality, at least in what the gender organization--especially gender partnership--is concerned. The theory also allows for thee development of an explanatory and cross-cultural model of the dynamic forces operating in the gender structure: either leading to the organization of the genders, or to their disorganization (marriage failure or divorce). Because Puerto Rico is dramatically searching for national identity and cultural roots while going through, and because of, an acute process of acculturation, this study is also an ethnographic incursion into the interaction between tradition and reconstruction. It allows for an overt and/or implicit reflection on the concept of Culture and cultures, in a rapidly changing world.