This article examines the persistent authority of lobola, the customary practice for forming marriages in many South African communities. South African marriage rates have sharply fallen, and many blame this on economic challenges completing lobola. Using in‐depth, qualitative research from a village in KwaZulu‐Natal, where lobola demands are the country's highest and marriage rates its lowest, I argue that lobola's authority survives because lay actors have innovated new approaches for pursuing emerging desires for marriage via lobola. I argue that dyadic narratives of marriage increasingly circulate alongside “traditional” extended‐family narratives, especially among the young women who strongly support lobola while yearning for gender‐egalitarian marriages. My argument synthesizes actor‐oriented analyses of legal pluralism with Ewick and Silbey's theorization of lay actors’ role in producing legality to illuminate how lay actors contribute not only to the form and content of different legal systems, but also to the reach of their authority.

This paper examines contemporary struggles over same-sex marriage in the daily lives of black lesbian-and gay-identified South Africans. Based primarily on 21 in-depth interviews with such South Africans drawn from a larger project on post-apartheid South African marriage, I argue that their current struggles for relationship recognition share much in common with contemporaneous struggles of their heterosexual counterparts, and that these commonalities reflect ongoing tensions between more extended-family and more dyadic understandings of African marriage. The increasing influence of dyadic understandings of marriage, and of associated ideals of romantic love, has helped inspire same-sex marriage claims and, in many cases, facilitate their acceptance. At the same time, continuing contestation over such understandings helps drive instances of opposition. KEYWORDS same-sex marriage; romantic love; lesbian and gay identities; kinship; South Africa

Sociology in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring everyday understandings of marriage among two sets of people recently incorporated into South African marriage law: residents of rural African communities governed by customary law, and people identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. He can be reached at myarbrough@jjay.cuny.edu. ABSTRACT While conjugal-recognition policies are often a subject of political debate, scholars rarely attempt to explain the causal roots of such policies. When they do, their methods typically focus on discrete policies in isolation-same-sex marriage, no-fault divorce, etc.-with comparatively little investigation of potential connections among policies. This article begins to develop a more holistic approach focused on identifying and explaining what I call conjugal-recognition regimes. Adapting the concept from the existing literature on welfare regimes, I argue that conjugal-recognition regimes exist when an identifiable pattern or principle organizes an institution's conjugal-recognition policies. Such regimes shape social relations at multiple levels, both between the individuals in conjugal relationships and among the multiple institutions (state, religious, and so on) that confer official conjugal recognition.

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