At the risk of having the carpet pulled from under us by the Wikiwhatnot Revolution, which we stand assured heralds the second coming of the cereal packet family, it probably makes sense to try to locate our homegrown 'divorce debate' within a broader framework.

For, while there is a general worldwide consensus that divorce is a civil right, the same cannot be said of the various forms of legislation that regulate it. As laws inevitably are, each variant is historically rooted in some sort of moral, economic, and political compost. Simply put, marriage (and divorce) legislation is always a product of a way of thinking about the family.

It pays to think about these ways of thinking. Durham anthropologist Bob Simpson has done just that, and much of his work deals with divorce, kinship, and relationship breakdown in 'Western' societies. I find it all very applicable to our situation, and in what follows I'll borrow some of it.

In contemporary Malta (and for once we are not alone), the dominant bourgeois model is that of the nuclear family. Our language reflects this. Take the expression 'broken families', for example - or, as a pundit recently put it, 'the broken vase'.

The term essentially assumes that once a relationship between man and wife goes pear-shaped, 'the family' is finished. Irrespective of any children there might be, or of the broader relations between former in-laws, the breakdown of one relationship is equated with the collapse of a whole family structure, if not a whole society.

Words like 'custody', 'maintenance', and 'child support' complete the picture. Thus, living with one's children becomes 'custody', feeding one's family 'maintenance', and so forth. Interestingly, the model is not the prerogative of the doomsayers. Notions of 'moving on' and 'starting a new life', both staples of the pro-divorce camp, belong squarely within it.

Trouble is that all of this flies in the face of the evidence on the ground. While talk of ex-this-and-that is quite fashionable in 30-something circles somehow spoiling for a second round, I have yet to meet an 'ex-father' or 'ex-grandma'.

It would also be interesting in the Maltese context to enquire about, say, 'ex-ħaten' (ħaten means brother-in-law, a relation which is often socially and economically significant in the long term - ħaten may hunt together or run a joint business, for example).

The point is that the vase may not be so shattered after all, and moving on not as simple as the pop lyrics would have it. As the standard sermon of family court judges goes, 'you may no longer be husband and wife, but you will be mum and dad for the rest of your lives'. We might add 'you may no longer be in-laws, but you will be grandma and grandad'. And so forth.

There is some confusion here between 'family' and 'the family'. The latter is the simpler sibling, and is usually taken to mean the nuclear family. The former is broader, and refers to what we may call kinship, that is, a nexus of blood and marital relations, patterns of residence and inheritance, and their relation to an economic and social context. When we say (ad nauseam) that 'the family is the bedrock of society', we probably mean the latter - rather than the nuclear family in the narrow sense.

Once we broaden our definition of family, we find that the implications of couple separation and divorce are not necessarily as drastic as they seem. On many counts, in fact, kinship may weather the squall rather well. Contemporary Western societies seem to be nearing a point where divorce and family survival and/or reconstitution become almost standard fixtures of the typical life history, rather than anomalous events. The crucial point is that separation and divorce do not bring about the end of kinship, but rather its re-definition. Bob Simpson talks of the 'unclear' family replacing the 'nuclear' one - but both are families.

The evidence is out there. For starters, societies with a high rate of marital separation - which, to mention the unmentionable, include Malta - do not collapse into some sort of primordial soup where people no longer belong to families and chaos takes over. On the contrary, the trend is for people with personal histories of separation to stretch their resources (time, money and so forth) so as to try to position themselves within networks of 'unclear' yet meaningful family ties.

Take the common scenario of a cohabiting couple where each of the partners is separated and has children from a previous marriage. Each side may be at the same time a father/mother to their natal children and 'like a father/mother' to the natal children of their partner.

If children are born to this new setup, the network becomes even more complex. Which is to say that, even as the 'traditional' nuclear family collapses, new and interesting family structures come into being. They may or may not be rewarding to the people involved, but who said that the traditional nuclear family is all smiles?

Our courts are crawling with cases involving estranged siblings squabbling over a few tumoli of land or some other paltry inheritance. Our old people's homes are full of men and women who haven't had a visit from their children in months. Most of these were raised in traditional nuclear families.

In spite of the evidence - local and otherwise - pointing towards the endurance of family, we persist in pig-headed talk of broken vases, shattered families, and impending social doom. Would it be too much to suggest that intelligent divorce legislation, rather than wax desperate over the passing of the cereal packet, might instead take into account contemporary kinship structures? They may not be 'the family', but are still very much 'family'.

mafalzon@hotmail.com