Les marâtres 2: Families, places and heritage

The "Marâtres" project is a transperiodic social anthropology project, from Antiquity to the present day, open to literary, sociological and legal approaches, which aims to question the social and mental construction of the stepmother, the stigmatizing and stigmatized figure of the father's second wife. A first scientific meeting (Arras, 2022) focused on linking the study of words and representations associated with the second wife with that of the family forms and kinship system in which they are embedded. Spatio-temporal frameworks and approaches were deliberately diverse in order to grasp in what social, cultural and economic, relational and affective configurations the subsequent wife becomes a stepmother, and why. This second symposium intends to extend the reflection by focusing on the living conditions of "stepmother families". In particular, it seeks to explore the forms of family recomposition, the places of life and death for recomposed families, as well as the role of heritage, both tangible and intangible, in family recomposition, whether peaceful or conflictual.