De rol van dooppeet. Of over de integratie van een niet-familiale rol in de structuur van het verwantschapssysteem

Samenvatting

The original significance of the role of godparent as a guarantor of his godchild's loyalty to the Roman-Catholic Church & as an educator of his godchild has waned in modern society. How then can its persistence be accounted for? Despite the fact that the catechumenate, to which originally godparenthood related most closely, entered a period of progressive decay after the persecutions of Christians by Roman authorities, godparenthood continued an independent existence without instrumental significance, because it had gradually gained a sufficiently important place in the system of expressive symbols of the Christian community to compensate for & survive the loss of its manifest functionality. The integrative function of the institution of godparenthood has been transferred from the ecclesiastical to the familial social system: godparenthood mainly functions as a channel of expressive-symbolic interaction among the members of a family of orientation after some of them, namely the children, have formed their own family of procreation. This development is directly related to the normative regulation of the allocation of the godparent role. Finally, the problem is put in a wider theoretical perspective, namely in the context of E. Durkheim's 'law of contraction.' AA.