1930s-1940s: (Plasaj as Honorable Union — Lescot’s Term Polygamy Being a Reference to Plasaj the Common-Law Marriage That Could but Did Not Always Involve Mu…

1930s-1940s: (Plasaj as Honorable Union — Lescot’s Term Polygamy Being a Reference to Plasaj the Common-Law Marriage That Could but Did Not Always Involve Multiple Partners, in Lescot’s Formulation Plasaj Not Being an Honorable Union — but Like Legal Marriage in the 1930s and 1940s Plasaj Involving an Extensive Contract Negotiation and Gift Exchange Between Families and a Courting Process Often Preceded by Rinmin and Fiyansé, Comhaire-Sylvain Asserting That Plasaj Was a Form of Marriage Recognized in Peasant Society and Completely Respectable from the Sociological Point of View as Civil Marriage): Lescot’s declaration also indicated that combating what he called “polygamy” was a primary reason for the change in legislation. His term was a reference to plasaj, the common-law marriage that could but did not always involve multiple partners. In Lescot’s formulation, plasaj was not an honorable union. But like legal marriage, in the 1930s and 1940s plasaj involved an extensive contract negotiation and gift exchange between families, and a courting process that was often preceded by other noncontractual conjugal relationships including rinmin (to date) and fiyansé (to be engaged). Comhaire-Sylvain asserted that plasaj was a form of marriage recognized in peasant society and completely respectable from the sociological point of view — the president dismissed as disorder what the ethnographer documented as order, the state unable or unwilling to recognize a legal architecture that preceded and would outlast its own.