Goody - Bao

One of the first questions that came to mind as I was reading the Goody article was in regard to the written norms versus the common norms within a society and how it was possible that the values of different levels of society differed based on their familial obligations. It was particularly interesting to me to see that the Church also attempted to instill in people what they believed to be the proper way of marriage and that there was still as significant percentage of individuals carrying on what they had always been doing. In that sense, does that outcast them from the society that the Church was trying to build? Or rather, why did the Church instill such strict rules of marriage if they knew that people were still going to hold on to their own practices? It seems strange to me to think that the Church was dominant in the religious aspect if its teachings were not necessarily followed or adhered to by the people they were supposedly guiding. It would make more sense, perhaps, for the Church to have legitimized the practices of the lay population rather than trying to get them to conform to their own opinion of a proper moral society. While it seems important to have some type of structured social system, the article suggests that the Church was aware of the populations not following the standard, and yet they didn't seem to do much about it other than try to shift public notions regarding marrying close relatives, remarrying, divorce, etc - things which now have different meanings associated. It is very interesting to see the changes across time and across populations because it seems that the mentality behind what is socially acceptable and unacceptable depends a great deal on the influential players which, in this case, was religion, but can extend to other things like environment, housing, culture, etc.