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- Convenors:
-
Janet Carsten
(University of Edinburgh)
Julia Pauli (University of Hamburg)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel seeks to explore the place of marriage in the ways people constitute and reconstitute social worlds. The papers will make connections between the emergence of new forms of intimate relations and more overtly political transformations.
Long Abstract:
How do marriage and conjugality provide insights into the creation and experience of hope, transformation and social change? How does marriage intersect with wider configurations and reconfigurations of politics, religion, economics, and relatedness? This panel seeks to explore the place of marriage in the ways people constitute and reconstitute social worlds. Classical anthropological analyses of marriage emphasised its role in forging ties between groups. In contrast, contemporary marriage often emerges in popular discourse as a shared individual 'project' on which a couple must work. Rejecting this apparent bifurcation, our panel seeks to join personal trajectories with social projects held in common. Struggles over same-sex marriage, for example, demonstrate its potency as a civil rights issue that indexes ideas about legality, generation, ritual forms, morality, religion, procreation, 'race', ethnicity, and gender. Taking marriage to encompass relations between spouses as well as relations beyond the conjugal couple - including those within and between generations - this panel will consider how marriage is implicated in life stories and social histories, and in the imagination of new and alternative futures. Going beyond the binaries of 'tradition' and 'innovation', the panel will explore how marriage involves comparative evaluations and judgments undertaken within and between couples, families, generations, and wider polities. The papers will thus make connections between the emergence of new forms of intimate relations and more overtly political transformations.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Despite very low marriage rates, middle-class Namibians feel entitled to marry. The paper explores how through the (non-)marital histories of one’s parents, this privilege is being legitimized.
Paper long abstract:
Within only fifty years, marriage in Namibia has changed from an inexpensive and common institution into a costly and exclusive celebration of status of the emerging middle- and upper-classes. I was thus surprised when most of my interlocutors in Namibia’s capital Windhoek in 2015 and 2016 told me that of course they knew that they would marry. In my paper, I explore how my interlocutors justified this conviction. A central threat of their reasoning dealt with their parents’ marriages or non-marriages, always also considering the parents’ social class. Interlocutors with married parents perceived their parents’ marriages as moral justifications for their own privileges and their entitlement to marry. Contrary to this, interlocutors coming from economically marginalized families with unmarried parents reasoned that their personal distinctions from their parents and kin legitimized their marital entitlement. Ideas of generational continuity and rupture thus both informed the multiple ways in which middle-class Namibians reflected on (their) marriage(s) in a rapidly transforming postcolonial society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the anticipation and production of luck and good fortune in the emerging practices of extensive weddings among Buddhists during Myanmar’s reform period (2011-2021) and asks what this can tell us about the role of marriage in contexts of rapid social and political transformations.
Paper long abstract:
Recent anthropological perspectives on marriage invite us to explore the place of marriage in the ways people constitute and reconstitute social worlds. Marriage among Buddhists in Myanmar confer upon social acknowledgement; conventionally there is no need for a ritual celebration nor a formal registration for marriages to be recognized and legal.
Myanmar’s reform period (2011-2021) was marked by political upheaval, social transformation, and uncertain futures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Upper Myanmar in 2015 and from 2018 to 2019, this paper explores what seems to be emerging practices of extravagant and elaborate wedding ceremonies (mingala hsaun) during this period. The paper has two main parts: first, I take the local perception of marriage as a matter of ‘luck’ as a starting point to investigate the constitution of marriage and the imagination of future married lives, and second, I explore how these changing marriage practices are connected to social and political transformations in Myanmar. I ask: How is luck and good fortune anticipated and produced through extensive mingala hsaun (lit. ‘to carry out an auspicious ceremony’) and why? How has mingala hsaun become a way of enacting hope in times of uncertainties?
I argue that these emergent forms of extensive wedding ceremonies are important sites for women to enhance the possibilities of fortunate futures of their married lives and suggest that analyzing notions of ‘luck’ in marriage during Myanmar’s reform period provides new insight into the role of marriage as constituting social lives in contexts of rapid social and political transformation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the ways that Islamic second wife marriage across geopolitical borders in Central Asia create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of carceral immobilities, state violence, and gendered limitations.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers Islamic second wife marriage (nikoh) between minority Uzbek businesswomen in Kyrgyzstan and persecuted Uyghur traders from Xinjiang. It analyzes the practice of linking business and marriage as a form of mobile intimacy that draws on historical, religious, cultural, and linguistic contiguities across a Central Asian space, while also leveraging the affordances and movement of commodities and goods over present-day geopolitical borders that circumscribe the movement of particular groups of people. Nikoh, in particular, is a practice that extends beyond the conjugal pair by generating broader webs of possibility and security for extended relational networks. Looking at forms of both mobility and immobility, my paper argues that commodity-mediated forms of transnational intimacy create spaces of safety and possibility in the face of carceral immobilities, state violence, and gendered limitations. These alternative spaces—liminal and interstitial—bump up against national borders but do not always conform to them, creating thriving spaces that are “elsewhere and otherwise" in the face of repression and exclusion.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how young urban women living in Yaoundé search for a suitable marriage candidate. I show how such searches constitute an exhausting and daunting enterprise requiring resources and amounts of work that can lead to a love-burn-out.
Paper long abstract:
Young urban women living in Yaoundé, Cameroon consider marriage with a suitable male candidate of their choice an important goal in their lives. Yet in the post-Cold war context securing a suitable candidate has become increasingly difficult. Due to, amongst others, ongoing economic decay, intense migration and high unemployment rates, suitable candidates have become scarce and harder to catch. Persistent in their endeavors, young women recourse to multiple means in view of finding a candidate. These means involve both networks of kin and peers as well as digital social networks at home and abroad. These are considered not alternative but complementary means to increase chances of securing a suitable candidate - ensuring young women’s wealth in prospects.
This paper traces changing political economy of marriage in urban Cameroon across two generations. I show how in contemporary Cameroon the complementary infrastructures of intimacy required to keep one’s options open involve an increased amount of resources and work – emotional, economic and social - if searching for a suitable marriage candidate is to be maintained. Young women find such work exhausting and daunting enterprise that can lead to a love burn out. Thus, the work invested in these enterprises could at times limit what it was meant to produce. While their mothers’ generation had rejected “traditional” marriage (Goheen 1996), the young women living in post-Cold war Cameroon while desiring marriage were unwillingly led to delay it and questioned whether it would happen at all.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines dowry giving as a practice of evidence production among urban poor in Delhi, India. I argue that dowry not only establishes and reconstitutes kinship links, but also anticipates and pre-empts dissolutions, gendered inequalities and violence, inherent in kinship relationships.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines dowry giving as a practice of evidence production among urban poor in Delhi, India. Despite dowries being illegal in India’s judicial system, urban poor families produce evidence of dowry payments as they create their family archives. Early anthropologists have explored how dowries constitute an essential practice in South Asian hypergamous marriage alliances where brides marry higher status families. More recently, practice of dowry giving and taking as a social practice that establishes kin connections in India has become reconfigured and fortified by economic and social transformations, such as capitalist consumer culture, globalisation, migration, changes in labour market and education (Osella and Osella 2000; Wright 2020; Xiang 2005). In this paper I argue that dowry not only establishes and reconstitutes the tenacity of kinship links, but also anticipates and pre-empts dissolutions, abandonment, gendered inequalities and violence, inherent in kinship relationships. By producing dowry evidence, families directly engage with the discourses around social change in gendered social relationships and seek to prepare for marriage contingencies and gendered kinship precarity. While historically, dowry practice developed in the context of social change brought upon by colonialism, it is now widely accepted and desired. Despite this, urban poor see dowry as a sign of Kaliyug - a social decline period in Hindu circular time cosmology, characterised by the rise of kin precarity and violence, dowry inflation and greed. Marriage arrangements then become a loci where public discourses about gendered violence intersect with intimate relationships and kin futures.