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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, -Aeron O'Connor (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
Bridging the gap between kinship studies and intellectual history, this paper examines how, through marriage, Tajikistan’s intelligentsia have navigated the past century’s political turmoil and promoted intellectual pursuits within the family, despite multiple cycles of persecution.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines ethnographic data from multiple generations of intelligentsia in Tajikistan’s capital city Dushanbe. Interested in how intellectuals navigated the formation of the Soviet Union, Stalinist purges, the collapse of the USSR and a five-year civil war in Tajikistan, this paper looks at how private, family life has played an inextricable role in determining public-facing, intellectual life for these figures. This paper looks at how spouses were chosen for one’s children in times of political turmoil and what repercussions these had on the professional and personal lives of both the individuals in the couple and their extended families: this multi-generational ethnography provides examples of both well- and mis-calculated marital matches – as they are perceived and described by interlocutors themselves. What emerges from this research is a clear link between kinship and intellectual history: two social spaces that are often completely separate from one another in scholarship. In this research, it emerges that the private, domestic environment has played a crucial role in preserving and encouraging locally-specific intellectual pursuits from generation to generation, even when it has been dangerous to promote them publicly in the political climate of the time. Using ethnography and oral histories that span over a century, this paper offers some longue durée perspectives on the role of marriage in intellectual history during political upheaval, how families of socially mobile intellectuals, through kin ties and marriage, navigate political conditions around them to protect their families as well as their intellectual pursuits and ambitions.
Ben Kasstan (London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Paper short abstract:
Building on anthropological approaches to marriage as an institution of intimacy and innovation, this paper examines the transformative and transgressive power of marriage and marital breakdown when caught between legal worlds by drawing on the case of Jewish orthodoxies in Britain.
Paper long abstract:
Building on anthropological approaches to marriage as an institution of intimacy and innovation, this paper examines the transformative and transgressive power of marriage and marital breakdown when caught between legal worlds. How does marriage provoke multiple, and at times, opposing rights and responsibilities between legal traditions? How do legal transformations re-configure the power held ‘in common’ by marital stakeholders? This paper addresses these questions by drawing on long-term ethnographic research into Jewish orthodoxies in contemporary Britain. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, orthodox Jews were thrust into the limelight for hosting ‘illegal’ weddings, which provoked multiple definitions of protecting life – that of biological and social continuity. At the same time, Jewish women began mobilising against denial of religious divorces (gett refusal). These women have drawn rebukes from rabbinic authorities for transgressing the authority of religious courts. Legal activism around ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’ has enabled women to pursue a legitimate route to challenge men who refuse to grant a gett, though rabbinic authorities have claimed how such legal recourse is inherently transgressive as men must consent to granting a gett – free from coercion. The paper examines how these multiple claims of coercion are embedded in accusations of transgressing competing rights (religious freedoms, gender equality), which are projected by differently-positioned actors. The paper argues that women who by-pass the jurisdiction of religious legal codes to “get” justice reveals how legal pluralism produces competing definitions of marital coercion – and casts attention to where the burdens of transgression are located.
Thalia Gigerenzer (Princeton University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores changing ideas of intimacy and romance among young Muslim women in Delhi against the backdrop of rising security concerns for Indian Muslims. With the rise of "WhatsApp romances" and love marriages, these young women are radically shifting the way they conceive of intimacy.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores changing ideas of intimacy and romance among young Muslim women in Delhi against the backdrop of an increasingly tense climate of suspicion in their neighborhoods. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in low-income, Muslim areas of Delhi, India, I found that residents would proclaim that their neighborhoods were in a state of moral decline. Residents linked these statements to narratives of moral decline on a national scale, citing the increasing persecution of Muslims under the current right-wing Hindu government. With the rise of so-called "WhatsApp romances," premarital relationships and love marriages, young women in these communities are experiencing a radical shift in the way they conceive of and practice intimacy. At the same time, however, concerns about security and waning morality encourage women to limit their romantic attachments. I argue that this climate of suspicion has caused these women to approach the search for a husband with heightened caution. Rather than being a move towards individualism or Western relationship forms, I argue that these new practices and technologies of romance actually enable a more cautious approach towards finding a compatible spouse. Social media platforms like WhatsApp enabled couples to extract background information about each other, while premarital relationships allowed young women to buy time to truly test their compatibility with a potential husband. My paper asks how these young women, in an atmosphere in which no one is as they seem, attempt to know their romantic partners intimately.
Ranjana Raghunathan (Vidyashilp University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes secrecy in marriages as a starting point to trace different forms of relatedness and intimacies emerging thereof. By situating the inquiry in the lived worlds of Indian women in Singapore, the paper reimagines the place of marriage in migration and diaspora.
Paper long abstract:
How do secrets in marriages inflect the ways that diaspora women reconstitute their social worlds? How do women navigate the secrets while imagining and working for their imagined futures? This paper takes secrecy in marriages as a starting point to trace different forms of relatedness and intimacies emerging thereof. By situating the inquiry in the lived worlds of Indian women in Singapore, the paper reimagines the place of marriage in migration and diaspora. Drawing on life history interviews and ongoing field engagements with the interlocutors, the presented vignettes and narratives explore the diverse ways that secrets intersect with the processes of marriage, and wider social constellations such as family, community and nation. Silence is often a key method used by women for translating secrecy and its ascribed meanings into the folds of relatedness. However, these silences are simultaneously entangled in intergenerational loss, fragmented migration histories and life stories. Additionally, the paper also demonstrates how navigating gendered social norms for appropriate belonging in the diaspora social context infuse women’s lives with secrecy and the required silence, resulting in a precarious and ambiguous sense of belonging. Consequently, women are constrained by the paradoxes of concealing or revealing secrets, both holding the potential to collapse marriage and other relations, and the hope for making relatedness.
Eirini Papadaki (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, drawing from my research in a middle-class suburb in Athens, I reflect upon the marital account of a woman and on what this can tell us about history, love, intimacy and death.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, drawing from my research in a middle-class suburb in Athens during the period of economic austerity, I concentrate on the marital story of a woman in her mid seventies, who 'lost' her husband five years ago. I reflect upon her narration about marriage, on her account about life, and I am trying to see how was marriage associated with the family's social histories and how was it implicated in bigger social projects. What does it mean to have lived a whole life together?
I consider what can any particular marital story that involves years of togetherness, children and grandchildren tells us about love and intimacy in Greece and what these stories tell us in general about Greece, about history and transformations of a place, and of the ways people constitute their social worlds.