Paper short abstract:

This paper explores reinterpretation and transgression regarding divorce among Muslim congregations in Sweden, specifically in the intersection of various Muslim communities, the formal Swedish law, other relevant national legislations, and not least the everyday practices of individual parties.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes its point of departure in my previous long-term fieldwork among members of Muslim youth associations in Sweden and their envisioning and negotiating marriage. As acknowledged by the convenors of this panel, young people tend to bend rules while trying to receive consent from families and further relevant others. While I studied young Muslims’ individual navigation through complex, sometimes contradictory, norm systems and institutions, I did also distinguish a common pattern: the youths tended to communicate unwanted norms in terms of “cultural traditions”, but refer to the “true” understanding and observance of the religion as a path towards influence on crucial decisions in their lives, such as when to marry and with whom. Moving beyond ideals and practices surrounding marriage, my current research focuses on divorce. In Sweden, a marriage can only be dissolved by decree of a court and by the application of the divorce rules of the Swedish Marriage Code. No religious denomination has jurisdiction to validly dissolve a marriage, yet many Muslims find themselves in need of an accredited “religious” divorce in addition to the civil divorce and, hence, turn to their congregations for solution. The purpose of this paper is to examine the divorce norms of some Muslim congregations in Sweden and how their representatives and members in turn navigate complex terrains in the intersection between the norms of various Muslim communities, the formal Swedish law, other relevant national legislations, and not least the everyday practice of individual parties.

Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar, this paper examines how young male professionals reappropriate the time between childhood and social adulthood - commonly depicted as a period of imposed waithood - as a period of intimate discovery and enjoyment, as they purposefully delay getting married.

Paper long abstract:

For young men, idealised marital trajectories have become increasingly difficult to accomplish in Dakar, Senegal, as they are unable to afford to marry and thus achieve social adulthood. Such research principally concerns poorer youth, for whom economic constraints represent an important obstacle in their daily lives.

For these young male professionals, however, economic status does not present a barrier to marriage. Contrastingly, they deploy diverse strategies to delay their marriages. This period, when they do not yet carry the responsibilities associated with being a social adult, thereby emerges as a positive temporal space in which youth create means to enjoy this liminal status and gain intimate experiences.

This paper investigates the strategies and practices through which such youth reappropriate the period of waithood. Through ethnographic analysis, it foregrounds their careful quests for intimate experimentation and respectability, as they must tread carefully to avoid shaming themselves and their kin. They prudently resist marital propositions from their kin, whilst simultaneously trying to prove to them that they are respectable young men, who take their social expectations seriously. Through these practices, youth try to balance their own desires for intimate discovery and enjoyment with the social expectations of their kin, for whom remaining respectable is paramount and integral to the young men’s future marital possibilities.

Through delaying marriage, a new image of male Senegalese youth emerges. Rather than being frustrated and constrained by economic hardship, these young men carefully and creatively use this liminal space for enjoyment and to gain intimate experiences.

Paper short abstract:

The act of avoiding an unwanted marriage has long held the attention of the ethnographers of Guinea-Bissau region. But the recently increased presence of Evangelical churches in the hinterland adds new contours to intergenerational tensions, reconfiguring established forms of "secondary marriage".

Paper long abstract:

Classical ethnography pointed to secondary marriages as being key to understanding the ways in which conflicts concerning conjugality may be settled in West Africa. This usually meant that what Europeans would see as a dreadful marriage of a young bride to an older polygynic man might be destabilized by his acceptance of her extramarital sexual relations, which might then result in another marriage, as well as by her autonomy later in life, regarding obligations to her first husband and his household.

In Guinea-Bissau, amidst tensions between elderly men and their young cadets, when a woman avoids an unwanted marriage to a man chosen by her kin, that is usually described in ways where nubile women appear to be taken off the realm of regulated marriage transactions, through elopement and kidnapping, as if themselves had only two passive options: to "be clothed" by the man ruling the house where she has been brought, or "made to run away" by a younger lover.

With this paper I intend to discuss this set of narratives in the light of their inscription in a broader arena of political interventions, focusing on what in my fieldwork (2013-2016) emerged as a network of institutional support to runaway brides. Because even if female sexuality appears to be nowadays looser than before, a look into the changes brought by the growing presence of Evangelical churches in the hinterland may point us to a broader understanding of the moral disputes that surround the young-bodied and their destinies.

Paper short abstract:

Departing from young professionals’ personal accounts of living in cohabitation in Tunis, this paper explores how some Tunisian youth, through this transgressive daily practice, challenge and transform intimate relationships and related discourses on an intrapersonal, couple, family and state level.

Paper long abstract:

Most Tunisians do not get married until their early thirties, nevertheless premarital sexual relationships remain largely unaccepted, especially for women. Although the 2011 uprising opened up some space to challenge (sexual) taboos, youngsters generally feel pressured to conform to social and familial expectations. Despite cultural, religious, and legal censorship of premarital intimate relations, and its possible negative consequences, some youth in Tunis opt for cohabitation

Cohabitation is one way in which students and young professionals renegotiate legitimate norms of behaviour to create the literal and figurative space to balance their personal desires with social and familial expectations and live according to their own normality. This way of dealing with the possibilities and constraints regarding intimacy and marriage strongly challenges state authorities and generational hierarchies. Cohabiters therefore point to the transformative potential of cohabitation on themselves, their relationship, the marriage institute, and on society as a whole.

This paper shows how for some youth in Tunis, cohabitation is both a way to deal with voluntary/involuntary waithood and a means to shape and express themselves as autonomous independent men and women. It offers a deep ethnographic exploration of how cohabitation, as a daily practice, (potentially) transforms relationships on an intrapersonal, couple, family, and state level.

Anthropological research often focuses on highly committed Muslims and their concerns with piety, or on secular Muslims who use Islamic institutions instrumentally. By focusing on a non-religiously motivated relationship practice in a Muslim majority country, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective on morality, religion, and secularity.

Paper short abstract:

Through interviews, I explore a hidden ‘marketplace of intimacy’ occurring in city public spaces. Despite Africa’s ‘crisis’ of marriage, low-wage human labor continues to be reproduced for the neoliberal African city, catalyzed by this ‘marketplace’. I examine its underlying practices and logics.

Paper long abstract:

With decreasing rates of marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa, low-wage workers for Africa’s cities continue to be birthed and raised - now by single mothers. This is catalyzed by what I call a heterosexual ‘marketplace of intimacy’: not a physical place but a field of activity based on monetary transaction and closeness-seeking that encompasses all public spaces of the city. People enter and exit this marketplace at different points depending on their needs and desires, but the entire field of activity gives rise to those sexual networks in which HIV/AIDS researchers are particularly interested. Using interviews conducted 2010–2020 with the residents of one low-income neighborhood, I examine how chronically poor men and women experience this marketplace and urban social reproduction in ethnically heterogeneous Dar es Salaam. Men compete with other men for the intimacy they desire and need, whereas women compete with other women for monetary ‘help’ and a sense of social worth. By seeing neoliberal heterosexuality as a field of activity rather than individual desire or particular sex acts, the analytic focus shifts to the local logics that structure its complex negotiations and outcomes (marriage, short-term relationships, sex work, HIV and pregnancies for which many fathers cannot afford to provide). The children of single mothers in Dar es Salaam ensure the continued pool of flexible labour needed by cities to function efficiently and keep urban living costs down. I examine the signaling, bargaining and mobile phone practices that create this marketplace of intimacy.