Full Description
This fresh and engaging book opens up new terrain in the exploration of marriage and kinship. While anthropologists and sociologists have often interpreted marriage, and kinship more broadly, in conservative terms, Carsten highlights their transformative possibilities. The book argues that marriage is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale, carrying the seeds of social transformation alongside the trappings of conformity. Grounded in rich ethnography and the author's many decades of familiarity with Malaysia, it asks a central question: what does marriage do, and how? Exploring the implications of the everyday imaginative labour of marriage for kinship relations and wider politics, this work offers an important and highly original contribution to anthropology, family and kinship studies, sociology and Southeast Asian studies.
Contents
Contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction: marriage and the moral imagination; 1. Anthropological engagements: fieldwork, marriage, Malaysia and Penang; 2. Marriage and gender in the political moment; 3. Marriage over the generations; 4. Marriage in the flux of self-fashioning; 5. Negotiating difference in marriage: conjugality and 'mixing'; 6. Those who leave and those who stay: marital uncertainties narrated through time; 7. Imagining conjugal futures: the personal and the political; Conclusion; Bibliography.
