Arranged Marriage

The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change

EDITED BY PÉTER BERTA

Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change shows how arranged marriage practices have been undergoing transformation as a result of global and other processes such as the revolution of digital technology, democratization of transnational mobility, or shifting significance of patriarchal power structures. The ethnographically informed chapters not only highlight how the gendered and intergenerational politics of agency, autonomy, choice, consent, and intimacy work in the contexts of partner choice and management of marriage, but also point out that arranged marriages are increasingly varied and they can be reshaped, reinvented, and reinterpreted flexibly in response to individual, family, religious, class, ethnic, and other desires, needs, and constraints. The authors convincingly demonstrate that a nuanced investigation of the reasons, complex dynamics, and consequences of arranged marriages offers a refreshing analytical lens that can significantly contribute to a deeper understanding of other phenomena such as globalization, modernization, and international migration as well as patriarchal value regimes, intergenerational power imbalances, and gendered subordination and vulnerability of women.

PÉTER BERTA is an honorary research associate at University College

London SSEES and a senior research fellow at Budapest Business School. He is the author of the award-winning monograph Materializing Difference: Consumer Culture, Politics, and Ethnicity among Romanian Roma, and the founding editor of The Politics of Marriage and Gender book series at Rutgers University Press.

Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Enduring Polygamy

Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis

BRUCE WHITEHOUSE

“In some wide regions, people deem polygamy a normal, natural option. In others, it’s spurned as an archaic, immoral form of oppression. But if monogamy may be human history’s exception, eyes and minds need opening to polygamy’s enduring pros, cons, and complexities. This collaboratively researched, empathic volume does it superbly.”

—Parker Shipton, author of Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa

Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage, and situates polygamy within structures of inequality that shape marital options, especially for young Malian women. Through an approach of cultural relativism, the book offers an open-minded but unflinching perspective on a contested form of marriage.

BRUCE WHITEHOUSE is associate professor of anthropology at Lehigh University, where he is also affiliated with the Africana and global studies programs.

Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

254 pp 3 color images, 4 tables

6 1/8 x 9 1/4

978-1-9788-2282-5 paper $44.95S

978-1-9788-2283-2 cloth $120.00SU

March 2023

Marriage and Family • Gender Studies

Asian Studies

246 pp

5 color and 7 b/w images, 6 tables

6 x 9

978-1-9788-3113-1 paper $39.95S

978-1-9788-3114-8 cloth $120.00SU

Marriage and Family • Gender Studies

African Studies

226 pp 29 b/w 1 table 6 x 9

978-1-9788-3432-3 paper $34.95S

978-1-9788-3433-0 cloth $120.00SU

August 2023

Medical Anthropology • Age Studies

Calling Family

Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives

TANJA AHLIN

How do digital technologies shape how people care for each other and, through that, who they are? This is a particularly pertinent question today, as technological innovation is on the rise while increasing migration is introducing vast distances among family members. The situation has been additionally complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirements of physical distancing, especially for the most vulnerable – older adults. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with families of migrating nurses from Kerala, India, Calling Family explores how digital technologies shape elder care when adult children and their aging parents live far apart. Coming from a country in which appropriate elder care is closely associated with co-residence, these families tinker with smartphones and social media to establish what care at a distance could be and how it should be done to be considered good. Through the notion of transnational care collectives, this book uncovers the subtle workings of digital technologies on care across countries and continents when being physically together is not feasible. Calling Families is an excellent entry point into a better understanding of technological relationality which can only be expected to further intensify in the future.

TANJA AHLIN is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.