Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.
Janet Carsten is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Hsiao-Chiao Chiu is ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage project at the University of Edinburgh.
Siobhan Magee is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Eirini Papadaki is ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage project at the University of Edinburgh.
Koreen M. Reece is ERC Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage project at the University of Edinburgh.