ANTH/WMGS 326 Issues in the Anthropology of Kinship
Winter 2018
Mar. 14, 19: Arranging marriages, not marrying
Required  readings:  Pande, Raksha (2015) “‘I arranged my own marriage’: Arranged
marriages and post-colonial feminism.” Gender, Place and Culture, 22:2, 172-187

Bourdieu, Pierre (2004) “The peasant and his body.” Ethnography. 5(4): 579-599.


Arranged marriages:
- are arranged marriages reflective of patriarchal ideologies expressed through kinship or do they offer scope for women’s agency? If the latter, to what extent can women exercise agency?
- Saheri’s Choice
- Pande:
    - post-colonial feminism
        - the role of cultural context: note how this challenges Western ethnocentric assumptions of how proper, “progressive” (modern) kinship should work
    - how have arranged marriages usually been understood?
    - how do her interviewees describe their part in the arrangement of their marriages? How do they use marriage to achieve their goals?
- do these examples show full agency? What are the culturally infused goals of Western women and men in getting married? Do these show full agency? (Is full individual agency necessarily a desired goal?)

next