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?)
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