Troubling kinship: Sacred marriage and gender configuration in South India

Ramberg, Lucinda

doi:10.1111/amet.12046

Cited by 24 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…), and here, too, this fundamental sexual asymmetry reflects women's unequal access to resources and the repression of their sexuality. Women's unpayable debt varies a great deal by modes of production and marriage types (Ramberg 2013), and it varies within the category of “woman” itself given that women maintain unequal positions in kinship (Sacks 1979).…”

Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet the unpayable debt takes shape daily in a multiplicity of exchanges, most of which are actually debts: exchanges of women, but also of corporal substance, goods, services, money, and so forth 4 . Now, as feminist anthropology has amply shown, it is these exchanges and debts that define masculinities and femininities by attributing and distributing value (Carsten 2000; Lamb 2000; Ramberg 2013; Strathern 1988).…”

Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although women are often the objects of exchange, they are also the subjects of it, even if “gender demarcates different types of agency” (Strathern 1988, 93). In some cases, women may refuse to participate in the traffic in women by extricating themselves from the flows of wealth and properly contained sexual unions dictated by dominant kinship norms (Ramberg 2013; Tabet 2005; Wardlow 2004). Here, they navigate between muzzling, bridling norms permeating their deepest sense of self and their own underlying desires struggling to surface.…”

Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

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Unpayable debt

Kumar

2020

American Ethnologist

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In recent decades rural South India has witnessed the profound effects of financialization, effects that include growing sexual puritanism, changing kinship patterns, and the redefinition of caste hierarchies. For Dalit women, these transformations have given rise to new forms of debt, sexuality, and sexual‐economic exchanges. Although such exchanges can be compatible with sexual desire and pleasure, Dalit women are nonetheless trapped in new forms of unpayable debt. Their debts, though quantifiable and financial, retain a strong moral component associated with new norms of chastity and monogamy. Far from being mere passive objects of exchange, Dalit women challenge their unpayable debt and struggle to exist both as creditworthy financial subjects and as subjects of desire. In contesting the norms of forced sexuality, these women challenge researchers to rethink the concepts of debt and unpayable debt through the lens of gender and sexuality. [debt, unpayable debt, exchange, obligations, sexuality, gender, feminist anthropology, financialization, India]

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Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unpayable Debts: a Puzzlementioning

confidence: 99%

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Unpayable debt

Kumar

2020

American Ethnologist

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“…The axiom that marriage holds human culture together is imprinted in the canon, from Malinowski's complicated maps of Kula exchange to Evans‐Pritchards's account of incest taboos furthering networks, and of course to Lévi‐Strauss's claim that marriage is the ultimate form of enhancing social connections. Marriage's resilience seems to lie in creative and fluid variations to the form, for the ways that “innovative kin‐making practices open new pathways to forms of social and political recognition and inclusion” (Ramberg 2013, 671). Recent global movements for marriage equality across sexual orientations and genders, for example, demonstrate how notions of conjugality may be used to challenge legal heteronormativity.…”

Section: Marriage: Can't Live With It Can't Live Without Itmentioning

confidence: 99%

The End(s) of marriage: Feminists, antifeminists, and Indian law

Basu

2020

Feminist Anthropology

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Feminist anthropology sought to transform the sex‐gender systems that enabled marriage. This essay considers the complications of that promise in the context of my recent research with antifeminist marriage resisters called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs). Despite a history of marriage resistance in the Indian women's movement, contemporary women's organizations rely on civil and criminal law relating to marriage to secure resources for their clients and thus cannot afford to transform its heteronormative patriarchal logic. MGTOWs challenge gender roles and paid labor within marriage and seek alternatives to conjugality, but do so on terms that highlight their pain and disavow their privileges.

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“…Women agree to get along with their husbands and husbands agree to care for their wives. I refer to the physical and emotional labor required to pursue aims within the bounds of kin relations as “kinwork,” echoing and developing other feminist critiques of the idea that kinship is primarily systematic and structural and only secondarily a matter of reiterative labor (Butler ; Ramberg , ).…”

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confidence: 90%

The Politics of Livability: Tutoring “Kinwork” in a New Delhi Women's Arbitration Center

Lemons

2016

PoLAR

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This article provides an analysis of dispute adjudication in a women 's arbitration center, or mahila panchayat, in New Delhi, India. In analyzing two exemplary cases from my fieldwork, I argue that mahila panchayat adjudication tends to tutor kinwork as a means of producing livable lives within a context of material and ideological constraint. Successfully adjudicated cases culminate in contracts that explicitly enumerate the demands of marriage and the requirements of reconciliation, thereby rendering disputants responsible subjects who are accountable to the contracts' terms. This formal conclusion to the adjudication process reflects the mahila panchayat's politics of livability, which entail teaching women to live with and through kinship norms by recognizing and rationally relating to them.[India, Muslim, dispute adjudication, kinship] On a Wednesday afternoon in April 2007, I sat with Farida, 1 the twenty-year-old head of the east Delhi women's mahila panchayat (arbitration center) that I analyze in this article, to discuss both a hearing that had just ended and the center's approach to arbitration. Farida worked tirelessly at the mahila panchayat, encouraging women involved in domestic disputes to stand up for their needs and desires, leading discussions with mahila panchayat members who had been tasked with resolving domestic disputes, keeping case records and charts of outcomes, running formal adjudication hearings, and holding informal daily meetings. Her dedication to the mahila panchayat was palpable. Privately, however, Farida expressed doubts about the institution's success. This particular Wednesday afternoon, she sighed before telling me:

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Troubling kinship: Sacred marriage and gender configuration in South India

Cited by 24 publications

References 33 publications

Unpayable debt

Unpayable debt

The End(s) of marriage: Feminists, antifeminists, and Indian law

The Politics of Livability: Tutoring “Kinwork” in a New Delhi Women's Arbitration Center

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