Suchergebnisse

Marriage is a cultural imperative in Sri Lanka and is constructed as the principal source of personal fulfilment for women. This paper critically examines through two case studies – a never-married woman and a woman in a "failed" marriage – how women from older generations narrate their life histories using culturally coherent repertoires. By deconstructing the subject positions of the "long-suffering wife", the "devoted mother", and the "selfless woman", I reveal the spaces for manoeuvre these women create to experience well-being and exercise agency outside of the culture's "hegemonic narrative" of successful marriage and maternity. Using the life history narratives I challenge the tendency to imagine older women's lives as more constrained and illustrate the ways in which equivocal narratives about independence and self-sacrifice, about freedom and suffering simultaneously conceal agency while allowing non-normative ways of being.

The shift to companionate marriage in South Asia and elsewhere is widely read as a move from 'tradition' to 'modernity' resulting in an expansion of individual agency, especially for women. This paper critically examines the narratives of urban middle-class women in Sri Lanka spanning three generations to illustrate that rather than indicating a radical shift in the way they negotiated between individual desires and social norms, the emphasis on 'choice' signals a shift in the narrative devices used in the presentation of the 'self'. The paper illustrates how young women's narratives about marriage appear to suggest 'modernity' as inevitable—that its processes are reconstituting the person who, less constrained by 'tradition' and collective expectations, is now experiencing greater freedom in the domain of marriage. However, it also shows how urban middle-class families in Sri Lanka have collectively invested in the narrative of choice through which 'a choosing person' is consciously created as a mark of the family's modernity and progress. Rather than signalling freedom, these narratives about choice reveal how women are often burdened with the risks and responsibility of agency. The paper illustrates that the 'choosing person' is produced through narratives that emphasise agency as a responsibility that must be exercised with caution because women are expected by and obligated to their families to make the 'right' choices. Hence, a closer look at the individualised 'choosing person' reveals a less unitary, relational self with permeable boundaries embedded within and accountable to family and kinship.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Series Foreword -- Introduction -- 1. Sinhala Marriage: Then and Now -- 2. Making the "Right" Choice -- 3. Structuring the "Right" Choice -- 4. The Virtuous Self: Failed Marriages -- 5. The Valued Self: Singleness -- 6. The Vindicated Self: Divorce -- Conclusion -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- References -- Index

This case study raises critical questions about the ethics of using friendship in ethnographic fieldwork. It draws from the author's experience of relying on friendships when researching her own community to reflect on whether relationships forged in the field are inherently instrumental in nature and compromises friendships that predate fieldwork. The case study also explores how, for indigenous anthropologists, the ethic of confidentiality is a lifetime commitment because the researcher continues to inhabit the social world of her interlocutors. Feminist researchers have highlighted the difficulties in reconciling ethics and methodologies in contexts that render informants more vulnerable, especially where thick description. depend on encouraging intimacy. Indigenous feminist anthropologists writing about insider positionality stress the importance of reciprocity. Little is said about the ethical dilemmas arising from the study of one's own community and where access to information is predicated on relationships that predate the research project, that is, with family, neighbors, and friends. The case study will describe several field encounters to ask, is it acceptable to take advantage of people's sense of obligation to researchers who may be a neighbor or friend? Should researchers take for granted the offer of hospitality people graciously extend and interpret this as consent to explore the most personal aspects of their lives? Although the researcher establishes trust by forming or deepening friendships, such a gesture is not reciprocated by informants with the research relationship foremost in mind. Friendship is extended within a specific context and has particular cultural meanings. Usually, not just prolonged contact and reciprocity, but a deeper sense of connection with another leads to friendship where one feels safe in sharing intimacies. When fieldwork ends, how do researchers maintain confidentiality in their day-to-day social relations? By supplanting friendship from a social setting to a research context, does ethnography transform friendships into inherently instrumental encounters?

In South Asia, shame is valued as a virtue and a means of social control, particularly for women. For Sri Lankan women, shame ( læjja-baya) denotes modesty, purity, innocence, and self-effacement. For unmarried girls, sexual improprieties—rumoured or real—threaten loss of respectability and jeopardise a girl's marriageability and her family's honour. We investigated the dynamics of shame and norms of propriety in adolescent girls' lives by re-analysing a subset of interviews of daughters and mothers (N = 24 pairs) collected in a prior study of nonfatal suicidal acts. Many such acts took place after girls were accused of violating norms of propriety. Other such acts served to 'blame and shame' wrongdoers. Girls and their mothers reported further that public knowledge of a suicide-like act sullied a girl's reputation because onlookers ascribed sexualised meanings to it. We point out the incommensurability between parents' goals and aspirations for their daughters' educational and occupation attainments and the rigid demands for respectable comportment to which they must conform.

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, international migration as well as patriarchal value regimes, intergenerational power imbalances, and gendered subordination and vulnerability of women