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"Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia"--

"Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia"--

This article uses the life stories of three women in Jinmen to demonstrate women's economic agency in bettering the livelihood of their families in circumstances largely shaped by Cold War geopolitics and the authoritarian state's military strategies. It argues that women's devotion of their labour and earnings to their families was part of the reproductive processes of the kinship system, but also important to their building of social reputation and emotional ties with their loved ones. Moreover, the state's campaign to protect traditional Chinese culture, framed within bipolar politics, supported the ideological reproduction of women's primary roles being in the domestic sphere. While the lives of Jinmen civilians were significantly distorted in the Cold War era, their experiences of economic improvement and a certain stability in their ways of life – revolving around kinship – account for the ambivalence they now feel towards the period of authoritarian rule. (JCCA/GIGA)

Intro -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense -- 1 Go Fiwa Molao/Giving the Law: Marriage, Law and Social Change in Botswana -- 2 'You can Learn to Do It Right, or You can Learn to Do It Wrong': Marriage Counselling, Togetherness and Creative Conservatism in Lynchburg, Virginia -- 3 Marriage, Time, Affect and the Politics of Compromise in Athens -- 4 Getting Married as a Trial: Deferring Marriage in Jinmen, Taiwan

Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? 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.