Maqsood, A;
(2021)
Love as understanding Marriage, aspiration, and the joint family in middle-class Pakistan.
American Ethnologist
10.1111/amet.13000.
(In press).
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Abstract
In middle‐class Pakistan, marriage is the prescribed future for all women, but premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged. To find the right partner, then, without visibly flouting social norms, requires a skillful balancing act between private interests and aspirations, and between public representations and collective concerns. Young women often navigate these conflicting demands by developing what they call an understanding: a secret premarital relationship that they normalize by involving family at a late stage to orchestrate an arranged marriage. Firmly enmeshed within the social life of joint families, understandings are an instance neither of defying patriarchal norms nor of pursuing self‐cultivation within them. Instead, they offer a window into how young women live and explore new possibilities within the vestiges of normative structures. [love, marriage, desire, morality, consumption, joint family, Lahore, Pakistan]
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Love as understanding Marriage, aspiration, and the joint family in middle-class Pakistan |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1111/amet.13000 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13000 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 The Authors. American Ethnologist published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10124323 |
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