The Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021. x, 214 pp. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9781978810303.
For her book, Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka, Asha Abeyasekera conducted her research among Sinhala Buddhist middle-class families living in Colombo. While young couples cite love as the main reason for marriage, the freedom to choose is the key value the author explores in her study of marriage. The bride and groom (but especially the bride) do not just have freedom to choose each other, but this autonomy also applies to the innumerable details that go into a wedding: from the look and script on an invitation card, to the ingredients and features of the wedding cake, and so on. Abeyasekera emphasizes that the groom’s and (mostly) bride’s capacity to make choices ranging across a minor to major continuum is the difference between traditional and contemporary marriages among the middle-class citizens of Colombo.
The main theme explored in this book is how modernity has been internalized by middle-class Sri Lankans and how this has affected who, when, why, and how they marry. To her credit, Abeyasekera compares traditional and modern marriages without resorting to a binary set of distinctions between arranged and love marriages. Instead she provides historical evidence that arranged marriages were seldom purely arranged, typically taking into account the desires and interests of the prospective groom and bride. Similarly, there was never an iconic traditional marriage process that was explicitly followed. Rather, marriages then and now are a blend of different interests, norms, social and structural relations, and desires. In not capitulating to the temptation of making binary comparisons of marriages across generations, the author provides nuance, dynamism, and humanism to her ethnographic case studies. Abeyasekera typically engages with the bride and secondarily obtains narratives about the bride’s mother’s marriage. The comparisons are to show the process of change as contemporary brides (and grooms) have more autonomy than their parents did, but the difference is variable and along a continuum, not abrupt and symbolically oppositional.
There are three keys to her theoretical perspective. First, she offers engagement and dialogue with feminist (Sri Lankan and Western) theory. Second, with an eye towards Anthony Giddens’ “pure love” model of modern intimacy, she rejects his ruptured binary perception between traditional times when sex was linked to pregnancy and family, and modern intimacies that allow for “pure love,” which is liberated from prior socio-cultural bindings, and unhooks sex from love, linking it to a mode of entertainment and pleasure (17–18). Third, in her exploration of the importance of averring and asserting agency, she shows that even when individuals state that their values and worldviews are opposite to that of their parents, they perhaps unwittingly blend their values. They do so by maintaining hidden transcripts. For instance courtship is most often carried out in secret for periods as long as six years. They are asserting their agency in opposition to their parents, yet the same time, they are checking each other out, using criteria similar to that established by their parents. Again, there is a blending of values that occurs within the context of agency and freedom of choice.
The author notes that “women’s agency is a central concern of this book” (31). Within the context of love, the author relies on Giddens’ work on confluent or pure love, which for him is a product of Western modernity. Her perspicuous critique of Giddens’ claim regarding “pure love” as freedom from cultural dictates is wonderfully reformatted to fit both the modern Sri Lankan marital context, where agency is emphasized, while simultaneously accommodating features of traditional arranged marriages important to family members. Abeyasekera observes that for her interlocutors life is not free from family and kin obligations. For the author (unlike Giddens), agency doesn’t imply freedom from social and cultural constraints, as much as it implies what Margaret Gilbert refers to as “joint commitment” between kin and all those people who serve and attend the wedding. The autonomy that Giddens exults as “liberating” is viewed as a “burden of responsibility” by her interlocutors. Thus, the author complexifies the concept of autonomy by viewing it, in the case of marriage, as an attribute of humans who are always caught in Max Weber’s “webs of signification.” Abeyasekera’s interlocutors acknowledge that “agency” and “freedom” do not dispel deictic rights and obligations.
Abeyasekera’s case studies show how contemporary Sri Lankan middle-class marriages are best understood as a blend of modern and traditional cultural features. For couples and their parents there is seldom an “either/or” list of criteria which bride and groom need satisfy in order to marry. Perspectives are not locked in, but are sensitive to social change. As a result, competing perspectives are a matter of degree, and differences are not reflexively disruptive.
Instead of viewing a rupture between traditional and modern marriages as a generational schism, which would be easy to do, the author describes how a new cultural, hybrid system related to marriage and family is born. This system represents a blending of both traditional and modern values and the emergence of an agented sense self-embedded in familial middle-class networks. The author’s ability to describe and analyze social change at the individual, cultural, social, and structural level is remarkable, especially since her explorations and explanations are textually transmitted with clarity, expertise, and substance.
The writing is almost uniformly clear, and her discussions and analysis can be easily followed and are backed up with numerous case studies. The book is mercifully lacking in academic obscurantisms. Her inferential takes on the case studies are always logical and understandable. The clarity of her writing and ability to wend a coherent theoretical thread through her case studies is both remarkable and refreshing. It is for this reason that I recommend this book as a course book for classes on South Asia, marriage, cultural change, ethnography, and family studies courses.
Victor de Munck
Vilnius University, Vilnius