Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. xi, 221 pp. (Tables, coloured photos.) US$35.00, paper; free ebook [Luminos Open Access]. ISBN 9780520389427.
The book Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility prompts a seismic shift in understanding a segment of the population that has received scant attention in academic discourse: the never-married single woman. In the most compelling way, Sarah Lamb writes critically and analytically about the plight of never-married women in West Bengal, India, addressing the structural ways in which single women in Indian society are sequestered while they create their possibilities of being. In this beautifully and lucidly crafted ethnographic study, Lamb asks why singlehood in India is on the rise even when Indian society deploys multi-layered obstacles for unattached, unmarried adult women? Lamb, in the book, poignantly explores both these aspects of why and how women are single and the challenges, stigma, and oppression they encounter. In doing so, she uses the intersectional everyday realities of never-married women to formulate two categories. First, there are those who live in urban settings in a cosmopolitan milieu, are city-educated, and enjoy relative freedom because of their class positions, and can frame their singularity as a “choice.” Second, there are the women who are constrained by social class and caste identities and find their singlehood due to structural compulsions of poverty, care for natal families, and class mismatch. The book analyzes the singlehood of never-married women in the overlapping typologies and problematics of “choice” and necessities as a recurring theme throughout the book. Lamb provides evocative histories and stories of women’s lives, where each character presents insights, claims, and intent, answering why one is single, what it means to be single and how being single defines one’s personhood. These revelations make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, fulfilling a much-regarded aim of an anthropologist.
Lamb purposefully chooses never-married women and defines this category as that demography of women who have lived outside of marriage and have never entered the realm of conjugality and are unlikely to do so. Within the fold of never-married women, she includes those who have not married, queer persons, and individuals in romantic and sexual relationships. Thus, being single here only means not having married, not the relationship status itself. Relatedly, Lamb establishes that the problem is not the status of marriage but marriage itself. In this regard, women within the patriarchal institution of marriage are non-subjects whose only purpose is reproduction and carrying forward social and cultural traditions, practices, and performances. Therefore, in decentering the attention paid to the marital status of women, Lamb asserts that to comprehend the alienation of single women, one needs to examine their situated realities within the queer studies framework. Queer studies empower the voices and experiences of those living outside compulsory heterosexual and patrilineal paradigms. Therefore, to think of singlehood as queer, a vital contribution by Lamb, is to resist the exaggerated value given to marriage.
In her oscillation between the oppression of and possibilities for never-married women in India, Lamb presents her aims as contributions to the fields of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, emerging single studies, and the discipline of social anthropology, as reflected in the book’s seven chapters, with each chapter addressing issues in the lives of single women. The first section expounds on how and why single women exist and their own interpretations of their lives, while providing a penetrating critique of a society theorized as gendered marriage imperative—a patriarchy-based coercion over women’s sexuality and desires within heterosexual marriage. The next theme delves into the possibilities that education and work opportunities have created for women by reducing economic and social vulnerability, even when “over accomplishment” is sometimes used to deem women unmarriable. In doing so, Lamb highlights the nuanced ways in which education and work have become two pillars for sustaining never-married women’s position in society.
The next two chapters introduce the politics of care as an integral part of single women’s lives. In one discourse of care, Lamb, through ethnographic evidence, explains the status of single women as the result of the expectation of care for their natal families as daughters and/or sisters. In such cases, a family’s class status or the death of a primary wage earner puts single women in a demanding situation. Here the patriarchal understanding of women’s responsibilities rules out the “option” of marriage because their exit to a marital home will wreck their natal family. In the other discourse of care, Lamb raises the anxieties single women have about who will care for them because natal families, in most cases, do not reciprocate care practices. The anxieties of care are the axiomatic reality of single women as they age and lack kinship relations to depend upon. The next theme studies love and sexuality in the lives of never-married single women; this understanding is tenuous because society expects these women to present as pious and asexual. If they appear attached, they are met with the stigma of “loose woman.” Lamb, through an anecdote, seeks to show that even self-pleasure is looked down upon. Therefore, even though stigmatized, women’s relationships with love, pleasure, and their bodies are situated in a class distinction where educated and class-privileged women find more avenues for romance and self-pleasure. The next theme deals with the state and societal ways of preventing women from adopting and using alternative reproduction methods. Lamb highlights success stories of single moms adopting or using IVF to conceive, despite ceaseless queries about “who is the father?” or how to situate the politics of respectability for single mothers. The final chapter examines friendship and fun and their vitality in the lives of single women and their relation to class and caste.
The book makes remarkable contributions in numerous ways. First, Lamb examines singlehood through seemingly disparate discourses that are not normally considered when thinking of the lives and struggles of single, never-married women. She presents her interlocutors’ voices and lived experiences as a penetrating critique of marriage, and succeeds in doing it in such a manner that their stories continue to live on with the reader. Second, she looks at the population of single women who are not simply young and fit into the discourse of the neoliberal consumerist agenda with cosmopolitan sensibilities but women whose social and familial necessities have produced singledom. She perceptively problematizes the idea of choice, freedom, and absolute agency when examining singlehood. Finally, the writing is deeply immersive; one almost feels in the company of Sarah Lamb as she moves among the single women in West Bengal.
Shivani Gupta
National University of Singapore, Singapore