Venue: Online & Room 1.60, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 1 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh.

If you need support to locate this room, please come in the main (street level) entrance at 1 Lauriston Place and walk ahead to find the reception.

Registration: This is a hybrid event. If you register to attend online, you will be sent a joining link for Microsoft Teams before the event starts.

In this event, we welcome four researchers from our CRFR network at advanced stages of their doctoral research to deliver a series of presentations that attend to how dominant cultural norms impinge upon various forms of coupledom. Focusing on India and Kazakhstan, it brings together various sites of the hetero-normative imaginary, including university spaces, caste and kin networks, marriage practices, and wedding rituals.

Programme

12pm -1.15pm: Session I

Chair: Nitzan Levenberg

From friendship to romance: the many contours of cross-gender sociality in university spaces in northeast India– Chandreyee Goswami
Scripting a Marriage: Narratives of Continuity and Change in Marriage-Making among Tamil Brahmins - Sambhavi Ganesh

1.15pm -1.45pm: Lunch

1.45pm - 3pm: Session II

Chair: Abby McCutcheon

Intimacy, Agency, ‘Consent’: Intricate Marriage Formation Practices in South Kazakhstan - Laura Makhulbayeva
‘I do not want to change my name’: Refusal within marriage as windows to marriage – Neerja Pathak

3pm -4pm: Coffee

Abstracts

1. From friendship to romance: the many contours of cross-gender sociality in university spaces in northeast India – Chandreyee Goswami

This presentation looks at the cross-gender sociality among university students in Northeast India. I argue that when cross-gender sociality is normalised, women students can subvert their normative femininity and feel a sense of control in articulating their sexuality. Carefree interaction, including playful teasing between men and women allows students to unlearn, question, reflect, and realise gender stereotypes, biases, dilemmas and desires and entitlements. I show how friendships enable women students to transgress gender norms attached to normative femininity. However, friendships also unravel and make women cautious of gendered hierarchies that put them in a disadvantageous position, no matter how much liberty they enjoy on campus. Set within this autonomy-constraint continuum, this presentation examines how women engage and experience different forms of cross-gender sociality on campus.

Chandreyee is a PhD student in Social Anthropology. Her work focuses on friendships among university students in Northeast India.

2. Scripting a Marriage: Narratives of Continuity and Change in Marriage-Making among Tamil Brahmins - Sambhavi Ganesh

This presentation unpacks Tamil Brahmin women’s experiences of making marriage by focusing on the changing and continuing expectations of caste members and kinspeople from brides. Graduating is an unspoken requirement for present-day brides and a far cry from families discouraging daughters' education and getting them married as children a few generations ago. Nevertheless, I argue that the discourse of change is stronger than actual change in forms of marriage and its associated notions of womanhood. Young women can negotiate with their parents about the timeline and spouse selection through their educated status. At the same time, the brides’ mothers play a crucial role in making the marriage while underplaying their involvement and scripting the process as an outcome of the bride’s initiative. Such scripting stems from their recognition of urban middle-class sensibilities of ‘allowing’ their daughters to make their marriage. Meanwhile, caste ideological collectives and individuals blame young women and their mothers for instances that transgress the ideal of endogamy and its associated conduct, highlighting women’s continuing roles in producing caste identity.

Sambhavi is a PhD candidate with the Centre for South Asian Studies. Her study explores the paradox of women’s gender roles underpinning the scripturally male caste category of ‘Brahmin’.

3. Intimacy, Agency, ‘Consent’: Intricate Marriage Formation Practices in South Kazakhstan - Laura Makhulbayeva

This presentation focuses on marriage formation practices in the context of South Kazakhstan, specifically those including bride abductions. I demonstrate that abductions, although traditionally understood as forceful, violent, abrupt actions emphasizing gender and power inequality, can also be intertwined with a varied array of connections, intimacy, and agency—all of which are shaping the extent and the reality of ‘consent’. Based on interviews with recently married women, a small number of men and some of their parents-in-law living in the Southern Kazakhstan district of Saryagash, and on my overall observations during several family events, my research demonstrates that abductions can be nuanced actions that do not negate these men and women’s pre-marital relationships, their agency, forms of intimacy and ‘consent’ to marriage. Moreover, I show that if we understand abductions as a step into marriage formation, more specifically a type of marriage proposal, ‘consent’ can be withheld for the abduction itself, but readily given for marriage. Therefore, functioning in a restrictive cultural context, marriage formation through abduction might be forceful and straightforward, but it can, at the same time, contain intimacy, implicit communication, degrees of agency and negotiations, which, as a result, can illustrate the reality of ‘consent’.

Laura Makhulbayeva is a final-year PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and her work focuses on marriage formation practices in the context of South Kazakhstan.

4. ‘I do not want to change my name’: Refusal within marriage as windows to marriage – Neerja Pathak

Among the Sindhi and Marathi Brahmins in India, the groom ritually changes the first name of the incoming bride at their wedding, following a tradition that can be traced through inter-generational histories of the families. The unsaid assumption of the natal and marital families is that the incoming bride will take the new name and accept it as her name from that moment of the ritual. Her new name is one of the many changes that are expected of her with marriage. This presentation will focus on women, albeit a minority, who refused a new name at marriage or years later in marriage while reflecting on their names. It asks what can exploring this refusal tell us about women, the working of marriage and the nature of names. In bringing narratives of refusal to a name at the ritual and over time in marriage together, I extend refusal to incorporate the work of time and relations in marriage. I argue that refusal to name-change becomes a crucial entry point to begin understanding how refusal manifests in different ways in marriage, how is it articulated and the risks and influences it stands on for women in marriage.

Neerja is a PhD Candidate with the Centre for South Asian Studies. She works within the Anthropology of names and naming in the context of marriage, gender and caste in India.

CRFR PhD Network Event: Making Marriage and Coupledom