Critical social sciences have not paid systematic attention to forced divorce and its causes, mechanisms, and consequences, even though the practice has a global presence. On a conceptual level, the ...article distinguishes four main subtypes of forced divorce. On an empirical level, it shows how spouse-driven and parent-driven forced divorces (generally involving minors) work among the Gabor Roma living in Romania. On a theoretical level, the article demonstrates that forced divorces in this Roma ethnic population cannot be understood without using a dynamic, processual perspective on arranged marriage, which highlights how the flourishing of the practice can be traced back primarily to the post-wedding survival of premarital contextual forces – conducive contexts, coercive parental control, etc. – supporting socialization into/normalization of arranged marriage. The findings may contribute to a deeper understanding of how spousal vulnerability and children's and women's defenselessness work in arranged marriage/arranged divorce cultures.
How do objects mediate human relationships, and possess their own social and political agency? What role does material culture -- such as prestige consumption as well as commodity aesthetics, ...biographies, and ownership histories -- play in the production of social and political identities, differences, and hierarchies? How do (informal) consumer subcultures of collectors organize and manage themselves? Drawing on theories from anthropology and sociology, specifically material culture, consumption, museum, ethnicity, and post-socialist studies, Materializing Difference addresses these questions via analysis of the practices and ideologies connected to Gabor Roma beakers and roofed tankards made of antique silver. The consumer subculture organized around these objects -- defined as ethnicized and gendered prestige goods by the Gabor Roma living in Romania -- is a contemporary, second-hand culture based on patina-oriented consumption. Materializing Difference reveals the inner dynamics of the complex relationships and interactions between objects (silver beakers and roofed tankards) and subjects (Romanian Roma) and investigates how these relationships and interactions contribute to the construction, materialization, and reformulation of social, economic, and political identities, boundaries, and differences. It also discusses how, after 1989, the political transformation in Romania led to the emergence of a new, post-socialist consumer sensitivity among the Gabor Roma, and how this sensitivity reshaped the pre-regime-change patterns, meanings, and value preferences of prestige consumption.
This article analyses the politics of consumption through contesting discourses rationalizing the interethnic trade of silver beakers and tankards carried out between two Romanian Roma groups. The ...members of these groups regard such objects as scarce prestige goods and political trophies imbued with emotional and identity value. The examined discourses focus on consumer practices and value preferences attributed to the negatively defined, ethnic other, and give a central role to strategies such as classification (or definition) struggles, moral criticism and stereotyping. The analysis demonstrates how members of these groups attach different meanings to the concept of a good/normal/ideal life, and to dichotomies such as average standard of living and luxuries, morally acceptable and morally stigmatized modes of consumption, and consumer modernism and conservatism when they explain their consumer choices. The analysis furthermore shows how – through the strategies mentioned above – these Roma construct their respective ethnic interpretations of consumer moral superiority.
The article examines how two symbolic arenas of Gabor Roma politics - the accumulation of wealth (with a special focus on competitive luxury consumption centred around beakers and roofed tankards ...made of antique silver) and marriage politics - are intertwined and interact with each other. The first part introduces Roma politics, describes the most important features of luxury consumption and marriage politics, and delineates the main types of interconnectedness and interplay between these two symbolic arenas. The second part, using a marital biographical perspective, sheds light on how one of these types of interconnectedness works through a detailed analysis of the establishment and dissolution of an engagement of historical importance among the Gabor Roma. This case study demonstrates why and how economic and political ambitions or constraints may shape individual and family-level strategies and decision-making concerning partner choice and marriage politics. The article serves as an insightful example of why a marital biographical perspective - based on concepts such as processuality, dynamism, relatedness, and context-sensitivity - is well suited to provide a nuanced insight into how the political economy of family life works in various ethnographic settings.
This book provides an in-depth exploration and analysis of marriages between Japanese nationals and migrants from three broad ethnic/cultural groups - spouses from the former Soviet Union countries, ...the Philippines, and Western countries. It reveals how the marriage migrants navigate the intricacies and trajectories of their marriages with Japanese people while living in Japan. Seen from the lens of ‘gendered geographies of power’, the book explores how state-level politics and policies towards marriage, migration, and gender affect the personal power politics in operation within the relationships of these international couples. Overall, the book discusses how ethnic identity intersects with gender in the negotiation of spaces and power relations between and amongst couples; and the role states and structural inequalities play in these processes, resulting in a reconfiguration of our notions of what international marriages are and how powerful gender and the state are in understanding the power relations in these unions.
Islamic Divorce in the 21st Century shows the wide range
of Muslim experiences in marital disputes and in seeking Islamic
divorces. For Muslims, having the ability to divorce in accordance
with ...Islamic law is of paramount importance. However, Muslim
experiences of divorce practice differ tremendously. The chapters
in this volume discuss Islamic divorce from West Africa to
Southeast Asia, and each story explores aspects of the everyday
realities of disputing and divorcing Muslim couples face in the
twenty-first century. The book's cross-cultural and comparative
look at Islamic divorce indicates that Muslim divorces are impacted
by global religious discourses on Islamic authority, authenticity,
and gender; by global patterns of and approaches to secularity; and
by global economic inequalities and attendant patterns of
urbanization and migration. Studying divorce as a mode of Islamic
law in practice shows us that the Islamic legal tradition is
flexible, malleable, and context-dependent.
Redefining Multicultural Families in South Korea provides an in-depth look at the lives of families in Korea that include immigrants. Ten original chapters in this volume, written by scholars ...in multiple social science disciplines and covering different methodological approaches, aim to reinvigorate contemporary discussions about these multicultural families. Specially, the volume expands the scope of “multicultural families” by examining the diverse configurations of families with immigrants who crossed the Korean border during and after the 1990s, such as the families of undocumented migrant workers, divorced marriage immigrants, and the families of Korean women with Muslim immigrant husbands. Second, instead of looking at immigrants as newcomers, the volume takes a discursive turn, viewing them as settlers or first-generation immigrants in Korea whose post-migration lives have evolved and whose membership in Korean society has matured, by examining immigrants’ identities, need for political representation, their fights through the court system, and the aspirations of second-generation immigrants.
