Women,Place and Practice in Vanuatu: a View from Ambae

This paper discusses the relationship between people and place in Vanuatu, focusing on the relationship between women and place. The paper draws on ethnographic data from the island of Ambae, arguing that practice mediates the relationship between people and place, and, in the new context of the nation, has become a way of demonstrating a person's affiliation to place. In contemporary Vanuatu, kastom mediates and expresses place-based identity. Landholding and land-use are aspects of the practice of a place. The fact that a person's identity is tied to their place raises issues for the identity and status of women, who move at marriage to their husband's place. It remains the case, however that at marriage a woman becomes identified as a person of her husband's place, no matter whether she lives there or not. Ni-Vanuatu women see their capacity to move and resettle in this way as a strength, a capacity of which they can be proud, and for which men respect them. The growth of urban centres since Independence is bringing new presssures to bear on the relationship between people, practice and place.     

Boundaries and opportunities: comparing slave family formation in the antebellum South

Our understanding of the marriage strategies and family formation of enslaved people remains clouded by disagreement among contemporary scholars. A perusal of the historical literature suggests that two issues lay at the root of this disagreement: First, scholars disagree over the extent to which slave family life was shaped by the external factors of slavery, or rather slave agency; and second, scholars appear reluctant to abandon their singular views of the slave family. This article addresses both of these gaps by formulating a middle ground in the slave agency debate and by redefining the slave family in plural form. An analysis of the boundaries and opportunities for family formation in northern Virginia and lowcountry South Carolina, this study shows that while the establishment of co-residential two-parent households was the ideal for slaves, not all were able to realize that ideal, and those that could not adapted their marriage strategies and family lives accordingly.     

Marriage,Love Magic,and Adultery: Warlpiri Relationships as Seen by Three Generations of Anthropologists

ABSTRACT A nuclear family, that is the social unit comprising a husband, wife(s) and their children, is one of the significant core elements around which the great majority of societies are built. An individual's most immediate social and emotional relationships, those between children and parents, between husband and wife, and between siblings are encapsulated within it. How these relationships are realised in actual practice is partly dependent upon the form marriage takes. In this paper, I analyse Warlpiri marriage as practice and institution by drawing on and comparing material by Mervyn Meggitt (from his work at Lajamanu in the 1950s), Diane Bell (based on her work at Alekarenge in the 1970s) and my own data from my fieldwork at Yuendumu (from the mid 1990s and onward). My aim is to explore the following questions: What constitutes a marriage in Warlpiri eyes today? Are there continuities with the past? What has changed since the 1950s? And, what do these continuities and changes mean in regard to the way Warlpiri people live their lives today?     

日本近世大名家训中的武家政治思想

近世日本是建立在武力统治和身份统治基础上的封建家族国家,虽然其以中国的儒学为统治思想,但是统治阶级始终坚持尚武为立国之本,把尚武习武看成是执政者和有教养者的重要标志,认为在治世能保持尚武精神的武士才是真武士。关于君臣关系,在“家”观念支配下,他们认为君臣关系是建立在同一家族共同体基础上的,家臣与主君同样对家的延续兴亡负有责任。他们的忠君观念具有家族主义和集团主义色彩,具有超越主君个人而把家国作为忠诚对象的特征。近世武士阶级在中国儒学的影响下,能够自觉地从治国安民这一政治角度考虑百姓的生活,并且达到“为国家人民立君”这样的政治高度。     

Men who ‘Marry Out’: unsettling masculinity,kinship, and nation through migration across the Taiwan Strait

Family reunification has become a widely recognized means to move across borders in the contemporary world. As a migration strategy, family reunification redefines the relationship of kinship to nation, diversifying the ‘national family’ and its gendered role expectations. This article uses cross-border marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese to interrogate how immigration affects the experiences of men who migrate through or in conjunction with marriage, integrating scales of family, citizenship, and nation in an analysis of migrant masculinity. Migrant husbands describe their disempowerment as male providers and citizens through the patrilineal and patrilocal kinship language of having ‘married out.’ The article examines the salience of this kinship model for immigrant husbands seeking to redefine their relationship to patrilineal gender privileges and secure citizenship status. How do men who migrate through marriage negotiate gendered kinship principles that may work to their benefit in their home country but undermine their status once they migrate? How does the experience of migrating as a kin-dependent threaten men’s self-image as family providers? By investigating these challenges to hegemonic masculinity, the article asks how migration reconfigures the gendered foundations of family formation by undermining kinship-based models of normative masculinity and creating a gender crisis for some migrant husbands.     

A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan,Feng Yuxiang,and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth-Century China

This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.     

Innocence and experience: sexuality among young people in modern France, c. 1750-1950

Prying into the sex lives of young people in the past has alwaysproved a challenging exercise. Historians have often ended uprelying on the testimony from adult observers or on the quantitativeevidence provided by illegitimacy rates. This article adoptsa more direct route by drawing on first-hand accounts of earlysexual experiences written by French people in diaries, childhoodreminiscences and autobiographies. As a preliminary, it analysesthe way various authorities depicted young people as sexual(or non-sexual) beings, and the state of sex education in Francebefore the mid-twentieth century. It then considers the waypeople depicted their first stirrings of sexuality during childhoodand adolescence. Finally, it examines evidence from the ‘egodocuments’ on sexual relations in the run-up to marriage.     

Ohitorisama,Singlehood and Agency in Japan

Abstract:

Postwar Japanese society has experienced significant demographic shifts. Of particular note are trends in marriage delay, increased divorce, increased rates of lifelong singlehood and an increased proportion of life spent unmarried. In this context, singlehood is increasingly experienced by women, for at least some period in their adult lives. Nonetheless, while greater numbers of Japanese are living as singles for a greater portion of their lives, marriage and childbearing remain key markers of contemporary Japanese womanhood. Living outside marriage – as a single, divorced or widowed person – suggests divergence from the ideal, even if it is just an unavoidable temporary state. This paper explores singlehood as a contested space of ideals and practices, and presents the notion of ohitorisama as one model of contemporary female singlehood.     

Marriage as a Marker of Secular Inclusion? Oral History and Lesbian and Gay Narratives on Marriage in Contemporary Australia

Same‐sex marriage has been one of the most widely discussed social issues in contemporary Australia for some time. In late 2017, after holding a contentious national postal survey that year, the Australia government introduced legislation allowing same‐sex couples to marry. This article draws on a major national lesbian and gay oral history project conducted in partnership with the National Library of Australia between 2012 and 2015, when discussions of same‐sex marriage were becoming increasingly widespread. It investigates the way interview subjects incorporated marriage into their narratives. In doing so, it highlights how understandings of marriage — both amongst lesbian and gay people and heterosexual people — have shifted and evolved over time. While some subjects saw marriage as a somewhat outdated, religious, and patriarchal concept, many others invested personal significance in the institution, arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians access to marriage would be a strong symbol of social progress and equality in a secular society. We conclude with one young interviewee who had managed to reconcile his faith with his sexuality and desire for marriage equality.     

Overlooked Husbands: The Paradox of Unfree Marriage in the Carolingian World

Unfree people in the Roman world could not legally marry, while they could in the Middle Ages. This paper explores the marriage of the unfree in the Carolingian empire (750–900 CE), a society with an intense moral concern about marriage. Carolingian churchmen wrote extensively about marriage, using a strongly gendered discourse focusing on how men should approach marriage and behave as husbands. However, these moral and legal texts rarely discussed unfree marriage, even though the practice was common. It is argued that this silence reflects the persistence of late antique class-based gender models, in which masculinity was reserved for married property holders. Although legal prohibitions on unfree marriages had ended, Carolingian moralists continued to be influenced by patristic assumptions that these were not valid relationships. These assumptions, combined with Frankish social practices that largely excluded unfree men from other key male roles, such as arms-bearing, meant that unfree husbands were not conceptualised as sufficiently ‘manly’ to have their marriages discussed. It is only from the tenth century onwards, when images of masculinity began to fragment more along lines of social status, that authors began explicitly to state that the Christian ideas of marriage applied to all, free and unfree.     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

Marriage Migration,Gender Transformations,and Family Values in the ‘Global Ecumene’

The metaphor of the market is a poor explanatory tool for the growth in international web-brokered marriages, between (mainly) men from rich countries and women from poor countries. States play an important role in regulating particular forms of migration including creating the ‘need’ for spousal migrants, as well as permitting their entry. The characterisation of the men who seek spouses through international agencies as powerful agents in the world system has to be mediated through understandings of the ways in which gender identities are not simple binaries that the contemporary global order is reproducing on an expanded scale. The characterisation of the women obscures the manner in which they are acting out of their own aspirations; and when a marriage is contracted, the man and woman enter into a personal relationship that cannot be reduced to a commodity exchange. These marriages involve people in negotiations about new forms of personal attachment involving intimacy, spousal roles and family relations. They are constitutive of the social networks of the ‘global ecumene’, a new kind of known world whose borders are constantly expanding. Gender relations are not constituted simply in the realm of the economic. We cannot assume family relations are merely expressions of dominant economic forms. The space of international web-brokered marriages is one in which women can be seen as active subjects in a transnational space that allows them to act outside, to certain degrees, of kinship-based power.     

Fault, Breakdown, and the Church of England's Involvement in the 1969 Divorce Reform

The 1969 reform of the divorce laws was part of a wider trendtowards the relaxation of family law that took place in mostwestern countries in the 1960s and 1970s.In Britain, the legislationresulted only in a regime of partial no-fault divorce. Thiswas the result of a compromise between church and state, whichis investigated in this article using Lambeth Palace papersand the archives of the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council. In particular, we focus on the origins of and reasons for theprofound shift in the Church's views on divorce that occurredin the 1960s. These had as much to do with changing views asto the source of sexual morality and the difficulties of imposingan external moral code. However, because divorce law reflectsa view of marriage, it was impossible for the Church to acceptfull no-fault divorce, which would have meant divorce by mutualconsent and have threatened the idea of marriage as a vocation.The compromise reached allowed the Church to go on treatingChristian and civil marriage as compatible. ^*The authors' names appear in alphabetical order.     

WOMEN AS SECONDARY EARNERS

This paper addresses the issue of the gender gap in young people's work preferences and intentions within the context of changing gender relations in urban Indonesia. A survey of senior university students in Jakarta and Makassar in 2004 provided evidence on the interplay between labour market and marriage role preferences among the young educated elite in Indonesia (n = 1761). Along with ongoing demographic transitions and socio-economic change, the study hypothesised that shifting gender norms have created a preference for a more egalitarian, dual-earner marriage among the target population. However, findings indicate that neo-traditional ideals placing men as the breadwinner and women as secondary earners are widely prevalent. Qualitative insights highlight how the universality of marriage and having children entail women to assume a role to satisfy increasing economic needs without relegating their noble role to maintain family harmony.     

"A Troubled Godless Place": Catholic Practice and Local Politics in the Communes of the Central Vaucluse, 1830–1905

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, men and women in the French communes of the central Vaucluse began to defer or neglect vital Catholic rites of passage. Against a backdrop of turbulent regional politics and economic upheaval, formal adherence to church doctrine declined sharply, never again to regain its previous levels. This article assesses the religious gestures of individuals and communities through the analysis of their sacramental participation, the only recorded response of Catholics to the church's presence in their lives. The implementation of the lay republic in the community by means of both local and national secularizing policy from 1878 to 1905 was the primary precipitant of general, dramatic decreases in formal Catholic practice. It was only upon the official secularization of communal society and politics that significant numbers of central Vauclusiens began to relinquish their attachment to Catholic rites of passage surrounding birth, marriage, and death.     

The Missionaries' Position: Polygamy and Divorce in the Anglican Communion, 1888–1988

This article explores the Church of England's engagement with polygamy through a survey of policy debates about plural marriage that took place from the 1880s to the 1980s. With few exceptions, nineteenth and early‐twentieth century missionaries refused to allow men in polygamous marriages to convert to Christianity. This decision was formalised at the 1888 Lambeth Conference, but reversed one hundred years later at the 1988 Conference. The article uncovers factors that led to the recognition of alternative forms of marriage, and begin to expose the dynamics of repression and toleration in Anglican marriage discourse. Following recent postcolonial feminist scholarship, it argues that the church's inability to resolve its parallel but conflicting oppositions to polygamy and divorce formed a paradox which implicitly provincialized British Anglican gender understandings, and that the 1988 Lambeth Conference decision represents a tacit acknowledgement of the fundamental epistemic divide represented by this paradox.     

Breaking Ground: Hoes in Precolonial South Africa—Typology,Medium of Exchange and Symbolic Value

In sub-Saharan Africa, every cultivator of the soil in a precolonial, agriculturist society needed a digging implement, and this normally took the form of a hoe with an iron blade hafted on a wooden handle. This paper marks the first attempt to document the surprising variety of hoe blade styles and map their regional distributions within South Africa. While the primary function of the hoe—this key item of material culture in African farming communities—was to cultivate the soil, the large quantity of metal and therefore labour required to make a hoe blade accorded it great value in the years before European industrial copies flooded the market. The hoe was an important item in trade networks, in marriage transactions and in a number of symbolic contexts associated with individual and collective ancestry. This biographical approach to hoe exchange, use and recycling reveals the complex significance of this tool in the lives of precolonial farmers. In particular, we are able to show that hoes could in some circumstances be accorded the same values as cattle in marriage exchange.     

Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

华侨家庭留守妇女的婚姻状况——以20世纪30-50年代福建泉州华侨婚姻为例

论文在现有研究的基础上,运用档案、民国报刊、口述历史访谈、留守妻子传记及其他相关资料和研究成果,以20世纪30-50年代福建泉州华侨婚姻为例,分析了华侨家庭留守妇女婚姻的缔结、维持、离婚、重婚以及婚外情等婚姻状况,探讨了国际移民对留守妇女婚姻生活的影响和华侨婚姻中的两性关系。本文认为,受到国际移民和侨乡发展的影响和冲击,华侨婚姻呈现出多元性,婚姻状况因华侨夫妇的不同境况而异。华侨婚姻是中国传统父权制婚姻在国际移民过程中的变异体,保留了父权制婚姻的一些特征,同时国际移民重新分配华侨夫妇的社会经济家庭责任,留守妇女往往要承担传统意义上属于丈夫的社会经济和家庭责任,她们的婚姻生活品质和生活也发生了变化。婚姻家庭的维持依赖各种复杂的内外因素,包括妻子的智慧、能力、坚忍和牺牲。     

Mission boys, civilized men, and marriage: educated African men in the Missions of Southern Rhodesia, 1920-1945

This paper examines what marriage may have meant to African men within the Christian elite of Southern Rhodesia. Using mission and government sources, it argues that domestic, Christian marriage was important to elite African men as a way of allowing them to achieve adulthood while remaining in good standing with mission sponsors who generally objected to or feared indigenous ideas of patriarchal male adulthood. Tracing life histories of two American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions ministers, one who succeeded in remaining within the mission system and one who left, blacklisted, it explores how domestic, Christian marriage defused many of the missions' suspicions of elite African men, while providing a way to acquire the economic, social and political power associated with full adulthood within the local context.