The Construction of Continuity in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

This study examines features of social organization originally encountered in New Ireland in 1929–30 by the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to depict important aspects of social life before these were transformed by colonial and missionary influences. Kinship and marriage are discussed as topoi in discourses of continuity. It is suggested that in a social landscape of demographic limitations and widespread violence, social morphology was generated through categorical distinctions providing symbolic order in a dense texture of factual kinship, an order imposed to counteract the ever‐present shadow of incest. The social grammar prescribed a primary uterinely defined demarcation of belonging. As a parallel counterpoint, there was also an agnatically inspired alternative cultural modality. In this other possible world, the main distinction was that between men and women, uterine belonging being irrelevant.     

Mother Scorpion: Women’s Politics and Affinal Relations among the Miskitu and other “Brideservice Societies”

This article is concerned with modelling the logic of social processes and cultural representations that inform “politics and gender in simple societies” (Collier and Rosaldo 1981 Collier, J. F. and Rosaldo, M. Z. 1981. “Politics and Gender in Simple Societies”. In Sexual Meanings, Edited by: Ortner, S. and Whitehead, H. New York: Cambridge University Press.  [Google Scholar]), and considers the well‐known ideal type presented by Collier and Rosaldo in which particular gendered practices and ideas are organized around a style of marriage commonly termed “brideservice”. These authors’ modelling of the cultural logic of so‐called “brideservice societies” provides in many ways a satisfyingly coherent analysis of this institution that offers considerable predictive power, but it remains in some respects a partial account neglecting important aspects of older women’s political motivations and representations and the role of these women in the context of corporate groups. I consider here ethnographic materials from the Miskitu of eastern Nicaragua, amongst whom brideservice is widely practiced, to highlight some limitations with Collier and Rosaldo’s ideal type, arguing that their model should be modified to accommodate these limitations.     

‘The dearest sacrifice’: Catharine Maria Sedgwick and the Celibate Life

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, America’s most respected and popular female novelist of the early nineteenth century, never married. Yet while she chose a life of celibacy, most scholars have argued that her life represented ‘a deviation’ from the more conventional women’s roles she prescribed in her fiction. This article places Sedgwick’s marital decision within the context of several converging influences – her family history, her Federalist upbringing, and most important, her conversion to Unitarianism. Read through the lens of the complementary religious and social principles of Unitarianism and Federalism, Sedgwick’s novels reveal a persistent exploration of several themes – the ability to realize and advance truth, the centrality of character and moral cultivation, and the obligation to serve one’s community. Sedgwick’s exploration of these themes illuminates her choice of celibacy, and her conclusions contain a radical commentary on the appropriateness of marriage for women.     

女权：无可奈何花落去——《诗经》婚恋悲剧的社会原因

《诗经》的婚恋悲剧,多是追求自由与专一的悲剧,这其中固然有礼制的原因,但并非是最根本的。西周以来的嫡长子继承制,使女性失去了拥有基本权利的经济基础,从而导致男权凌驾于女权之上,进而演化成整个社会的男权集体无意识。女子的婚恋悲剧就是由于女权被男权剥夺而导致的。     

对匈奴收继婚制度的再探讨--匈奴婚姻制度研究之一

匈奴的婚姻制度较为复杂,收继婚是其最具特色的婚姻制度之一。史籍中匈奴的收继婚只笼统概述为“父死,妻其后母;兄弟死,尽取其妻妻之”,实际上,它有着相当严格的法则和收继顺序。同时,匈奴的收继婚不仅是一种婚姻制度,而且还是匈奴身份继承制度的重要组成部分和一种赡养制度。     

Castles,castellans and the structure of politics in Poitou, 1152– 1271

By the middle of the twelfth century Poitou had been divided into small units of local control, known as castellanies. A castellany was the territory surrounding a castle; within it the castellan exercised military, judicial and economic powers. Between 1152 and 1271 the control of castles in Poitou experienced a development of three stages, moving from single-castellany holdings by the province's fifty leading families via regional lordships pieced together by four of these families to country-wide hegemony by the count. The progressive consolidation of castle-holding corresponded to the development of political life. The chaotic political conditions of the second half of the twelfth century were replaced by the leadership of the regional lords after 1200, which in turn gave way to the unchallenged authority of the count after 1242. The logic of this tripartite development explains the achievement of Alphonse of Poitiers, count from 1241, in turning Poitou from a region of chronic turbulence into a well-governed country. This paper emphasizes the role of the regional lords as the bridge between extreme fragmentation of authority and effective centralization.     

Repertoires of Family Life and the Anchoring of Afghan Trading Networks in Ukraine

This article examines the “repertories” of family life of men of Afghan background in Odessa, Ukraine. It focuses on these men's intimate relationships with “local women” and challenges the notion that such unions merely offer a form of emotional escape for migrants or refugees far from home. Instead, we advance two arguments: first, that Afghan men in Ukraine form part of a complex transnational trading network, rather than a bounded group of refugees or migrants; second, that the cross-community relationships between Afghan men and “local women” play a significant role in the spatial anchoring and commercial fortunes of transnational Afghan traders in Ukraine. In the analysis of our ethnographic data, we consider the importance of the aftermath of the Cold War in shaping the diverse forms of family life within these trading networks.     

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.     

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.     

论中国古代抢婚文化

抢婚是一种古老的婚姻习俗,大约产生在母系社会氏族内群婚向氏族外对偶婚的过渡时期。生产力的进步促使了婚姻形态的演变,私有制产生以后,买卖婚俗流行,抢婚已逐渐丧失其原有的内涵,而注入了不同历史时期的社会文化特征。