Overview

This fresh and engaging book opens up new terrain in the exploration of marriage and kinship. While anthropologists and sociologists have often interpreted marriage, and kinship more broadly, in conservative terms, Carsten highlights their transformative possibilities. The book argues that marriage is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale, carrying the seeds of social transformation alongside the trappings of conformity. Grounded in rich ethnography and the author's many decades of familiarity with Malaysia, it asks a central question: what does marriage do, and how? Exploring the implications of the everyday imaginative labour of marriage for kinship relations and wider politics, this work offers an important and highly original contribution to anthropology, family and kinship studies, sociology and Southeast Asian studies.

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9781009601047

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Reviews

'Marriage and the Moral Imagination is a brilliant exposition of what Janet Carsten calls encounters with difference at the most intimate scale. At the same time, it is a profound reflection on new ways of conceiving the political and the ethical which sprout from the everyday and transform the way we imagine the emergence of the new. Carsten's work shows her creativity in thinking in the quietest of voices - her voice and the voices of her interlocutors who step out from these pages and become companions in the life we as readers come to share.' Veena Das, FBA, Professor Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University 'Janet Carsten has transformed the anthropological imagination on kinship and, in this book, reconfigures our very conception of marriage. Weaving together the intimate with the political, Carsten documents marriage's creative potential across generations and over time, unravelling its capacity to endure and enact change.' Ammara Maqsood, Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, University College London 'Janet Carsten paints an exquisitely rich and nuanced portrait of how the moral and imaginative labor intrinsic to marriage - rooted as it is in the personal, social, and political complexities of the present and encompassing comparative reflections on past histories and future possibilities - can become a creative force for social change. Here is Carsten at her very finest.' Susan McKinnon, Professor Emerita, University of Virginia 'The anthropology of kinship is deeply enrichened by Carsten's beautiful account of marriage making in Penang, Malaysia, presenting it as a deeply intergenerational and relational process of reflection and ethical self-fashioning that engages the moral imaginations of individual subjects as well as entire societies and polities. Marriage emerges as not just a conventional force but instead one that bears a profound potential for intimate transformations that can be exceptionally – and historically - significant.' Perveez Mody, Associate Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

Author Information

Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the anthropology of kinship, encompassing domesticity, the house, bodily substance, migration, and memory. She is the author of After Kinship (2004) and Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang (2019).

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