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The right spouse : preferential marriages in Tamil Nadu / Isabelle Clark-Decès.
LIBRA DS432.T3 C63 2014
Available from offsite location
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Clark-Decès, Isabelle, 1956-2017, author.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Tamil (Indic people)--Marriage customs and rites.
- Tamil (Indic people).
- Tamil (Indic people)--Kinship.
- Marriage--India--Tamil Nadu.
- Marriage.
- Kinship--India--Tamil Nadu.
- Kinship.
- Endogamy and exogamy--India--Tamil Nadu.
- Endogamy and exogamy.
- Tamil Nadu (India)--Social life and customs.
- Tamil Nadu (India).
- India--Tamil Nadu.
- Physical Description:
- x, 204 pages ; 23 cm
- Place of Publication:
- Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2014.
- Summary:
- The Right Spouse is an engaging investigation into Tamil (South Indian) preferential close kin marriages, so-called Dravidian Kinship. Isabelle Clark-Decès presents readers with a focused anthropology of this waning marriage system: its past, present, and dwindling future. The book takes on the main pillars of Tamil social organization, considers the ways in which Tamil intermarriage establishes, kinship and social rank, and argues that past scholars have improperly defined Dravidian kinship. Within her critique of past scholarship, Clark-Decès recasts a powerful and vivid image of preferential marriage in Tamil Nadu and how those preferences and marital rules play out in lived reality. What she discovers in her fieldwork are endogamous patterns and familial connections that sometimes result in flawed relationships, contradictory statuses, and confused roles. The book includes a fascinating narration of the complex terrain that Tamil youth currently navigate as they experience the complexities and changing nature of marriage practices and seek to reconcile their established kinship networks to more individually driven marriages and careers. Book jacket.
- Contents:
- Introduction : Tamil preferential marriages
- The Kaḷḷars and Dumont's theory of alliance
- Doing the right thing
- The remainders of right marriages
- The younger brother takes less
- The unbearable chain of kinship
- The wrongness of kin
- Love in the time of youth
- Conclusion : the present is not another world.
- Notes:
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-198) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780804788069
- 0804788065
- 9780804790499
- 0804790493
- OCLC:
- 861497359
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