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A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - AGATM (A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage)

Reporting period: 2021-07-01 to 2022-06-30

This comparative project has created a new theoretical vision of the importance of marriage as an agent of transformation in human sociality. The research has investigated marriage ethnographically as a transforming and transformative social institution through five contrastive and complementary sub-projects carried out in different locations: Malaysia; the U.S; Greece; Botswana; Taiwan and China. These sub-projects have been linked through the themes of care, property, and ritual forms. The encompassing frame of temporality has clarified the connections between the sub-projects and themes, and created an overall theoretical vision for the project. Together these have produced a synthesis of the moral, practical, political, and imaginative significance of marriage over time.

AGATM has had two main objectives:
• To collect new empirical data with a strong comparative focus on emerging forms of marriage
• To build a new theoretical vision of the long-term transformative significance of marriage in human sociality.
To achieve these objectives, AGATM has examined marriage ethnographically and comparatively in order to understand how marriages are constituted in practice, and in what ways marriage is currently changing. The research objectives have been operationalised through the following specific questions:
1. What new forms of marriage are emerging in contemporary societies?
2. What social tensions or contestations do these articulate or give rise to?
3. What kinds of social transformation might these new forms of marriage enable?
4. What cultural media enable these transformations to be imagined, absorbed, or resisted?

AGATM has forged synergies between the new kinship studies and work on intimacy, consumption, class, and religion. Our sub-projects of marriage in the economic crisis of Greece, emerging forms of middle class marriage in Malaysia, contestations around same-sex marriage in the US, marriage in the context of the HIV/Aids epidemic in Botswana, and under contrastive politico-economic regimes in China have been selected to illuminate the transformative force of marriage as well as its capacity to ensure resilience, its imaginative salience and its practical importance. They have made possible a comparative theorisation of local manifestations of change, such as new patterns of delayed marriage or non-marriage, changes in ritualisation and consumption patterns, or the availability of discourses of choice and romance.
The preparatory phase of reading and planning of fieldwork was completed in months 1-7. A planning workshop was held over 2 days in May 2017, involving the team and the Advisory Committee. Months 7-18 were focussed on carrying out field research for all projects. The comparative framework and discussions of the AGATM programme were fostered through the visits of the PI to three of the projects and used as opportunities for presenting preliminary research finding to local academic audiences.
In months 19-36 (July 2018-December 2019), work mainly focused on analysis of research materials, writing, planning and carrying out dissemination activities, as well as further fieldwork. PI visited Botswana project in Nov 2018. Ongoing activities included transcription of materials; preliminary analysis of field-notes and writing of draft chapters/papers. Full team meetings to foster the comparative framework of AGATM work, and for consolidation, discussion and planning of ongoing writing and dissemination events were held approximately every month.
Overview of results (dissemination highlights): A joint article was by team was published in Anthropology of this Century, May 2019. Magee delivered a paper on the Virginia project at ASA annual conference in Sept 2018; Chiu and Carsten delivered presentations at workshop on ‘The Invisible Within’ at University of Central Lancashire in Nov 2018; Carsten and Reece participated in round table discussion of Botswana project at University of Cape Town in Nov 2018; Carsten, Chiu, Papadaki, and Reece presented papers on all AGATM projects in May 2019 at a workshop at the University of Aegean. Reece organised panel on ‘Intimacy, marriage and social change’ at the European Conference for African Studies in Edinburgh in June 2019, and delivered a paper. Carsten delivered a seminar on Penang project at Monash University, KL in March 2019, and a training event for students and staff at University Sains Malaysia in April 2019, and a seminar on her Penang project at UCL in October 2019. Writing of papers and organisation for our main workshop/conference’ was completed and held in Edinburgh Sept 2019. Work for planned exhibition and associated catalogue and website, ‘An Anthropology of Weddings: 5 places, 50 Objects’, was completed, and exhibition displayed in Edinburgh Central Library during Sept 2019 with an associated on-line catalogue, and a panel on AGATM research was presented by AGATM team at AAA Annual Meetings in Vancouver in Nov 2019. From January 2020 to June 2022, work concentrated on preparation of our co-edited volume, monographs and journal articles. Carsten’s 'Imagining and living new worlds: The dynamics of kinship in contexts of mobility and migration', appeared in Ethnography in 2020; Reece’s article, ‘Telling Families, Telling Aids’ was published in Ethnos in 2021. Our collective edited volume, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense, was published by UCL Press, open access, in Sept 2021. Papadaki’s film, ‘Family Time’ was completed and shown at a University of the Aegean anthropology seminar in November 2020, and shown with a round table discussion at the RAI Film Festival in March 2021. Reece’s monograph, Pandemic Kinship: Families, Intervention, and Social Change in Botswana’s Time of Aids was published by Cambridge University Press in June 2022. Chiu’s monograph was accepted for publication with Berghahn to appear in 2023. We held workshops at University of Bayreuth (May 2022) and University of Thessaloniki (June 2022). Carsten conducted a final research visit to Penang in May-June 2022, and delivered a public talk on her research at the Penang Institute in June 2022.
Overall, we have maximised dissemination and publication activities to bring our work to as wide an audience as possible. Our research, using a combination of interdisciplinary methodological approaches and maximising collaborative work throughout, has broken new ground for the anthropology of kinship. Emphasising the ethical, political, affective, temporal and imaginative qualities of marriage, our exhibition, film, talks and publications have taken discussions into new comparative and theoretical directions. Concentrating on the production of high-quality monographs, we expect our work to have continued impact in ensuing years.
The original analytic approach and innovative methods of this research will reconfigure social science understandings of the importance of marriage as a transforming and transformative social institution. AGATM will not only reshape kinship studies in anthropology, but has provided new insights for other social scientists and policy makers in the field of social care in relation to family institutions, resources, and residential arrangements. Ongoing publications from AGATM research will continue to appear over the next few years. Three further monographs and seven further journal articles are currently in preparation for submission
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