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23 - Kinship and Love

from Part IV - Intimate and Everyday Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2023

By
Perveez Mody
Edited by
James Laidlaw
James Laidlaw
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter explores the ethical tension between kinship and love in the realm of self-chosen marriages or ‘love-marriages’ in India. Central to the discussion are notions of personal autonomy as revealed in the deliberations of young people who must contend with normative ideas about acquiescing to marital ‘arrangement’ (by parents, elders, or kin) and who appear to eschew them by seeking to base their self-made kinship on love. In contrast, societal delineations of selfishness and selflessness play an unusually large part in narratives about love-marriages in North India and impose a measure of authenticity of self and of ethical distinctiveness between persons. This chapter seeks to explore the meanings of the ‘selfishness’ of love-marriages ethnographically by identifying bekhudiyat (literally, ‘losing the self’) as a form of self-forgetting that is poignantly linked to experiences of love and marriage in Delhi.

Keywords

kinshiplove-marriagebekhudiyatselfishnessself-sacrificeself-choosingethicsloveintimacy
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics , pp. 591 - 609
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Carsten, Janet, ed. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Das, Veena. 2007. ‘The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen As Sexed’, in Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Faubion, James. 2001. ‘Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of the Ethics of Kinship’, in James Faubion, (ed.), The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 1–28.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. 2011 [1996]. ‘On Love’, in Anthropology of the Century. http://aotcpress.com/articles/love.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Jennifer. 2007. ‘“Love Makes a Family”: Globalisation, Companionate Marriage, and the Modernization of Gender Inequality’, in Padilla, Mark B. et al. (eds.), Love and Globalisation: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Mody, Perveez. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. Delhi: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mody, Perveez. 2019. ‘Contemporary Intimacies’, in Srivastava, Sanjay, Arif, Yasmeen, and Abraham, Janaki (eds.), Critical Themes in Indian Sociology. New Delhi: Sage Publications: 257–66.Google Scholar
Mody, Perveez. 2022. ‘Intimacy and the Politics of Love’. Annual Review of Anthropology, 51: 271–88.Google Scholar
Padilla, Mark B. et al. (eds.). 2007. Love and Globalisation: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.Google Scholar
Reddy, Deepa. 2001. ‘Kousi Oda Ponnu (Kousi’s Daughter)’, in Faubion, James (ed.), The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield: 125–52.Google Scholar
Srivastava, Sanjay. 2007. Passionate Modernity. Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India. Delhi: Routledge.Google Scholar

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  • Kinship and Love
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.023
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  • Kinship and Love
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.023
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Kinship and Love
  • Edited by James Laidlaw, University of Cambridge
  • Book: The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Ethics
  • Online publication: 11 May 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108591249.023
Available formats
×