Marriage and the Moral Imagination

Explores the everyday, imaginative, and ethical work of marriage to reveal its transformative effects on individuals, families, communities.

How are the intimate relations of marriage and wider social change connected? Combining interviews, family histories, comparative social studies, novels, and popular discourse, this book explores the everyday, imaginative and ethical work of marriage and its transformative effects on individuals, families, and communities.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.