Familial Undercurrents

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of “marrying for love” and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran’s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men’s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

‘Clan’ and ‘Family’: Transformations of Sociality among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea

Changes in what anthropologists understand “clan” to refer to, and the social relations that many sociologists think of as constituting a “nuclear family” are at the centre of this article. It is based on ethnography among Wampar speakers in north-eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG). Among the Wampar, different, sometimes conflicting, transitions relevant to the emergence of the family as an accentuated social entity can be observed; yet all are a result of Christianisation and the local effects of capitalism. Nominally patrilineal clans (sagaseg), after a period when they seemed to have a somewhat diminished social significance, are again crucial social units: a result of the government’s requirement that statutory Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) form the sole legal basis of compensation for land use. At the same time, there has been an increasing emphasis on the nuclear family, which, along with the aspiration for modern lifestyles (and their associated consumption patterns) and education for children, has reconfigured the gendered division of labour. Ideals of companionate marriage and values specific to the nuclear family have become much more critical to social practices. In some families, traditional notions of descent have lost importance to such an extent that some young people are no longer aware of their sagaseg membership. Wampar men and women discuss these conflicting tendencies and argue about the different values that ground them. Which argument prevails often depends on the specific position of the person confronting them.

Beauty Standards in Egypt

The creation of a hybrid beauty in the cartoon sphere and in advertising intersected with popular and consumer culture at a moment when women’s roles in the public sphere were changing. Politically the nation was at a crossroads: the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 removed most impediments toward Egyptian independence; however, British troops remained in the Suez Canal zone. With respect to economic history, multinationals were expanding in Egypt, while an emerging bourgeoisie worked to establish local industries. With World War II came economic crisis: inflation, profiteering, black markets, rising inequality, and the return of British troops to strategic locations around the country. This article argues that the hybrid beauty represents the push and pull between women’s emerging roles in public spaces and traditional values, imperialism versus authenticity, local industry competing against multinationals, and a negotiation of new roles for husbands and wives in companionate marriage.

Evolutionary Love and Companionate Marriage in Jane Austen's Novel Pride and Prejudice

In the novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen has selected the basic unit of human relationship, the family. In the family we have several forms of relationships. The most fundamental relationship is there in terms of love and marriage which form the basic theme of the novel Pride and Prejudice. In the research paper, love has been analyzed as an evolutionary process. It is the logic of love that unfolds the characteristics of its main characters. Their love has been brought out from the usual shadow of emotionalism and sentimentality. It has been put under the direct control of their ratiocination. And that is the peculiarity of Austen's treatment of love. The characters have passed through various stages of love so that, ultimately, they reach the final stage of passionate love, shorn of their pride and prejudice. From there they move to marriage which I have called the companionate marriage. When they enter matrimony, they enter it as pure companions moving together, hand in hand, in their life. It is not the marriage as established and defined by the early nineteenth century society. Austen's lovers do not abjure the society, yet they do not accept this society's concept of marriage completely. As they have shaped their love, so they will shape their marriage.

Transnational Intimacies and the Construction of the New Nation

This article examines love as a facet of nation building in constructions of modern womanhood and national identity in the 1950s and 1960s. In Tunisia and France, romantic love was evoked to define an urban, middle-class modernity in which the gender norms implicit in companionate marriage signaled a break with the past. These ideals were represented in fiction and women's magazines and elaborated in the novel genre of the advice column. Yet this celebration was interrupted by concern about “mixed marriage” and the rise of anti-immigrant discrimination targeting North Africans in France. Referring to race or religion, debates about interracial marriage in Tunisia and the sexual stereotyping of North African men in France reveal the continuity of colonialism's racial legacies upon postcolonial states. The idealization of marital choice as a testament to individual and national modernity was destabilized by transnational intimacies revealing the limits of the nation-state's liberatory promise to women.

Transnational Intimacies and the Construction of the New Nation

This article examines love as a facet of nation building in constructions of modern womanhood and national identity in the 1950s and 1960s. In Tunisia and France, romantic love was evoked to define an urban, middle-class modernity in which the gender norms implicit in companionate marriage signaled a break with the past. These ideals were represented in fiction and women’s magazines and elaborated in the novel genre of the advice column. Yet this celebration was interrupted by concern about “mixed marriage” and the rise of anti-immigrant discrimination targeting North Africans in France. Referring to race or religion, debates about interracial marriage in Tunisia and the sexual stereotyping of North African men in France reveal the continuity of colonialism’s racial legacies upon postcolonial states. The idealization of marital choice as a testament to individual and national modernity was destabilized by transnational intimacies revealing the limits of the nation-state’s liberatory promise to women.

Marriage on the Border

Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the mid-nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. There, the clashing ideologies of this era—slavery and freedom, urban and rural, industrial and agrarian—met, merged, and melded. As they did, they formed something new—a fluid, flexible identity that somehow grew from these tensions while rising above them. This border identity would play a critical role in these states’ experiences during the secession crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Yet, this story—one of political division, internal warfare, and economic struggles—is only one part of the border South’s larger saga. Focusing on the heart of this complicated region, Marriage on the Border reveals how this border environment shaped the lives and loves of Kentuckians, West Virginians, and Appalachian Virginians. Inundated with conflicting messages about marriage, divorce, and gender, these border southerners set their own path. In an era when advice manuals urged all Americans to adopt new ideals of companionate marriage and loving mutuality, border southerners proved especially receptive to these notions. Additionally, when these marriages crumbled, border southerners found ways to divorce more easily than other southerners of this era. Marriage on the Border follows border southerners through their courtships and into their homes, through blissful marriages and turbulent divorce dramas, through secession, war, and reconstruction. Along the way, Marriage on the Border captures the turmoil and confusion of this era, not in its legislative halls or on the battlefield, but in the households of those who lived at the heart of the country.