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South Asia
Organized Panel Session
During more than two years of fieldwork in the Andamans, I (Philipp Zehmisch) came across a broad set of conjugal norms and practices that deviated from conventional studies of kinship and caste in India: interlocutors from local migrant communities reasoned to have chosen a marital partner out of “love”. They had acted against a deeply ingrained sense of obedience and duty towards their families and community elders who exert the customary right to arrange an endogamous match within their own caste. Soon, I came to regard “love marriages” as symptomatic of an antagonistic struggle between individualism and collectivism, between self-realization and a sense of duty, between choice and control; a struggle, which, in numerous cases, caused strong affective responses, and, in others, deep rifts between different members of a kin network. Analysing such a contested field of social negotiation, this presentation concentrates on the topic of “love marriage” and asks how globalization, notions of modernity and local formations of vernacular cosmopolitanism impact the practice of inter-community marriage. The presentation aims to highlight in which ways the residents of the Andaman society appropriate globalized ideas about “romantic love” to their lifeworld and their conjugal relations; further, it elaborates on how marriage practices have also been shaped by a "tradition" of vernacular cosmopolitanism that is particular to the multi-ethnic character of the Andamans as a conglomerate of diasporic overseas communities.
Philipp Zehmisch
Lahore University of Management Sciences, Germany