Marriage globally is undergoing profound change, provoking widespread public comment and concern. Through the close ethnographic examination of case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense places new and changing forms of marriage in comparative perspective as a transforming and also transformative social institution. In conditions of widespread socio-political inequality and instability, how are the personal, the familial and the political co-produced? How do marriages encapsulate the ways in which memories of past lives, present experience and imaginaries of the future are articulated? Exploring the ways that marriage draws together and distinguishes history and biography, ritual and law, economy and politics in intimate family life, this volume examines how familial and personal relations, and the ethical judgements they enfold, inform and configure social transformation. Contexts that have been partly shaped through civil wars, cold war and colonialism – as well as other forms of violent socio-political rupture – offer especially apt opportunities for tracing the interplay between marriage and politics. But rather than taking intimate family life and gendered practice as simply responsive to wider socio-political forces, this work explores how marriage may also create social change. Contributors consider the ways in which marital practice traverses the domains of politics, economics and religion, while marking a key site where the work of linking and distinguishing those domains is undertaken.

Grounded in multi-generational stories from Kinmen in Taiwan, Visions of Marriage explores the historical entanglements between the pursuit of new personal and national futures. Focusing on the relational and future-making aspects of marriage, the ethnography highlights the intersection of transformations across familial generations and shifting political economies in Taiwan, and more globally. While theories of modernity often treat marriage as an index of social change, without adequate attention to its transformative capacities generated through personal and familial agency, this volume provides comparative insights on family change and demographic shifts in Asia.

Unconventional Muslim marriages have been topics of heated public debate. Around the globe, religious scholars, policy makers, political actors, media personalities, and women’s activists discuss, promote, or reject unregistered, transnational, interreligious and other boundary-crossing marriages. Couples entering into such marriages, however, often have different concerns from those publicly discussed. Based on ethnographic research in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, the chapters of this volume examine couples’ motivations for, aspirations about, and abilities to enter into these marriages. The contributions show the diverse ways in which such marriages are concluded, and inquire into how they are performed, authorized or contested as Muslim marriages. These marriages may challenge existing ties of belonging and transform boundaries between religious and other communities, but they may also, and sometimes simultaneously, reproduce and solidify them. Building on insights from different disciplines, both from the social sciences (anthropology, political science, gender and sexuality studies) and from the humanities (history, Islamic legal studies, religious studies), the authors address a wide range of controversial Muslim marriages (unregistered, interreligious, transnational, etc.), and include the views of religious scholars, state authorities, and political actors and activists, as well as the couples themselves, their families, and their wider social circle.

The Guide Book for the Use of National Taiwan Normal University Department of English Students Whose Work Frequently Requires Them to Use Nouns That Are Not ‘Common Nouns’ in English Grammar By: Chiu Yong Poon The Pinsin Chinese-English Dictionary was compiled by the Chinese-English editorial committee of the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute over the course of eight years, from 1971 to 1978. More than fifty people took part in the compilation and editing. A Practical English Grammar was written by A. J. Thompson and A.V. Martinet and printed by the Oxford University Press. Together these two sources take up little shelf space and complement each other perfectly. Under the shelter of A Practical English Grammar, the Pinsin Chinese-English Dictionary carries within it the seeds at the contents of this book. In fertile soil, the seed sprouted and produced The Guide Book for the Use of National Taiwan Normal University Department of English Students Whose Work Frequently Requires Them to Use Nouns That Are Not ‘Common Nouns’ in English Grammar.

"Wedding New Worlds revises histories of interracial love, sex, and marriage amid legal and cultural barriers created to regulate and make illegal the liaisons between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia and the US from the late 18th century to the 20th century"--

Shaped around the stories of one extended family, their friends, neighbours, and community, Pandemic Kinship provides an intimate portrait of everyday life in Botswana's time of AIDS. It challenges assumptions about a 'crisis of care' unfolding in the wake of the pandemic, showing that care - like other aspects of Tswana kinship - is routinely in crisis, and that the creative ways families navigate such crises make them kin. In Setswana, conflict and crisis are glossed as dikgang, and negotiating dikgang is an ethical practice that generates and reorients kin relations over time. Governmental and non-governmental organisations often misread the creativity of crisis, intervening in ways that may prove more harmful than the problems they set out to solve. Moving between family discussions, community events, and the daily work of orphan care projects and social work offices, Pandemic Kinship provides provocative insights into how we manage change in pandemic times.