Until Death Do Us Part

Marriage/Death in Anthropological Discourse

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2467426
AutoresJohn Borneman (Cornell University, autor de correspondencia)
Año1996
Volumen23
Número2
Páginas215-235
Fecha de publicación1996-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/ae.1996.23.2.02a00010
OpenAlexW2125749103
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas79
Referencias citadas42

Anthropology has represented marriage as the definitive ritual and universally translatable regulative ideal of human societies. Its relation to the assertion of privilege, to closure, death, abjection, and exclusion are rarely examined in anthropological analyses. In this article I analyze the specific and changing representations of marriage in anthropological literature. I ask what forms of inclusion and exclusion are derived from the use of marriage as a universal equivalent. I argue that there has been a metaphysical privileging of the categories marriage, gender, heterosexuality, and life, which obtain their privilege by functioning as part of violent hierarchies in occasions of symbolization. Given the high political stakes in this imagining of marriage in the age of AIDS, I conclude that anthropologists should pay more attention to variability and instability as well as to that which is denied articulation in the occasions of reiteration of marriage. [marriage, death, AIDS, kinship, gender, sex

Articulation (sociology · Assertion · Closure (psychology · Heterosexuality · Human sexuality · Ideal (ethics · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Privilege (computing · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Law · Sex work and related issues · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies