Abstract
ABSTRACT Arranged marriage is associated in Western political discourse with “forced”, “sham” and transnational. Such discourse holds it to be an anachronistic practice in which parents are portrayed as misguidedly clinging on to “traditional customs” and understood to be premising ethnic and religious cultural reproduction above the needs and happiness of their children. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork including 44 semi-structured interviews, this paper analyses how an understudied yet implicated “group”, Somali Muslim parents, talk about spouse selection of/for their children. Building on the substantial scholarship on the marital practices of British Asians, this paper provides evidence which contradicts and complicates political assumptions and academic conclusions about the role of religion, “tradition”, and ethnic and cultural reproduction in arranged marriages, and brings into focus and problematizes the ongoing operation of “groupism” in relation to both ethnicity and religion.
Published Version
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