“What Does Marriage Stand for?” Getting Married and Divorced in Contemporary Tajikistan

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to show that marriage in Tajikistan does not have a single meaning or encapsulate a single practice. Although marriage is considered to be a crucial matter in the country, both for men and women, and is usually talked in terms of normative rules and prescriptions, marriage practices show the constant negotiations in daily life which contribute to defining what marriage is and is not, and what relations are being valued when others are discredited. Through the example of two life stories collected among “demarried” women, I argue that the heterogeneous practice of marriage reveals that it works as a practice of legitimizing one’s position in the community, but also as a means, for women, of overcoming life’s obstacles. As such, marriage comes across as a highly context-dependent practice.