Intimate Connections dissects ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. It offers insightful perspectives from the emotional lives of Shia women and their active engagement with their husbands. These gender relations are shaped by countless factors, including embodied values of modesty and honor, vernacular fairy tales and Bollywood movies, Islamic revivalism and development initiatives. In particular, the advent of media and communication technologies has left a mark on (pre)marital relations in both South Asia and the wider Muslim world. Juxtaposing different understandings of ‘love’ reveals rich and manifold worlds of courtship, elopements, family dynamics, and more or less affectionate matches that are nowadays often initiated through SMS. Deep ethnographic accounts trace the relationships between young couples to show how Muslim women in a globalized world dynamically frame and negotiate circumstances in their lives.

In a world with more and more global trends and fast changing lives due to technological innovations it is necessary to think about the social aspects of these processes and consider their effects on people's everyday lives. Much is said and written about the impacts of mobile phones on Western societies but what about areas of the world where technologies are still implemented, where the process of appropriation is still going on, such as in rural South India? To analyze the creative powers individuals have to integrate mobile telephony in traditional ways of life was the aim of this paper. In what way do innovations change the daily life of the people? How is the mobile phone accepted in local communities? The most important topics uncovered during the fieldwork in rural South India are money saving techniques, like village phone operators, shared phone use, and the practice of beeping, facts about direct personal communication situations on the mobile phone, or the use of SMS, and changes in the perception of time and space due to mobile communication.