This book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India.

This book provides an ethnography of love-marriages in the late 1990s in Delhi, identifying the ways in which marriage is ever more a pitch of intense political contestation. It bears upon anthropological understandings of marriageability, urban morality, gender, kinship and the study of the individual and the couple in contemporary India.

The collection examines the ways in which the emerging interdisciplinary study of care provokes a reassessment of the connections and disjuncture between care and governance, ethics, and public, personal and professional identities. Evolving from a project coordinated by the Cambridge Socio-Legal Group, Spaces of Care brings together leading international scholars to articulate what we may consider to be a useful analytic of care. Lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists and criminologists reflect on specific aspects of conceptualising caring relations in ‘spaces’. These spaces include: communities of care and abandonment; self-care and kinship care; spaces as ‘gaps’ in care; the meanings of marketised care; and the ways in which care is constructed and constrained in different ways in venues such as homes, prisons, workplaces and virtual spaces. Common themes include temporality (historical specificity) and the dynamics of care across time and place; subjectivity (including different experiences of care); the economies of care (including the commodification of care; public and private manifestations of care; privatised ‘care’); disruptions of care (which generate vulnerabilities with regard to continuities of care); eligibility (those deemed to be deserving and undeserving of care); relationalities of care (collective and individual agency in caring relations, kinship care), and technologies and imaginaries of care (as in new notions of care forged by those in online virtual worlds such as Second Life).

Recent years have seen extensive discussion about the continuing retreat from marriage, the increasing demand for the right to marry from previously excluded groups, and the need to protect those who do not wish to marry from being forced to do so. At the same time, weddings are big business, couples are spending more than ever before on getting married, and marriage ceremonies are increasingly elaborate. It is therefore timely to reflect on the rites of marriage, as well as the right to marry (or not to marry), and the relationship between them. To this end, this new interdisciplinary collection brings together scholars from numerous fields, including law, sociology, anthropology, psychology, demography, theology and art and design. Focusing on England and Wales, it explores in depth the specific issues arising from this jurisdiction's Anglican heritage, demographic development, current laws and social practices.