Intimate Connections

ANNA-MARIA WALTER is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oulu in Finland and is part of an interdisciplinary team working on conservation, tourism, and remoteness in Europe. She lives in Munich, Germany.

• List of IllustrationsSeries Foreword by PÉter BertaPreface and AcknowledgmentsNote on Transcription1 Politics of the Sensible2 Embodying Modest Reserve3 Arranging Affection4 Fearing Passion5 Romancing MarriageGlossaryNotesReferencesIndex

"Intimate Connections is an elegant and nuanced ethnographic account of gendered intimacy as experienced by women in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. Eschewing simplistic formulations such as 'love vs. arranged marriages' and 'agency vs. gendered subordination,' Anna-Maria Walter instead pushes us to consider emotions anew, in particular 'love,' as sites of embodied, ethical formation of the self, and as significant to gendered norms that shape marriage and emergent forms of conjugality." - Attiya Ahmad (author of Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait) "Intimate Connections is a richly ethnographic account of women’s and men’s experiences of kinship and sexuality in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, showing how young women’s changing expectations of marriage and love are reforming the institution from within." - Katherine Lemons (author of Divorcing Traditions: Islamic Marriage Law and the Making of Indian Secularism)