Opting Out

JOANNA DAVIDSON is an associate professor of anthropology at Boston University. She is the author of Sacred Rice: An Ethnography of Identity, Environment, and Development in Rural West Africa.DINAH HANNAFORD is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Houston. She is the author of Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal.

• Series Foreword by PÉter BertaIntroduction: Messing with Marriage by Joanna Davidson and Dinah HannafordPart I. Never Married1. Almost Married: Two Generations of Single Mothers in Namibia by Julia Pauli2. Single in Botswana by Jacqueline Solway3.  Freedom to Choose? Singlehood, Gender, and Sexuality in India by Sarah Lamb4. Single Women’s Invisibility in South Korea’s First Decades by Laura C. NelsonPart II. Outside of Marriage5. Pathivratha Precarity: Sex Work on the Other Side of Marriage in South India by Kimberly Walters6. Respectability & Black Brazilian Women’s Decisions to ‘Opt Out’ of Remarriage by Melanie Medeiros7. The Upward Mobility of Matrifocality and the Enigma of Bajan Marriage by Carla Freeman8. Messing with Remarriage: The Problem of Widows in Guinea-Bissau by Joanna DavidsonPart III. Within Marriage9. Extramarital Intimacy: Juggling Femininity, Marriage, and Commercial Sex in Contemporary Japan by Akiko Takeyama10. “What’s Wrong with These Mens?”: Reworking relationships and finding foreign love in the new South Africa by Brady G’Sell11. The Appeal of Absent Husbands in Contemporary Senegal by Dinah Hannaford12. “Not a normal wife”: Marrying Activism and Aberrance in Indonesia by Carla JonesAcknowledgmentsBibliographyContributorsIndex

"Provocatively and engagingly, this volume provides compelling ethnographic evidence of the changes marriage is undergoing around the world. The impact of these changes raises profound questions, not only about the future of marriage itself, but which, as these essays show, go to the heart of gender relations and their intersection with politics, economics and religion." - Janet Carsten (co-editor of Marriage in Past, Present, and Future Tense) "Grounded in superb ethnographic chapters drawn from all over the world, Opting Out explores the diverse ways in which women exert agency in and against marriage. With fresh insight into practices that occur in every society, this collection delivers a rich and rewarding comparative examination of an astonishingly overlooked aspect of everyday life." - Daniel Jordan Smith (author of A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria)