Name: [Book Launch/Talk] Marriage Anthropology by Janet Carsten
Start: 2026-04-06T20:00:00+08:00
End: 2026-04-06T21:30:00+08:00
Location: Penang Institute

$[Book Launch\/Talk] Marriage Anthropology by Janet Carsten$

[Book Launch/Talk] Marriage Anthropology by Janet Carsten
About this Event

Join Janet Carsten as she explores with fresh and engaging insights the experience of being married, with special reference to her rich ethnography of Penang. In conversation with Gareth Richards.

In this talk, Janet Carsten presents findings from research conducted from 2017 to 2022 on marriage in Penang. Unlike much anthropological work, which focuses on the process of spouse selection, wedding rituals and structural aspects of marriage, her research is on experiences of being married, and how these experiences have changed over time and generations. We often think of marriage as a conservative institution—ignoring how it draws new elements into the heart of kinship and is a source of change and renewal.

Accounts in Janet Carsten’s latest book, Marriage and the Moral Imagination (Cambridge University Press), show how being married requires a constant process of adjustment and accommodation—or refusal of accommodation—to a spouse and their relatives by individuals, families and wider communities. The culturally diverse nature of Penang’s population highlights how everyday acts of imagination, care and creativity expand the seemingly closed, conventional bounds of kinship. Cumulatively, intimate familial processes of ethical imagination, which are a fundamental part of conjugality and marriage, enable wider social transformation.

About The Speaker
Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She has conducted research in Malaysia since the early 1980s. Her work has focused on domestic relations, gender, the house, bodily substance, kinship and memory. She recently held a European Research Council Advanced Grant to examine contemporary transformations of marriage in global perspective. Janet Carsten is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her previous publications include The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (1997), After Kinship (2004) and Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang (2019).

About The Discussant
Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller. His most recent book (as co-author) is Discourses, Agency and Identity in Malaysia: Critical Perspectives (2021).