Choosing the Arranged One, Arranging the Chosen One – Imagining an Indian Modernity: Reconciling Love, Marriage and Family On and Off the Screen

This is a study on the changing practices of kinship in Northern India. The change in kinship arrangements, and particularly in intermarriage processes, is traced by analysing the reception of Hindi popular cinema. Films and their role and meaning in people´s lives in India was the object of my research. Films also provided me with a methodology for approaching my other subject-matters: family, marriage and love. Through my discussion of cultural change, the persistence of family as a core value and locus of identity, and the movie discourses depicting this dialogue, I have looked for a possibility of compromise and reconciliation in an Indian context. As the primary form of Indian public culture, cinema has the ability to take part in discourses about Indian identity and cultural change, and alleviate the conflicts that emerge within these discourses. Hindi popular films do this, I argue, by incorporating different familiar cultural narratives in a resourceful way, thus creating something new out of the old elements. The final word, however, is the one of the spectator. The “new” must come from within the culture. The Indian modernity must be imaginable and distinctively Indian. The social imagination is not a “Wild West” where new ideas enter the void and start living a life of their own. The way the young women in Dehra Dun interpreted family dramas and romantic movies highlights the importance of family and continuity in kinship arrangements. The institution of arranged marriage has changed its appearance and gained new alternative modes such as love cum arranged marriage. It nevertheless remains arranged by the parents. In my thesis I have offered a social description of a cultural reality in which movies act as a built-in part. Movies do not work as a distinct realm, but instead intertwine with the social realities of people as a part of a continuum. The social imagination is rooted in the everyday realities of people, as are the movies, in an ontological and categorical sense. According to my research, the links between imagination and social life were not so much what Arjun Appadurai would call global and deterritorialised, but instead local and conventional.

Trends in consanguineous marriage in Karnataka, South India, 1980–89

Analysis of data on 106,848 marriages in the cities of Bangalore and Mysore, South India, between 1980 and 1989 showed that levels of consanguineous marriage varied between cities through time and by religion. The average coefficient of inbreeding was higher in Bangalore (F = 0·0339) than in Mysore (F = 0·0203), principally reflecting large-scale, post-Independence rural migration into Bangalore. Although there was some evidence of a decline in consanguineous marriages in Mysore, there was no convincing support in either city for earlier projections of a rapid reduction in the popularity of unions between close biological relatives.

Molecular Marriage through Partner Preferences in Covalent Cage Formation and Cage-to-Cage Transformation

Unprecedented self-sorting of three-dimensional purely organic cages driven by dynamic covalent bonds is described. Four different cages were first synthesized by condensation of two triamines and two dialdehydes separately. When a mixture of all the components was allowed to react, only two cages were formed, which suggests a high-fidelity self-recognition. The issue of the preference of one triamine for a particular dialdehyde was further probed by transforming a non-preferred combination to either of the two preferred combinations by reacting it with the appropriate triamine or dialdehyde.

Hydrogen-Bond-Driven Controlled Molecular Marriage in Covalent Cages

A supramolecular approach that uses hydrogen-bonding interaction as a driving force to accomplish exceptional self-sorting in the formation of imine-based covalent organic cages is discussed. Utilizing the dynamic covalent chemistry approach from three geometrically similar dialdehydes (A, B, and D) and the flexible triamine tris(2-aminoethyl)amine (X), three new 3+2] self-assembled nanoscopic organic cages have been synthesized and fully characterized by various techniques. When a complex mixture of the dialdehydes and triamine X was subjected to reaction, it was found that only dialdehyde B (which has OH groups for H-bonding) reacted to form the corresponding cage B3X2 selectively. Surprisingly, the same reaction in the absence of aldehyde B yielded a mixture of products. Theoretical and experimental investigations are in complete agreement that the presence of the hydroxyl moiety adjacent to the aldehyde functionality in B is responsible for the selective formation of cage B3X2 from a complex reaction mixture. This spectacular selection was further analyzed by transforming a nonpreferred (non-hydroxy) cage into a preferred (hydroxy) cage B3X2 by treating the former with aldehyde B. The role of the H-bond in partner selection in a mixture of two dialdehydes and two amines has also been established. Moreover, an example of unconventional imine bond metathesis in organic cage-to-cage transformation is reported.

Sunlight-Induced Covalent Marriage of Two Triply Interlocked Pd-6 Cages and Their Facile Thermal Separation

A template-free triply interlocked Pd-6 cage (2) was synthesized by two-component self-assembly of cis-blocked 90 degrees acceptor cis-(tmen)Pd(NO3)(2) (M) and 1,3,5-tris((E)-2-(pyridin-3-yl)vinyl)benzene (L). Assembly 2 was characterized by H-1 NMR and ESI-MS, and the structure was confirmed by X-ray crystallography, which revealed a parallel conformation of the olefin double bonds belonging to the adjacent cages in the solid state at a distance of 3.656 angstrom, thereby indicating the feasibility of 2+2] photochemical reaction. Two adjacent interlocked cages were covalently married together by intermolecular 2+2] cycloaddition in a single crystal-to-single crystal fashion upon exposure to sunlight/UV irradiation. Most surprisingly, the covalently married pair was easily separated thermally in aqueous medium under mild reaction conditions.

Career Planning in Spain: Do temporary contracts delay marriage and motherhood?

The aim of this paper is to find an empirical connection between the impressive increase in the use of temporary contracts in Spain and the observed increase in age at marriage and maternity. Using a pool of the six available waves of individual information from the European Household Panel for Spain, we find that holding temporary contracts rather than permanent ones delays marriage for males, but not for females. Concerning maternity, the labor market situation of both members of the household affects entry into motherhood. In particular, if woman has a temporary contract rather than a permanent one, motherhoods is delayed independently of the husband's contract. As expected, postponement of maternity is not found for non-working women. These results give strong support to the career planning, motive to delay maternity in Spain, given that an unstable labor market situation of female workers is found to be the main deterrent to entry into motherhood.

Marriage, transgression and death: Wuthering heights and The awakening

Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar a situação da vida da mulher durante o século XIX, na Inglaterra e nos Estados Unidos da América, através de duas obras do século XIX: Wuthering Heights (1847) de Emile Brontë e The Awakening (1889) de Kate Chopin. Objetivamos, na presente dissertação, apontar a crítica dos discursos patriarcal e das práticas de poder social que tornaram o contexto social das mulheres representadas nos romances citados, propício para a anulação da expressão erótica e repressão. O objeto da análise restringiu-se às duas personagens principais dos romances, Catherine Earnshaw e Edna Pontellier; personagens cujas subjetividades foram reprimidas através da imposição e desempenho de papéis sociais que não as satisfaziam como mulheres

A Christian analytic approach of marriage through abduction among the Basotho people of Lesotho: A challenge for pastoral care ministry

University of Pretoria / MA Dissertation / Department of Practical Theology / Advised by Prof M J S Masango

'That horse that runnes vpon the toppe of Powles': Middleton, Dekker and the Anonymous The Fatal Marriage

Posits textual evidence for consideration of Middleton and Dekker as hands in the authorship of the anonymous play 'The Fatal Marriage'.