Negotiating Boundaries of Intimacies in Family and Marriage: Ethnographic Cases from Contemporary Urban India.

This paper investigates how young urban Indians understand, experience, and negotiate intimacies particularly in family and marriage, in the increasingly digital landscape of contemporary urban India (Lupton 2014).Drawing from our ongoing research across the Indian metropolises of Pune, Mumbai, and Bengaluru, this paper explores how incorporation of digital technologies into daily routines and activities, digital embodiments, shapes intimate spheres and intimate relationships into newer forms. Thus, this paper reflects on how dispersed social ties are becoming the new norm and a mantra for new-age mobility (for more details on this shift, please refer to Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Salazar 2017).

Situated within the sociological framework of intimacies as both individually experienced and institutionally mediated through family and marriage, this study examines how the evolving and contested nature of these institutions is transforming intimacies in the increasingly digitalized urban Indian context. In doing so, the paper explores the negotiations around non-normative intimacies and how young urban Indians transgress, challenge, or reproduce traditional norms vis-à-vis marriage, family and beyond by employing the boundary work framework (Lamont and Molnar 2002; Alba 2005; Barth 1969; Wimmer 2008).

References:

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Barth, F. (2012). Boundaries and connections. In Signifying identities (pp. 17-36). Routledge.

Hannam, K., Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Mobilities, immobilities and moorings. Mobilities, 1(1), 1-22.

Lamont, M., & Molnár, V. (2002). The study of boundaries in the social sciences. Annual review of sociology, 28(1), 167-195.

Lupton, D. (2014). Digital sociology. Routledge.

Salazar, N. B. (2017). Key figures of mobility: an introduction. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 25(1), 5-12.

Wimmer, A. (2008). The making and unmaking of ethnic boundaries: A multilevel process theory. American journal of sociology, 113(4), 970-1022.