Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London
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Abstract
This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, ‘post-traditional’ contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjugal instances of hunger around Haredi dining tables, we explore the broader question of how heterosexual marriages endure in the face of struggles for intimacy and freedom between different genders. By focusing on what can be learnt about marriage through mealtime rituals with religious significance, we develop a response rooted in a form of Jewish relational ethics that has been repressed within ‘Western’ liberal culture. This approach addresses some tenacious dualisms at play in the anthropology and politics of marriage and articulates a vernacular dialectical grammar of desire, tradition, freedom, and love.
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Anthropology Marriage Family and Household Food Ritual Ethnography Haredi / Strictly Orthodox Jews Main Topic: Other Festivals and Holidays
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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Redeeming marriage? Bittersweet intimacy and the dialectics of liberation among Haredi Jews in London. 2024: https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1111/1467-9655.14165
