Working Separately but Eating Together: Personhood, Property, and Power in Conjugal Relations

1998/11/01 by Tania Murray Li · 35 citations
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Archaeology #Context (archaeology) #Economics #Epistemology #Ethnology #Futures contract #Gender studies #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories #History #Personhood #Philosophy #Power (physics) #Property (philosophy) #Socioeconomic Development in Asia #Sociology #Southeast asia

paper · doi:10.1525/ae.1998.25.4.675

published in American Ethnologist 25(4), 675-694 (Wiley)

openalex publication_date 1998/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

In this article I apply the conceptual repertoire developed by feminist scholars in Africa to examine concepts of personhood, property, and the conjugal contract in Southeast Asia. I suggest that as theory travels, it offers fresh insight in the new context in which it is deployed and is itself enriched. Studies of urban Singapore and upland Sulawesi illustrate the ways in which cultural ideas are reworked as women and men reposition themselves and attempt to secure their economic futures in the context of changing material conditions and shifting fields of power. [gender, property, personhood, work, power, theory, Southeast Asia]

Related

• “We don’t mix with those married women”: Widowhood as an emergent gender for development projects in urban Papua New Guinea
• Representing Women: The Politics of MinangkabauAdatWritings
• Wives’ enduring responsibility? The exercises and outcomes of gender power in urban Chinese families
• Land in transition: from social reproduction of labour power to social reproduction of power
• Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation