Working Separately but Eating Together: Personhood, Property and Power in Conjugal Relations.
1998. American Ethnologist 25(4): 675-694.
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].