The Right Spouse, Isabelle Clark-Decès's provocative refiguration of South Indian marriage patterns, is a kinship lover's delight. She focuses on the close-kin marriage preferences at the center of South Indian kinship models. She has two primary aims: to explore the motivations for and emotional experiences of close-kin marriage, and “to interpret [these marriages’] decline through the point of view of subjective perspectives” (p. 163). Clark-Decès carried out her fieldwork in periods between 2007 and 2011, first briefly in a village near Pondicherry, and thereafter in and around the city of Madurai.
Clark-Decès devotes much of her text to challenging multiple common understandings about South Indian kinship. These probing challenges begin with her discussion of contam (literally, “mine”), the term used for close consanguineous kin. (More distant relatives are anniyam, “other.”) She found that people discursively define contam not in terms of shared bodily substance, but in terms of...
