Herzfeld, Michael. Subversive Archaism. ISBN: Walter, Anna-Maria. Segalen, Martine. Essai d'auto-ethnographie familiale. Lazarev, Egor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Stephen. Changeant de terrain enfin, dans Evicted from Eternity. The Restructuring of Modern Rome , M. Tinder, Grindr and other dating apps weren't the first mobile technology to transform the ways love and relationships work.
Ideas of love and partnership have always been in flux and affected by socio-technological innovations. Anna-Maria Walter's ethnography Intimate Connections is a detailed study of how the initial introduction of mobile phones impacted romantic relationships.
The book describes the multi-faceted practices around romantic emotions and marriage in Northern Pakistan, and their relation to the use of mobile phones. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork living with different families in the multi-religious city of Gilgit predominantly Shia, Ismaili and Sunni Muslim between and , Walter offers a nuanced picture of young women negotiating love, identity and family.
After positioning her book as a critique of an essentialising discourse on female agency and simplistic understandings of love and marriage, Walter provides four short ethnographic chapters that together form a prism of socialβromantic dynamics during the arrival of new communication technologies. Chapter 2 elaborates on the way sharm modesty, respectability emerges as a self-conscious set of feelings that women in Gilgit learn to embody from early on.
Walter demonstrates that appropriate female behaviour at her fieldsite was far from fixed, with women taking control over the interpretation of their actions and changing it over the lifetime. Yet, the involved actors are not passively accepting conditions but shape them by creatively drawing on ambivalent norms and values.
