I think quite like one of the central, is the volume everything fine?

Yeah, in class. Oh great, okay.

So it's not there.

Yeah.

Okay, I'm very sorry.

So we are like completely unprepared for the...

Maybe we don't want to go back to... I think maybe we want to stay...

We just need a text book.

There is a document that collapsed, I think.

Okay, no, it's okay.

So sorry.

Okay, so yeah, so like I said, the decision-making processes were always kind of implicit in my

research and then glad for the opportunity to be thinking about this more.

And yeah, marriage has been like this kind of classical anthropology team for a while,

and then it kind of went out of vogue.

And most recently, it has come back into focus, especially with the marriage equality debates.

I mean, I was also taken feminist scholars by surprise because there was an expectation that

they would slowly be moving away from an institution which is decidedly quite patriarchal.

But with marriage equality debates and more recently what I've been working on,

transnational marriages, this issue has kind of come back again.

And I think it's quite exciting for me in my research interest.

And yeah, so in terms of like decision-making, I was thinking maybe we could go back to

what marriage, yeah, how would you define marriage before we come to the idea of decision-making.

And in anthropology itself, perhaps like in 19th century, there was Louise Henry Morgan,

who was an upstate New York practicing lawyer.

And he decided to like figure out how property relationships among Native American communities

work. And that's how he actually got interested in kinship relationships and marriage.

And for him, marriage was this relation for the perpetuation of species.

So he essentially thought of it as how do people reproduce themselves?

How are these kinship ties families formed? What are appropriate relationships, intimate

relationships, where reproduction can take place? And what are the ones that like are

forbidden explicitly or discouraged? So maybe one of the like something like instants taboos

or something he came up with as people who are in some kind of relation of blood,

you decide that they do not get into sexual relationships.

So that's how, I mean, a lot of early anthropologists, cultural anthropologists in

the 20th century thought of, they built on Morgan's idea, specifically,

Lévi-Truyx is also kind of controversial figure right now.

But he wanted to figure out how societies work, how the relationships between people,

men specifically function, and perhaps economic, social, how there is transactional element to it,

reciprocal element to it. So gift giving was one of the things that people like Marshall Mouse,

for example, thought about. And exchanges, woman was considered something that came in

in this framework. So maybe marriage for early anthropologists was interesting as long as it

in the being exchange of women mostly, of course, between men.

And yeah, I mean, Lévi-Truyx was controversial for other things, but when feminist anthropologists

maybe late 70s, 1980s, maybe when they came up, of course, there was quite a bit of pushback

on it. But some like Sheri Othner and Gil Rubin said, okay, let's just take Lévi-Truyx seriously

if this is what he's talking about, if he's talking about marriage as exchange of women,

let's think about what these relationships mean, marriage mean for people. And Sheri Othner saw

women as probably like, saw marriage as this symbolic breakup of old property units and

formation of new ones. And I think decision making on marriage in many ways is still in the Western