A love letter
Journal Title: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology - Year 2014, Vol 5, Issue 2
Abstract
This letter tells the story of a young woman and a man I met during fieldwork with some university students in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2007/08. Here, Hiranthi – the narrator – writes a letter to her boyfriend of nine months Anish, interpreting the twists and turns of their relationship and highlights the ways in which the relationship fails to meet her expectations. Describing her expectations of romantic relationships and the efforts exerted in the making of it, this letter highlights that my interlocutors aspired towards a particular kind of romantic relationship – a ‘serious’ relationship. In this piece of writing, I use authorial and creative license to contextualise and interpret Hiranthi’s and Anish’s story within a frame of contemporary life in Sri Lanka, which I put together with the stories of others I met during fieldwork. I use the letter to highlight that romantic relationships of my interlocutors are embedded within particular discourses about the normative conjugal unit, which is essentially heterosexual. It illustrates that romantic relationships consist of a process of investment, a way of embedding one’s sense of self. The article highlights the relational aspect of self, pointing out that one’s life’s worthiness could be tied to the people who are around them.
Authors and Affiliations
Mihirini Sirisena
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP111395
- DOI -
- Views 127
- Downloads 0
The role of smartphones in increasing digital and social inequalities among Romanian children
The emergence of new mobile devices such as Smartphones and tablets in children’s everyday life has facilitated the rise of Internet private use among them, making it possible for them to go online at anytime and anywher...
A four-part model for narrative genres and identities: evidence from Greek data
This article presents a tentative typology of narrative genres based on Greek data and following a discourse analytic perspective. Taking into consideration the contemporary literature on narrative, I maintain that the r...
Words leaking from objects: thinking with absent photographs
The possibilities within notions of the object constitute a special area of interest in my research. As I have come to see it, the object is bounded by – and yet comes to alter- views of representation/re-presentation; i...
Parental involvement in schools. A study of resources, mobilization, and inherent inequality
In this article I explore issues of parental involvement in school activities in former communist countries of South Eastern Europe. Although parents with higher socio-economic status feel more efficacious and thus get i...
The device, the self and the other: A review of the self-tracking culture
This paper takes self-tracking culture as the subject matter and provides an example of systematic academic literature review that explores the relationship between culture and nature. It illustrates how the embedding tr...