My current book project, Plastic Patriarchy: Migration, Honor and Capitalism in Rural Pakistan, explores how transnational joint families are shaping capitalist development ‘from below’ in migrant-sending villages. Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the book is an intimate ethnography of the micropolitics of migrant joint families from upwardly mobile classes. It shows how changing relations of family solidarity and conflict constitute the practices and meanings of labor, land and capital in a remittance-dependent and real estate-oriented economy stretching across Pakistan and Malaysia. The book argues that in spite of major disruptions of honor-based tribal norms caused by migration, the patriarchal family is stretched and creatively renewed. I theorize these dynamics by introducing the concept of plastic patriarchy, through which I see patriarchy as both a malleable and persistent set of relations. Against perspectives that see patriarchy as a rigid relic of the past, I argue that the fluidity of patriarchy allows for its persistence over time, making it a central node through which capitalism develops.  

A wedding necklace made of Malaysian Ringits, worn by the groom on his wedding day.