Tag Archive | "intercultural marriage"
Friday Connections 27-11-09
Friday Connections: a time when I give links and a bit of commentary to things I'd blog about if I had the time. This week the categories are mixed families, cross-cultural food, and gender inequality issues in India (with a really sweet video).
Continue reading...Book Review and Giveaway: Your Intercultural Marriage
Monday, August 17, 2009
Well, here's a first for this blog - a giveaway! I was recently contacted by the publishers of Your Intercultural Marriage: A Guide to a Healthy, Happy Relationship with the offer of a copy of the newly-published book to review - and five copies to give away to readers here. Of course, being the bibliophile that I am, I jumped at the chance. Details on the giveaway are at the bottom of the review.
Continue reading...Indian Wedding Story, Part Six
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
This is Part Six of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you’re new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One, where the story starts. After we started the fire (think Agni Pradipan, not Billy Joel), I fed Aditya some pre-made Laddu, which is a common Indian sweet used in pujas and other ceremonies. After this Aditya stood up and promised to provide for me for the rest of my life, so, really, I didn't begrudge him the sweet. (Also: it was way too hot to do much but sweat beside that fire. Doesn't look like it? Read on.)
Continue reading...Broken Traditions? Intercultural Marriage and Cultural Continuity
Thursday, July 16, 2009
A new commenter, Lurker frequent, brought up this interesting topic in regards to intercultural marriages in the comments section of my last post: As an Indian in the USA; the only reason I would not want to marry a local is to not "lose" my own traditions and culture. Minds meeting , and matching interests and hearts are more important, but certainly , coming from an old and rich tradition, one would want to preserve it by having a completely Indian family, no? Thoughts? It seems to me that there are several issues in play here, some of which Aditya and I discussed in the comments section when Lf first wrote out his comment (do check it out). What is meant by cultural continuity? Is it something we should value, and if so, why? Does intercultural marriage (which often leads to Third Culture Kids) automatically mean that the cultures of the parents is ending? What does it mean to say that India has an "old and rich tradition" (compared, presumably, against America or other Western cultures' younger and poorer traditions)? Is it something we should value? What exactly do we mean by tradition, anyways? What sort of culture - or cultures - do we want to have in our own lives? For those of us in intercultural relationships, what (if anything) are we losing by not creating a monocultural family? Will our lives be richer for it? Poorer? What about extended families? Well, that's a lot of questions! Enough for a book or three, certainly, so I'll just give a simplified sketch of my own views on this matter, than open it up to the rest of you.
Continue reading...Don’t Get Your Undies in a Bunch: Worrying About Intercultural Quirks
Friday, June 5, 2009
Okay, I'm a huge supporter of researching your significant other's culture and understanding cultural differences, but let's just put this one out there: worrying about intercultural quirks can be taken too far. There's reasonable concern, and then there's fretting over - or being shocked by - cultural differences that, in the end, don't really matter. Basically, Internet, I'm saying you shouldn't get your tighty-whities in a wad over the smaller cultural differences or customs you discover in your intercultural relationships. (And no, it's not all small stuff - but there's more small stuff than the amount of complaining would suggest.)
Continue reading...Intertwined Utility Functions – the Economics of Relationships
Thursday, May 21, 2009
The study of economics screws up your brain. Or, at least, that's what people outside the field who haven't drunk the econ kool-aid tell me. (Like most potentially insane people, I, of course, wouldn't know if I were in fact insane. That's the fun of it!) Anyway, I'm informed that most people don't think about romantic relationships in terms of intertwined, interdependent utility functions. But I do. And I think you should consider the idea too. Think of it as practice in learning how a subculture (a geeky, mathematically-inclined subculture) thinks about love and romance.
Continue reading...Interracial Marriage in the US: Some Simple South Asian Demographics
Monday, May 11, 2009
Want to settle the debate on how much interracial marriage there is in the US? I know I'm tired of hearing the occasional uninformed comment on how South Asians just don't marry people outside their ethnicity, and isn't it downright odd that my supposedly proud-of-his-Indian-heritage husband would do so? (Hmm, well, he is an odd, odd dude. But not because he's married to me. Or, I mean, not 'cause he's married to a white woman - I'll admit you might have to be odd to voluntarily marry me. We brought matching crazy to the marriage table as dowry.) Well, the statistics on interracial marriages in America are now here, courtesy the US Census, so we can put this baby to rest. Actually, the statistics have always been "here" since the 2000 Census information was released, but I'm not such a numbers nerd that I felt like crunching the raw data myself with SAS or STATA. Luckily for me, a pair of sociologists have already done the dirty work, and their results have been made available at Dr. C.N. Le's Asian Nation website. I'm going to only present the South Asian related statistics here, but Dr. Le has the same sort of information available on all Asian ethnicities, and you can tease out information about other ethnicities as well.
Continue reading...Indian Wedding Story: Part Four
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
This is Part Four of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you're new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One, where the story starts. When I last left off on the story of our wedding in India (see part three), I had just arrived, as the picture above shows. The lovely lady trailing behind me is a friend of the family (and Aditya's childhood math tutor), who'd been helping me with all the preparations - it was like she was an older aunt of mine for the day. There were flowers ALL OVER the place as I arrived - from where the car dropped me off to the second floor hall where the ceremony would be, I was surrounded by sheets of flowers, while walking under flower arches (spelling Aditya's and my names in flowers) and over a red carpet, just like you see at movie premiers. Of course, the only person who took pictures of this wonder was my uncle, who, of course, has not yet gotten around to sending me his photos.
Continue reading...Categories, Generalizations, and Stereotypes: Talking About Cultural Differences
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
We talk about cultural differences a lot on this blog: "Indian parents tend to worry about X, Y, and Z when their children are getting married." "My husband grew up in a culture where it wasn't okay to do A, B, or C." "Lego people of South Pacific descent enjoy conga lines and grass miniskirts." This is a pretty sensitive topic. In talking about cultural differences, I'm careful to not make too strict generalizations - I'll hedge what I say by emphasizing I'm talking about my own, personal experiences, or suggest that a group seems to act in a certain way, or that some (but not all!) people from a particular culture do a particular thing. But it's impossible to avoid making any generalizations at all about cultures or to keep from categorizing people - and silly to even try.
Continue reading...Indian Wedding Story: Part Three
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
This is Part Three of a continuing series on my Indian wedding adventure. If you're new to Gori Girl, try checking out Part One and Part Two. Lunchtime! Tomorrow the real wedding pictures start, but today was super hectic, so you'll be getting the pictures from the lunch before the big night, and the story of bridal preparation and nerves. After our pre-lunch siesta, everyone returned to the community center where the wedding ceremony would be held for lunch. All I can say is yum - the caterers were very, very good!
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Friday, November 27, 2009
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