This article intervenes in feminist anthropological debates about marriage within Western cosmopolitan, ‘post‐traditional’ contexts through a close ethnographic examination of food and ritualized meals among Haredi Jews in London. We focus on this diasporic religious Jewish minority, whose marital practices have been the object of debates over marriage, gender, and cultural difference in cosmopolitan London. Learning from ethnographic and conjugal instances of hunger around Haredi dining tables, we explore the broader question of how heterosexual marriages endure in the face of struggles for intimacy and freedom between different genders. By focusing on what can be learnt about marriage through mealtime rituals with religious significance, we develop a response rooted in a form of Jewish relational ethics that has been repressed within ‘Western’ liberal culture. This approach addresses some tenacious dualisms at play in the anthropology and politics of marriage and articulates a vernacular dialectical grammar of desire, tradition, freedom, and love.

中文翻译：

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挽回婚姻？伦敦正统派犹太人苦乐参半的亲密关系和解放的辩证法


本文通过对伦敦正统派犹太人的食物和仪式化膳食进行仔细的人种学考察，介入西方大都会“后传统”背景下关于婚姻的女权人类学辩论。我们关注的是这个散居海外的宗教犹太少数群体，他们的婚姻习俗一直是伦敦大都市有关婚姻、性别和文化差异的争论的对象。我们从正统派餐桌上的民族志和夫妻饥饿实例中汲取教训，探讨了更广泛的问题：面对不同性别之间为亲密和自由而进行的斗争，异性婚姻如何维持下去。通过关注通过具有宗教意义的进餐仪式可以学到的关于婚姻的知识，我们制定了一种植根于犹太关系伦理形式的回应，而这种形式在“西方”自由文化中受到压制。这种方法解决了人类学和婚姻政治中一些顽固的二元论，并阐明了欲望、传统、自由和爱的白话辩证语法。