Conjugality as Social Change: A Zimbabwean Case
通过分析津巴布韦中部地区从殖民时期到1980年代末婚姻关系的变化，批判了契约主义视角的静态结构逻辑，揭示了女性能动性如何重塑婚姻，对理解性别平等和HIV/AIDS等政策有参考价值。
Abstract Understanding intrahousehold relations between spouses is central to understanding gendered wellbeing in developing countries, and therefore has engaged the attentions of economists, anthropologists, political theorists and interdisciplinary development studies. In all these fields contractualism in conceptualising conjugality and intrahousehold relations is ubiquitous, yet it implies an overly static and compelling structuralist logic, which this article questions. A better understanding of agency and change, in relation to marriage, matters for both the conceptualisation of intrahousehold relations, and for a range of policy initiatives, for example gender equity, or indeed HIV/AIDS, where the ability of women to instigate change in conjugality and sexual cultures is significant. This article makes no claim to represent contemporary Shona gender relations in Zimbabwe, but offers a temporal analysis of changing conjugality in south-central Zimbabwe from the colonial period into the late 1980s 1 1. Fieldwork was conducted in two areas of Chivi Communal Area in southern Zimbabwe over 18 months in 1988 and 1989, and consisted of repeated interviews and observations with husbands and wives in 60 households in each site, group interviews and additional interviews with sex workers and many other informants. I am grateful to Ester Tagarira, Beauty Musavengana and Vhenekai Man'ozhe for their help. to critique the theoretical stance of contractual approaches, through revealing the ways in which marriage has been reformulated through women's agency.