Invitations to Love

Citation

Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Invitations to Love: Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal. University of Michigan Press.

Chapter Summary

The book is an ethnography of Junigau, a village in Nepal whose Magar residents have shifted in recent decades from arranged and capture marriage toward elopement. Ahearn argues that young people's newly acquired literacy, put to use in writing love letters, is part of a change that goes beyond marriage ritual to how villagers think about their own ability to act and who is responsible for events. The ten chapters fall into three parts, followed by notes, references and an index. Two complete letter correspondences are published as web-only appendices on the publisher's site.

Part One: Arrivals, Introductions, and Theoretical Frameworks

Chapter 1: Invitations to Love. The opening chapter, about twenty-four pages long, introduces the project. A reviewer in Language in Society notes that Ahearn begins with a love letter from a young man, Bir Bahadur, to a young woman, Sarita, and places the rise of such letters in the context of changing literacy and marriage practices, understandings of emotion, and development efforts by the Nepali state and other organizations.

Chapter 2: Juggling Roles: Daughter, Development Worker, and Anthropologist. The chapter concerns the author's own positions in the field. Its subtitle names three roles that had to be juggled: daughter, development worker and anthropologist. A reviewer in the International Journal of Educational Development praises how the book takes the reader through the process of carrying out the research and building an ethnography.

Chapter 3: Key Concepts and Their Application. The theoretical chapter sets out the concepts used in the rest of the book and shows how they apply. The contents do not itemize them, but the publisher's description and the title of the final chapter point to agency (how people see their capacity to act and assign responsibility) and to the social effects of literacy.

Part Two: Transformations in Gender and Marriage

Chapter 4: Gender and Marriage over Time in Junigau. This chapter sets out the history of gender relations and marriage in the village. The lists of figures and tables show that it presents data for the village's central ward on first marriage types by sex and over time, on who made the decision about a first marriage, and on premarital kinship relations by marriage type.

Chapter 5: Narratives of Marriage. The longer chapter that follows deals with how people talk about marriage. Its photographs of marriage rituals, such as the pounded rice ritual and the red powder ritual, show that it also covers the ceremonies themselves.

Chapter 6: Meeting by Way of a Letter: Shila Devi and Vajra Bahadur's Courtship. The first of two case studies follows a single courtship conducted partly through letters. The full correspondence is reproduced in Appendix A (web-only).

Part Three: Love, Literacy, and Development

Chapter 7: Developing Love: Sources of Development Discourse in Nepali Love Letters. The longest chapter, at about forty pages, traces where the language of development in the letters comes from. The illustrations list school textbooks, a literacy workbook with a comic strip, magazines and a popular novel, which indicates the kinds of texts in play.

Chapter 8: The Practices of Reading and Writing. This chapter looks at literacy as practice. Its tables give rates of literacy and schooling among ever-married women and men in the central ward in 1993, and the photographs show schools and classes over time.

Chapter 9: Wearing the Flower One Likes: Sarita and Bir Bahadur's Courtship. The second case study follows the courtship whose first letter opens the book; the full letters are in Appendix B (web-only).

Chapter 10: Love, Literacy, and Agency in Transition. The concluding chapter, about sixteen pages, returns to the book's main themes of love, literacy and agency, and what the changes mean for gender relations. The publisher says increased female literacy in the 1990s made new courtship practices and self-initiated marriages possible but also reinforced certain gender ideologies and closed off some routes to social power, especially for women.

Key Concepts

Part One: Frameworks

• Literacy as social practice: the idea that the effects of reading and writing depend on who uses them, for what, and in which social setting.
• Agency: villagers' sense of their ability to act and of who is responsible for events.

Part Two: Marriage

• Types of marriage: arranged marriage, capture marriage and elopement, compared across time.
• Courtship through letters: a new practice whose emergence is studied through single couples.

Part Three: Development

• Development discourse: the images of progress and modernization that reach the village through schools, texts and development programs.
• Gender ideologies: beliefs about women and men that new literacy both enables and reinforces.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Primary material is available to the reader. The two complete love-letter correspondences are published free on the publisher's site, so a reader can test the analysis against the letters themselves. The appendix notes explain that names were changed and that words written in English by the letter writers are marked.
• A single question followed across scales. The structure moves from the author's position, through village-wide data on marriage and schooling, to two case studies of couples and the sources of development language, so the argument rests on both numbers and individual stories.
• Praised as readable and carefully argued. Blurbs and reviews quoted by the publisher describe it as ethnographically rich and readable, and one reviewer calls it a pleasure to read at a measured pace. Ladousa's review in Language in Society stresses that expressions in the letters must be understood within the wider shifting context of literacy and development discourse.
• Reflexive account of fieldwork. A reviewer in the International Journal of Educational Development notes that the book shows the process of doing the research as well as its results, which helps students of ethnography.

Limitations

• One village. The analysis rests on Junigau, a Magar community in western Nepal. The book's claims about "Nepal" and about literacy in general are therefore best read as arguments from one case, as the publisher's own description of a single village implies.
• Data from the 1990s. The data and photographs come from the 1990s (the tables are dated 1993 and one photograph 1998), and the book appeared in 2001, so it does not cover later changes in communication technology or schooling.
• The letters sit online. The full correspondences are web-only appendices rather than part of the printed book, so a reader with only the print edition has to go to the publisher's site to check the analysis against the letters.
• Letters in translation. The letters were written in Nepali, with some English words, and are read in the book in translation, so close linguistic analysis cannot be checked without the original.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within this course list, Invitations to Love is the ethnographic monograph. It is best read after one of the introductions: Claire Kramsch's Language and Culture is a short introduction to how language expresses cultural reality, and Stanlaw and Adachi's Language, Culture, and Society is a comprehensive textbook covering structure, variation and identity. Ahearn's own Living Language is an introduction to the field that treats language as social action, which makes it a natural companion. Alessandro Duranti's Linguistic Anthropology and Asif Agha's Language and Social Relations are more advanced: the first a graduate-level textbook drawing on fieldwork in Samoa, the second a theoretical monograph on how language mediates social relations. The monograph can be used to see in a single sustained case what such theories mean in practice.

How to Use This Book

The book is for undergraduates and graduate students in anthropology, linguistics, gender studies, development studies and South Asian studies. Previous reading in linguistic anthropology or ethnography is helpful but not required, since Chapter 3 introduces the concepts.

A practical plan:

• Core: Chapters 1, 3, 6, 9 and 10 give the framing, the theory, the two case studies and the conclusion.
• Context: Chapters 4 and 5 supply the marriage data and narratives; Chapters 7 and 8 explain the development discourse and the practices of literacy. Read these when the cases raise questions that need background.
• Skippable on a first pass: Chapter 2 if the reader is not interested in fieldwork methods.

Read the letters in the appendices alongside Chapters 6 and 9, first on your own and then with the author's analysis, noting what each letter does and what it assumes. A useful exercise is to ask how the argument would change with a different village, a later decade, or a different medium such as mobile phones.