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Responding to the renewed emphasis on the significance of village studies, this book focuses on aging bachelorhood as a site of intolerable angst when faced with rural depopulation and social precarity. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in contemporary Macedonian society, the book explores the intersections between modernity, kinship and gender. It argues that as a critical consequence of demographic rupture, changing values and societal shifts, aging bachelorhood illuminates and challenges conceptualizations of performativity and social presence.
“Modernity and the Unmaking of Men is an ethnographically rich and beautifully written work that analyzes aging bachelorhood in the context of rural depopulation and decline and of changing values to marriage and childrearing in the country now known as North Macedonia… The book presents a wealth of fascinating details about so-called old bachelors who are over twenty-five, the socially expected age of marriage, and refuse to get married... Overall, [this] is a richly informative, engaging, and accessible book that will interest general readers, undergraduate and graduate students, and specialists in Europe alike.” • Anthropos
“This book contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on kinship, marriage, and masculinity in rural Macedonia in the post-Socialist period. With her focus on “the village scape,” Schubert adds fresh insights to understandings of modernity and the state.” • Deborah Reed-Danahay, University of Buffalo
Notes on Translation
Chapter 1. ‘A Village Is for the Old and Dead’: The Disappearing Village Scape
Chapter 2. A Kinship Frame of Mind
Chapter 3. Marriage and the ‘Order’ of Life
Chapter 4. The Invisible Significants: Women and the Androcentric Social Imaginary
Chapter 5. The (Dis)Orderly Individual
Chapter 6. The Decoupling of Time and Order: Aging Bachelors and the (Im)productive Ethno-Nation
Conclusion: On Being Stuck
References
Index