Remarriage

Abstract

This chapter examines divorced British Asian couples with children, exploring whether they sustain contact with their former spouse in order to bring up those children jointly, whether they have further children or acquire stepchildren from their new partners, and the family configurations that ensue in the long run. The findings differ with the slim existing literature on lone parenthood and divorce among British Asians, which has suggested exceptional levels of enmity and discontinuity in parenting relationships post-divorce. Yet the relational textures of these divorce-extended families were also shaped by the politics of the patrilineage, cultural constructions of the bloodline and long-term considerations of marital alliance. The chapter concludes with questions about the ethnocentricism of anthropological and sociological work on divorce in the UK.