Socio-Cultural Dynamics in Intermarriage in Spain: Beyond Simplistic Notions of Hybridity

EDITOR'S SUMMARY: "Dan Rodríguez-García, in exploring the situation of Senegalese and Gambian (male) immigrants living in mixed unions with Spanish nationals in Catalonia, Spain, shows how cultural debates (including, for example, about circumcision) may be observed within the conjugal relationship itself. Intermarriage, involving the formation of transcultural and transnational families, constitutes a complex socio-cultural space, encompassing both the local and the global, in which social actors, rather than cultures as whole, fixed entities, are protagonists. Their responses are very diverse and Rodrı´guez-Garcı´a illustrates the dialogic aspect of family life as a negotiated intercultural order. Mixed marriages of the kind discussed by Rodríguez-García have an important transnational dimension, and indeed most of the families with which the present volume is concerned live transnationally, with transnationalism shaping their lives and the debates with which they are engaged."