Abstract
When I told a Mauritian acquaintance that I planned to carry out research on mixed marriages in Mauritius, he laughed sadly and said that the best place to investigate this phenomenon would probably be near the Pont Colville Deverell — the highest bridge in the island, which has been a favoured spot for double suicides by young couples unhappily in love, unable to marry each other because of rules of ethnic endogamy and, sometimes, caste endogamy.2 In this article I shall try to show why my acquaintance was wrong (although he was also right in certain respects) by accounting for the current growth in the number of interethnic marriages in Mauritius and indicating some possible long-term effects on social categorization and organization in the island.
Thanks are due to Vinesh Y. Hookoomsing, Cora Govers and Hans Vermeulen for their useful comments on an early version of this article. An earlier version was also presented as a Northern Scholar lecture at the University of Edinburgh in February 1995, and I am grateful to its Department of Social Anthropology, and in particular Anthony P. Cohen, for the opportunity to discuss it there.
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Eriksen, T.H. (1997). Mauritian Society between the Ethnic and the Non-Ethnic. In: Govers, C., Vermeulen, H. (eds) The Politics of Ethnic Consciousness. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-64673-9_8
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