ABSTRACT
The first stage on the marital continuum is framed by previous ethnographic analysis of women's agency in the context of kawin-lari. This chapter presents a unique exploration of the intersection between kawin-lari and the fluidity of the Sasak marital continuum. It shows how women frequently enter marriage before feeling fully ready – a phenomenon that has been identified in other ethnographic works of Lombok. Through an examination of social relations that work to influence women's everyday lives in the prelude to marriage we can gain a more complex understanding of women's agency as they enter into the marital continuum. The chapter demonstrates the complexities of kawin-lari and its implications for young women as they negotiate normative notions of gender and sexuality in the prelude to marriage. However, the ambivalence that often underpins women's experiences of kawin-lari (and other means of entering marriage) complicates our understandings of elopement as bound up in autonomous marital choice.
