It traces artisanal connections within the local context, during migration within India, and to the Gulf, examining how woodworkers utilise local and transnational networks, based on identity, religiosity, and affective circulations, to access resources, support and forms of mutuality. Networks, Labour and Migration among Indian Muslim Artisans provides an ethnography of life, work and migration in a North Indian Muslim-dominated woodworking industry. (Keywords: global industrialization Taiwan religion I-Kuan Tao (Yiguan Dao) marriage resistance) In this article, I therefore caution against a totalizing understanding of the concept of resistance based on its final result, but call for a more nuanced analysis focusing on the process. Yet the different readings that these women and their families applied to their situations, as well as the ingenuous strategies they deployed to solve their predicaments, also added new elements to the cultural repertoire which, collectively considered, might broaden the range of options for future Taiwanese women who attempt a similar life trajectory. Marriage resistance, in this case, was an act of both transgression and conformity. Paradoxically, while trying to establish an alternative social space, these women were also seeking cultural legitimacy for their choice.

Three interlocking factors are particularly important to an understanding of these women’s experience: cultural (the Taiwanese patrilineal family), religious (I-Kuan Tao), and economic (Taiwan’s post-World War II export-oriented industrialization and its recent economic restructuring). This article situates singlehood in the literature of resistance and sees it as a strategy of these women seeking an alternative lifestyle from the culturally prescribed roles of wife, mother and daughter-in-law. They lived together in an I-Kuan Tao temple.

Against the background of Taiwan’s recent economic restructuring, this article investigates the lives of a group of working-class women who were believers of I-Kuan Tao, a sectarian religion, and who had by and large decided to remain single in order to better practice their religious teaching.

Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang