In this ethnography of Durrani marriage I have treated marriage from a number of different angles. The variety of strategies I have employed in my presentation may be summarized in terms of three rather different emphases: first, a focus on the complexity of marriage choice and the specificity of each marriage; second, the nature of the ideology of control which embraces all aspects of Maduzai social relations; and third, the effects of the wider environment on competition among the Maduzai.

Each marriage makes a complex statement about social relations and involves a large number of people in many different kinds of social activity. This inevitably means that any discussion of marriage based on classification into particular modes (such as brideprice marriage or direct exchange) or in terms of the ties it creates within or between groups (cousin-marriage, intra-lineage marriage, interethnic marriage, etc.) is bound to be simplistic. For example, an exchange marriage between the houses of close agnates who are both poor and in need of wives differs greatly in both causes and implications from an exchange marriage arranged to settle a dispute between two powerful households. They differ in the way the exchange is arranged, in the quality of the affinal ties created, in the extent to which the marriage celebrations may be used to gain prestige, and so on.