Cultures often differ on whether they have a bride price or a dowry system for contracting marriages. In cultures where wives pay their own way, such as in New Guinea and African hoe agriculture economies, where much of the farm work consists of light weeding in light soil, it's common for grooms to pay their brides' families for their new wife's future services, often in cows or other valuables (Borat says that in his country, a wife costs "15 gallons of insecticide").
In cultures where men do much of the farm work (e.g., heavy plowing in rich soil), however, it was common for the bride's parents to pay a dowry to the groom.
Now, anthropology is full of exceptions (what Robin Fox calls "ethnographic dazzle"), but this is something of a general pattern.
In normal American culture, we don't have either, at least not explicitly. And yet, my wife contends that the standard wedding protocol provides an in-direct dowry from the bride's parents laundered through the guests.
I am the last person to pose as an expert on etiquette, so I may be getting this wrong, but her parents shelled out for a big wedding and big reception. My parents paid for the smaller rehearsal dinner the night before (largely attended by my relatives and friends from out of town) and, perhaps, the alcohol at the reception (I can't remember). But my brides' parents bore the bulk of the costs.
At the reception, lots and lots of people came up to us and handed us money. Others bought presents (some of which we returned for cash -- I especially recall six small plain water glasses that I was about to give away until I turned them over and saw "Baccarat" stamped on the bottom -- we returned them for $350, which was nice money in 1987).
The general idea is that guests should give the couple cash or a gift roughly equivalent to their share of the cost of the reception provided by the bride's parents. In other words, the gifts functioned more or less as a dowry from my in-laws to set us up, but indirectly routed through the guests.
Does this interpretation make sense?
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I wondered why I never saw you using those glasses! Ingrate!
I said "yes" the moment I read title of your post.
But there is a bit of nuance. For the upper-middle class it's a way for the parents to give their kids $$$ by laundering it through the guests. For example, it's illegal for the parents of a newly married couple to make the down payment on their house on their behalf, and would pay taxes if they gave them a gift over, what, $12K these days?
Also, the wedding allows everyone to have a big party rather than a strict cash payout, which would cause the groom to lose face.
It's also a status marker, especially for the mother-in-law. I know my wedding had to be huge b/c it had to be bigger than every previous wedding that had taken place in her social circle.
I would have rather had a small wedding and the remaining $$$, but of course that's b/c I have a Y chromosome.
Yes, I think your wife has the right of it. It's grossly inefficient from an economic or aspie point of view, but it's got strong cultural functions. You see, giving gifts is semi-sacralized in almost every culture, and if you're a neurotypical, giving gifts makes you like the giftee better. The wedding itself may be the last element of marriage to lose its sacral status in the public mind.
Yes, your wife is right. When my ex and I were getting married and deciding what we could afford to spend, we definitely took into consideration the general amount of money we would be getting in gifts. It's not like we budgeted on it, of course, because we didn't know how much it would be. But we knew there would be a chunk of cash there to help cover expenses. Since we kept most things cheap, and her mother paid for the reception and some other things we weren't going to bother with, we definitely came out ahead on the deal.
I don't know why it's turned out that way, but it does function as a dowry from the bride's parents to the couple. If the bride controls the couple's checkbook, though, it's not quite the same as a dowry that went to the groom in the past.
As far as I could tell the wedding process was very much centred on my mother in law and the enhancing of her status. She even got to keep most of the gifts, since (a) the guests were mostly her friends & relatives, buying stuff she liked and (b) we couldn't take most of it home from US to UK even if we'd wanted to.
I seem to recall one of my English half-cousins bought us a handy coffee maker; but he didn't attend the wedding so there was no quid pro quo. My father in law (divorced) gave us some money, this went into an account in my wife's name, and some of it helped ensure we didn't starve, so there was direct support there.
I think the theory is interesting, but judging by my experience I'd agree with Andrew Ryan that the primary function of weddings seems to be status marker for mother in law.
Yeah, Steve, that has been my understanding of the system (including Andrew Ryan's addenda) since we got married way back in '79.
It would be interesting, though, to see the reactions of "normal" people (i.e., those not as analytical as most of your readers) to your analysis: Does everyone take this for granted and just not mention it? Would most people say, "Hey, I never thought of it that way, but, yeah, that makes sense"? Or would most people recoil in horror at such a "mercenary" analysis?
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Stands to reason.
As the LDS Church has grown in the third world, there's been an effort by Church leaders to fight the dowry culture, since it's a barrier to young marriage (and, therefore, chastity before marriage and all that goes with it).
The indirect dowry thing makes sense. Dowry tends to be found where you have a combination of (a) economic stratification (Why pay for a husband for your daughter if one guy is no richer than another?) and (b) monogamy (Why pay for a rich husband if your daughter's just going to be one of a bunch of co-wives?)
Robin Fox just (last couple days) got elected to the National Academy of Science.
I wonder how the sociology of dowries or quasi-dowries will present itself with gay marriages.
It sounds plausible, but would have to account for destination weddings where people are cynically invited when it is known the vast majority won't go due to the high barriers of cost and effort.
Also, the over-the-top wedding seems to be a phenomenon that slowly began in the late 80s. Perhaps it's just a trendy thing.
I have a friend in his 60s who told me that back in the late 80s, his brother married for the umpteenth time on a boat. The problem was that the wedding party (he was the best man even) was left back on the beach.
To take their vows on a boat in the ocean was just the most romantic thing apparently and since the party and guests wouldn't fit on the boat, well they'd just have to be left behind. He said the marriage lasted about as long as one would expect.
"Simon in London said...
As far as I could tell the wedding process was very much centred on my mother in law and the enhancing of her status. She even got to keep most of the gifts, since (a) the guests were mostly her friends & relatives, buying stuff she liked and (b) we couldn't take most of it home from US to UK even if we'd wanted to."
I know several couples who would have rather received money or an extravagant honeymoon as opposed to a fancy wedding ceremony. But in every case the mother of the bride demanded a traditional wedding.
On the destination wedding thing... other people would need to chime in. It might not negate your wife's theory.
With the destination wedding I was invited to, somewhere in the Caribbean, the couple came back and held two receptions. These receptions, quite unlike the wedding, were conveniently located for easy attendance.
My sister was the maid of honor (she did not attend the wedding, but was expected to perform duties at the reception) and from her stories and the pictures of the Florida reception,
it was more over-the-top than a reception normally is and they even tried to recreate a wedding feel (since the vast majority couldn't attend the actual wedding) with the bride wearing her gown. Wedding-lite.
Heh, maybe she has a point.
I remember one time I got married. My wife would buy presents for every married female she'd ever met at Christmas time, thinking I couldn't work out that in essence, she was buying HERSELF dozens and dozens of presents, and that every wife she knew of participated in the same scam, whilst simultaneously making sure to point out to all and sundry the length and breadth of their magnanimity in such a time.
If I hadn't got divorced I'm sure I would have progressed to buying my brother a motorcycle while he got me a boat on such occasions...
As the LDS Church has grown in the third world, there's been an effort by Church leaders to fight the dowry culture, since it's a barrier to young marriage (and, therefore, chastity before marriage and all that goes with it).
Dowry culture isn't a barrier to young marriage, since dowries are paid by the bride's family, not by the bride herself. The bride's father will generally have accumulated some money or be around the peak of his earning power around the time of the wedding.
You might be thinking of bride-price culture, where a man has to pay the bride's family.
I don't get it. The groom's parents typically pay a smaller, relatively trivial sum. The bride's parents pay the bulk of the costs. The wedding guests basically pay a gift roughly equivalent to their share of the cost of the wedding.
The married couple receive gifts, with little cash outlay. The guests pay but get something fun to attend in return. The bride's parents fork out money, but get to see their daughter married in a lavish fashion.
So I guess your point is correct. The bride's parents contribute a large sum of money, that the bride receives indirectly through gifts. I do get it now.
jehu said - " It's grossly inefficient from an economic or aspie point of view, but it's got strong cultural functions. You see, giving gifts is semi-sacralized in almost every culture, and if you're a neurotypical, giving gifts makes you like the giftee better."
ya'll will be glad to know that when my husband and i got married, there was a total of two people there -- him and me. oh. four if you count the justice-of-the-peace and the clerk who stood in as the witness. we went to mcdonald's afterwards for lunch (inside joke). the bride wore her best pair of jeans. (~_^)
This is a timely topic for me. I'd love to hear the iSteve-o-sphere's opinions on this.
How much should be spent on a wedding when one's 25 yr old daughter, against her parent's strong opposition, accepts a proposal from a 36 year old guy with no education and no steady job? Are we expected to put on a big wedding for this guy who is already mooching off our daughter with no change in sight?
Traditionally, the wife is entitled to the dowry upon divorce. She's not supposed to get alimony or half of the assets, just the dowry. It was insurance paid by the bride's family.
What will be the impact of the Gay Marriage Juggernaut on the multi-billion bridal industry once straight couples stop bothering to get married? I'm guessing "Nervous Bride Magazine" will survive in Kindle form--Howie Kurtz should look into that.
"How much should be spent on a wedding when one's 25 yr old daughter, against her parent's strong opposition, accepts a proposal from a 36 year old guy with no education and no steady job? Are we expected to put on a big wedding for this guy who is already mooching off our daughter with no change in sight?"
No, the cost of the wedding should not be out of proportion to the likelihood of success of the marriage. Encourage an Elvis chapel marriage or something on the Carnival Cruise line with Captain Steubing.
Raymond Crotty noted in "When Histories Collide" that Ireland used to have a brideprice system (part of his argument that it resembles third world colonies), it was replaced by the dowry after conquest.
"I remember one time I got married. My wife would buy presents for every married female she'd ever met at Christmas time, thinking I couldn't work out that in essence, she was buying HERSELF dozens and dozens of presents, and that every wife she knew of participated in the same scam, whilst simultaneously making sure to point out to all and sundry the length and breadth of their magnanimity in such a time."
I can't believe I've been married for nearly a decade and never worked that one out. Maybe it's why I'm still married. :)
One addendum to both this thread and the previous one on traditional vs contemporary marriage.
The aspiring bride on the previous thread directed her particular disdain against White male/Asian female cheapo weddings.
Well, I fit that demographic (I live in China, but am American) and I can tell you by experience one good reason why such weddings may be underfunded: in Chinese culture, it's the groom's family that is expected both to pay a price for the bride, and to foot the bill for the wedding. In American culture, conversely, the bride's family is supposed to pay for the wedding. This leaves the happy couple in a bit of a bind: both sets of in-laws are expecting the other to pay!
We simply paid for the whole deal ourselves to avoid trouble, and therefore did keep things relatively modest.
"in Chinese culture, it's the groom's family that is expected both to pay a price for the bride, and to foot the bill for the wedding."
In China, the bride joins the groom's family and leaves her biological family behind, and is expected to work hard for mother-in-law. So, I guess it makes sense for China to be a bride-price culture, even though husbands also work very hard in Chinese agriculture.
It sounds like its more of an in-direct dowry as your wife indicates. Which would make sense, as the husband has been traditionally the bread winner.
"remember one time I got married. My wife would buy presents for every married female she'd ever met at Christmas time, thinking I couldn't work out that in essence, she was buying HERSELF dozens and dozens of presents, and that every wife she knew of participated in the same scam, whilst simultaneously making sure to point out to all and sundry the length and breadth of their magnanimity in such a time."
For a minute I thought you were outlining some status marker I don't get or experience. But then I realized you were describing something called "exchanging presents." People have been doing it from time immemorial. I find it tedious usually, but sometimes it's fun to see what somebody else thinks is just the ticket for you.
Of course, my wedding screwed the dowry thing all up by us eloping....
Yes, Steve, that's exactly right. In traditional Chinese family arrangements, the tension between wife and husband's mother is notorious, because the latter can easily see herself as having 'bought' the former, and therefore having free rein to push her around. And the MIL is also likely to have suffered as a new bride herself, so she may have bushels of resentment built up over the decades just waiting for a legitimate target . . . .
In this sense, paying for our own wedding due to orthogonal cultural expectations has bought my wife and me an out from some of the ongoing pressures that can plague intra-cultural marriages.
It's a combination of the dowry and the potlach.
My daughter is in her mid-20s so I hear some wedding stories from her. A lot of young couples pay for the wedding themselves and they borrow the money. For some reason, they want to have a big party.
Of course, they always hope that people are going to give them cash gifts that cover the place setting but from what I hear, there is a lot of disappointment about the haul. They want to invite their friends and young people don't give much. They'll chip in $40 on a gift, maybe. Then they want to bring a date, too. And you're not getting $40, you're getting a gift that you might not need or want.
How do you limit the guest list to people who will come up with the cost of their place setting? My daughter and her boyfriend are talking marriage so I've thought about it a bit. If my brother and his wife are invited, then his 2 daughters (ages 32 and 38) would have to be invited and how do you not invite the older one's 3 children (ages 6, 12 and 13). They'd all want to come. They'd all feel miffed if any of them weren't invited. My daughter would not get $200 total out of the 8 of them! A huge financial loss. directly.
You can get around the gift limits by spreading it over 2 years. Its $13,000 per person per year for each gift-or so we could give $52,000 to the young couple with no tax penalty in one year. I'd much rather do that.
Since when are these weddings fun for the guests? My policy for a long time has been to decline and send a $50 check rather than spend $300 or $400 for me and my husband to go to a wedding. We'd probably have to buy some clothes, too, because we don't need party clothes in our regular life. And to do what? Sit there and wait for the food? We can go out to a nice restaurant 3, 4, maybe 5 times for what it would cost to go to a wedding.
My older brother called the guests who gave a gift less than their share of the reception cost, "costers." He was (pretty much) joking around though, as gauche as it sounds.
@steve - "In China, the bride joins the groom's family and leaves her biological family behind...."
genetically speaking, she typically left her paternal biological family behind, but often united up with her maternal biological family since maternal cousin marriage was preferred for a very long time in china.
financially speaking, though, things have been run along patrilineal lines in china for pretty much forever.
"I know several couples who would have rather received money or an extravagant honeymoon as opposed to a fancy wedding ceremony. But in every case the mother of the bride demanded a traditional wedding."
Holy crap! That's us! It's nice to know that, for a Soviet girl who had a court house wedding followed by a dinner at her parents', just like all her peers, my mom now has such Western sensibilities. Assimilation is key...
that's the east asian way... i believe
Like pretty near everything else, the American wedding system itself is all screwed up.
As the meaning of "marriage" even between a man and woman deteriorates - with couples living together openly before the formal ceremony takes place - the size and cost of the proceedings has expanded greatly. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Confirmed that the Chinese way of giving wedding gifts is admirable: cash (or cash-equivalent money orders), straight up, in a red pocket. No fuss, no muss for givers and receivers!
Most people here (I'm in Hong Kong) give enough to cover the cost of their presence at a wedding banquet, so for the couple (or the groom's family, if they're taking the traditional path and paying for the party) it's usually at worst a wash financially. Some relatives also give gold jewelry to the bride, but this practice seems to be slowing down a bit.
When my wife and I held our wedding, quite a few of our guests were western expats who gave actual gifts, so we ended up well in the red.
I cannot overemphasize how much more sense it makes to simply give money at weddings. I know it's still considered gauche in the west, but man, couples end up in debt staring at a collection of material objects they're never going to get good value from.
I believe that the purpose of the modern fancy wedding is to give the bride something to do with her nervous energy. It seems like in Jane Austen, Trollope, etc, up to the 1950's "Father of the Bride" with Elizabeth Taylor, the father of the bride planned the wedding while the bride fussed over her trousseau. Now that married women aren't expected to start dressing matronly, no one has a trousseau anymore, and so brides have nothing to fuss over except the wedding itself.
" Semi-employed White Guy said...
This is a timely topic for me. I'd love to hear the iSteve-o-sphere's opinions on this.
How much should be spent on a wedding when one's 25 yr old daughter, against her parent's strong opposition, accepts a proposal from a 36 year old guy with no education and no steady job? Are we expected to put on a big wedding for this guy who is already mooching off our daughter with no change in sight?"
Speaker Boehner, is that you?
Hmmm. I need more supporting arguments, Steve. If the function of a dowry is to provide the groom with seed money or an estate property to get the marriage off the ground, I’m not so sure. Unless the bride’s parents provide the newlywed couple something like that, I don’t know how you can call it an indirect dowry.
Since the guests attending most weddings are roughly half split between the bride’s friends and family and the groom’s friends and family, any gifts/money from them cancel each other out. So you’re left with who fronts the sunk cost of the wedding and reception, which are the bride’s parents. I don’t see how that is an “investment” to launch the relationship, because it’s a onetime event, and the bride’s parents can’t recover that sunk cost. As I said, if the bride’s parents provide property, a house, or perhaps the house down payment, then I would consider that a dowry. In theory, if the marriage fails, the bride’s parents could recover this type of initial investment (as long as the wife gets title to it in any divorce settlement).
Semi-employed White Guy said...
How much should be spent on a wedding when one's 25 yr old daughter, against her parent's strong opposition, accepts a proposal from a 36 year old guy with no education and no steady job? Are we expected to put on a big wedding for this guy who is already mooching off our daughter with no change in sight?"
I think I'd go for the old "You're an adult, so I can't stop you from being a damned fool, but I'm damned if I'm going to fork out good money so you can marry that worthless s.o.b. in style."
Yes, I have a daughter getting to marriageable age, and yes, I would say that to her.
Miss Manners, by the way, has consistently condemned the idea that a gift should be obliged to equal the cost of the guest's share of the reception. It is a gift, she says, not a business transaction.
For example, it's illegal for the parents of a newly married couple to make the down payment on their house on their behalf, and would pay taxes if they gave them a gift over, what, $12K these days?
Really? This is illegal, and you can't just give cash gifts to people? I had no idea.
How much should be spent on a wedding when one's 25 yr old daughter, against her parent's strong opposition, accepts a proposal from a 36 year old guy with no education and no steady job? Are we expected to put on a big wedding for this guy who is already mooching off our daughter with no change in sight?
"Nothing" and "no".
Then again, myself, I wasn't aware of this idea that a bride's family is expected to pay for anything, seeing as how my in-laws were dirt poor country folks and we paid for our small, non-extravangant wedding ourselves. The system being described herein doesn't really seem very fair.
Married in Hong Kong some years ago to a Chinese woman. Wedding--over 200 guests, net loss financially but MIL was satisfied. Deficit covered mostly by the MIL.
Interestingly, there does seem to be a "new tradition" of a dowry in Hong Kong--the price of housing is so high that almost no young people can afford to have a home. Parents (who rode the wave of opportunity in the 1980's and after) have to help out.
Second interesting detail--for us, the dowry from the MIL came when we had children--i.e., when it became obvious that our marriage was serious.
"Interestingly, there does seem to be a "new tradition" of a dowry in Hong Kong--the price of housing is so high that almost no young people can afford to have a home. Parents (who rode the wave of opportunity in the 1980's and after) have to help out. "
I've seen A LOT of this in Seoul, S. Korea. The cost of real estate is extremely hight, and it's hard for a middle class young(ish) couple to afford anything that's not a filthy hole.
On the other hand, I've noticed that, just as the kids over there are expected to follow a predetermined life plan, the parents are expected to invest everything they have into their kids. It's not so much that the parents are expected to pay for a wedding or an appartment, but that they are expected to pay for anything they can possibly afford.
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