Payment Made by a Bride to Her Husband's Family
Helpmate Wealth
| The bride price or bride wealth system constitutes assumes an important role in the distribution of family property and the arrangement of exchanges and alliances among families in many socieities. This establishment specifies that a prospective husband, normally with the help of his relatives, must provide a substantial sum of money or highly valued appurtenances to his future wife's family unit before a marriage tin can be contracted. In many patrilineal societies the payment is likewise made for the rights to assign children to their begetter's family rather than to their mother�s. Bride payments have been interpreted in numerous ways. In many cases, groups justify the practice past claiming that the wealth received compensates them for time and trouble taken to heighten a daughter who volition be sent off to live with another family. In others, it is viewed as bounty for the loss of a daughter'due south economical services or for the children she adds to her new family. For example, among the Dani of New Guinea iii separate conjugal assets are recognized in transations that are separated in time. A man must make gifts of special valuables, such as pigs, shells, or stones to his married woman�s family when:
|  Photo Credit: Lewis, Herbert South. |
The first European observers of helpmate wealth arrangements concluded that it constituted an actual buy of married woman alike to ownership a slave. The general anthropological interpretation is that the actual funds transferred are less significant as economic inducements or avails than as counters in a social exchange organisation that binds the bride's and groom's families together in the course of the wedlock. Thus the commutation of material items (coin, cattle, pigs) too as of women assume mainly political and symbolic value. Sometimes they establish a special purpose currency that tin can be used only for union payments. Bride wealth as well contributes to the stability of the marriage. Since they often must be repaid if the wedlock is dissolved, a woman�southward family has a interest in resolving any problems between their daughter and her hubby to ensure the stability of the union.
It spite of their obvious integrative importance, the value and relative scarcity of bride wealth payments does have implications for the accumulation and utilize of both physical and social capital. In full general the need for bride payment supports the institution of polygyny, where men marry more than 1 wife, since it will take a man a long fourth dimension to accumulate the necessary matrimony wealth. In the process, older men, who have had more time to acquire the requisite resources, will be able to ally several adult female earlier their juniors have assembled enough wealth to begin their own marital careers. Their larger families will both adjure to their prestige and social status and provide them with a considerable productive base to accumulate more wealth.
The institutions of bride wealth and polygyny are present in many societies. They involve a variety of wealth forms, in many instances special items that are used exclusively for marriage payments. In some areas special valuable shells or stones are used. In others, domestic animals, such as pigs or cattle are prominent. For example, many South African societies, such every bit the Zulu or the Swazi, require helpmate payments, known as lobola, in the grade of cattle, which are considered to be a special wealth object whose exchange is restricted to a few highly prominent social transactions (Kuper 1982). The matrimony cattle are transferred from the groom or his family to the bride�s begetter or brother. However, the recipient of the payment does not fully assume the right to dispose of the animals involved. If his daughter fails to bear children or becomes divorced, he must return them to his sometime in-laws. He may otherwise use them to acquire wives for himself or other members of his family. A father is expected to provide first wives for his sons, although this contribution, as many other transactions in the system, sets up a debt. A son must hand over the lobola payment that he receives from his first girl�s marriage as a repayment to his father.
In the Due south African system spousal relationship cattle grade the focus of an brotherhood arrangement similar to one constructed through cantankerous cousin marriage, except that cattle as well every bit women are systematically transferred from family to family. In some cases lobola and cross cousin marriage are interrelated. Among the Lovedu, a human being holds a special relationship to his �cattle-linked sister�, whose wedlock payment he receives. He will unremarkably apply these cattle to acquire a wife of his own, a benefit for which he becomes indebted to his sister. Appropriately, he is required to requite her the right to make up one's mind the marriage of one of his daughters and forgo whatsoever expectation of a bride payment. His sister may ally off her niece to her son, creating a matrilateral cross cousin union.
Lovedu Marriage Exchanges
She can also requite her to her own hubby to obtain a dependent co-wife, or may even marry her in her own right and become a female husband, inside the Lovedu organisation of �woman marriage�.
The South African example introduces a curious problem related to the condition of family unit and lineage groupings. The brotherhood theory of marriage maintains that the apportionment of women and cattle binds the groups that brand up the club into a system of reciprocal commutation and cooperation in which all units are equal. However, both economic and/or demographic conditions can create or support a situation in which the groups involved presume higher or lower statuses co-ordinate to the number of women or the amount of cattle they possess. In the S African systems economic, political, and social inequalities are actually structural features of spousal relationship institutions. Selected patrilineages assume aristorcratic statuses in numerous kingdoms and chiefdoms in the region and maintain and validate their leadership positions specifically in terms of the lobola organization. They possess larger herds of cattle and substitution them for wives co-ordinate to a pattern in which married woman givers/cattle recipients are subordinate to wife takers/cattle givers. This arrangement is term hypergamy, an institution in which women ally upwardly rather than in an egalitarian circle. They accumulate at the top, where the major power holders benefit and enhance their status past having many wives in return for the redistribution of their cattle to lower ranking groups. High status occupants includes kings and ranks of subordinate chieftains and, sometimes, queens and other female power holders, who employ their wives and cattle equally political currency in the aforementioned way every bit their male counterparts. For example the Lovedu rain queen, regularly received wives as tribute from all the districts of her realm and their numbers may have been as high as a hundred women (Kuper 1982:72).
- Adjacent: Dowry
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University of Manitoba Created: May 2002
Last Modified: Oct 2003
Source: https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/tutor/marriage/bride_wealth.html
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