Analysis: Marriage And Family

This reaction paper will be on pairing number four. We watched a total of two videos for this pairing: Video one was called Marriage and Family, and video number two was called Family and Household. Both of these videos had my complete attention, as did the class discussions. I found this pairing to be the greatest attention-grabber so far. A few of the key topics that I was the utmost engaged in and would like to react to in this paper would happen to be, dowry verse bride price, the economics between a man and women in a marriage, and lastly, polygamy in marriages throughout other cultures.

In America, we use the dowry system. A daughter stays at home with her family and the family takes care of her until a groom takes her hand in marriage.

Most of the time, this compensation is in the form of the female 's family paying for the wedding. However, in other cultures, especially pastoral societies, they use a system called the bride price. In certain cultures, a daughter stays home with her family and helps take care of the family until a man takes her as his wife. This was described in class, as the man paying compensation to his future wife’s family, usually in the form of cattle for his new wife. To clarify, they do this because, in these cultures, women are considered to be very valuable around the home. They’re hard workers that contribute to the families’ success. All things considered, this is ironic in a way, as it appears in a dowry system the family members pay to have their daughter (who is an expense to them) transferred to another family. On the

Laurel Bossen did a nice job of explaining it, saying, “Usually land is held by men through patrilineal inheritance.” In an online book Economic Anthropology, they explained that men are typically land owners while most women are land workers. Moreover, economics is why a woman’s status is less than a man’s. While watching video number one, “Marriage and Family”, something that especially caught my eye was how Moroccan women go up for display at a “Bride Market”. I suppose when a man purchases a woman for himself that would give him more authority over her, being as she was bought. In addition, the man has expectations of the woman he marries. Nevertheless, as discussed in class, a man’s status as a hunter who can feed a whole group supersedes a woman’s – who can only collect enough nuts and berries for her immediate household. In all cultures kids learn from the adults they’re around, in video number two, “Family and Household”, they showed a clip of a mother showing her daughter what plants were ok to pick and eat. She has also built a hut out of branches and leaves, with her daughter by her side. On the other hand, the boys were learning how to hunt animals with bow and arrows like their fathers. Moreover, they teach them by first showing them how to catch small things like frogs. Furthermore, in India, they took a different