Between Standardized Ritualized Obligation and Variation of Family Choice
In Chinese society, matrimonial payments begin with the engagement ceremony, and the most important gifts refer to the caili 彩礼 offered by the groom’s side to the bride’s side a few days before the wedding ceremony, and the jiazhuang 嫁妆 offered by the bride’s family to the groom’s family on the wedding day. By keeping a distance from the two dominant theories—marriage payment theory and marriage endowment theory—in existing studies on marriage exchanges in China, this article aims to propose a new interpretation, by demonstrating that only the fiancé’s family is ritually and collectively obliged to provide the matrimonial payments, without which the marriage cannot take place. However, the gifts transferred from the fiancée’s family to the fiancé’s family—jiazhuang—is optional, personalized, and secret, being above all part of a family strategy. Moreover, since the specificity of the Chinese terrain reveals incompatibility with classical work in anthropology of kinship on “dowry”, “bridewealth” and “indirect dowry”, the article also seeks to enhance the value of vernacular terms in the understanding of Chinese society, as well as to compare and dialogue between previous work in the field and my own analyses.