Wedding as Text
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Wedding as Text

Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

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eBook - ePub

Wedding as Text

Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual

Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz

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About This Book

A wedding serves as the beginning marker of a marriage; if a couple is to manage cultural differences throughout their relationship, they must first pass the hurdle of designing a wedding ceremony that accommodates those differences. In this volume, author Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz documents the weddings of 112 couples from across the United States, studied over a 10-year period. She focuses on intercultural weddings--interracial, interethnic, interfaith, international, and interclass--looking at how real people are coping with cultural differences in their lives. Through detailed case studies, the book explores how couples display different identities simultaneously. The concepts of community, ritual, identity, and meaning are given extensive consideration. Because material culture plays a particularly important role in weddings as in other examples of ritual, food, clothing, and objects are given special attention here. Focusing on how couples design a wedding ritual to simultaneously meet multiple--and different--requirements, this book provides:
*extensive details of actual behavior by couples;
*an innovative format: six traditional theoretical chapters, with examples integrated into the discussion, are matched to six "interludes" providing detailed descriptions of the most successful examples of resolving intercultural differences;
*a methodological appendix detailing what was done and why these decisions were made; and
*a theoretical appendix outlining the study's assumptions in detail. Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual is a distinctive study of those who have accepted cultural difference into their daily lives and how they have managed to do so successfully. As such, it is suitable for students and scholars in semiotics, intercultural communication, ritual, material culture, family communication, and family studies, and will be valuable reading for anyone facing the issue of cultural difference.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2002
ISBN
9781135694203

1
Introduction

“Indeed, weddings are contested ground”
—Kendall (1996, pp. 225–226)
The United States includes individuals drawn from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds.1 Most of us face diversity in school, at work, and in our neighborhoods, but there are an increasing number of individuals who choose to cross cultural boundaries in that most intimate of relationships—marriage.2 These are not people who face cultural differences briefly when in the public realm or for a week when on vacation to an exotic location.3 They have committed toing with difference in their own homes, for their entire lives “until death do us part” as many wedding ceremonies still state. A wedding marks the beginning of a marriage. As Mayer (1985) argued:
The issue of the wedding and the marriage ceremony itself is frequently the first and most significant test of how a young couple will deal with the twin tugs of their love for each other and their dual heritage. Often that issue will affect all subsequent marital negotiations: questions concerning each spouse’s familiarity with his and her respective traditions, emotional attachments thereto, attachments to parents, and varying degrees of embeddedness on the part of each in his or her community of origin, (pp. 191–192)
Other resolutions are less public, thus both more flexible and more negotiable.4
Naylor (1998) pointed out that “all cultural groups learn their cultures as the way to believe and behave, the most correct way, as the true way…No culture group teaches new or aspiring members that someone else or some other cul-tural beliefs or practices are more correct than the ones they are being taught” (p. 23). This teaching may make sense for each monocultural group when members stay at home but leads to cultural dissonance and even conflict when individuals from different groups attempt to cross group boundaries. In Naylor’s succinct phrase, “cultures in contact produce conflict” (p. 153).5 We cannot change this; ethnocentrism will continue to exist as long as it serves its primary purpose of strengthening the group. What we can do is to work with it. Conflicts can be resolved. Couples have small conflicts, in the context of ongoing, committed relationships, and thus have both an easier time of it and more reason to pursue a resolution than participants in many other contexts.
My title, Wedding as Text, provokes three obvious questions:
  • Why study weddings?
  • What kind of weddings will be studied?
  • In what way is a wedding a text?
Each is answered in the following pages.

WHY STUDY WEDDINGS?

Weddings are one of a small number of rites of passage (events celebrating major changes in the life cycle, like birth and death) widely practiced across the United States and around the globe.6 Of the various rites of passage, weddings are particularly enticing to study. Even if they have not experienced their own, most people who have been to multiple weddings, have seen weddings portrayed on television and in films, have read descriptions of weddings in newspapers, magazines, or books, and everyone has something to say on the topic. At least in the modern United States, this does not hold equally true for births and deaths. We generally participate in only the births and deaths of immediate family members, if even those, and these are neither acceptable topics for casual conversations nor celebrated in the popular media to the same extent as weddings.
Weddings, like all rituals, are complex events, composed of multiple parts. They incorporate a variety of codes (e.g., liturgy, music, food, clothing, and objects) and related events (in addition to the ceremony proper, participants may conduct multiple preceremony rituals, such as showers, bachelor parties, and prewedding dinners, premarital counseling or some other sort of wedding classes, and various postceremony rituals, such as receptions, opening presents, and honeymoons). Different groups place differing importance on these component rituals, any of which can be expanded to an astonishing extent. A wedding can, for example, be preceded by as many as 15 showers, though such elaboration is uncommon and noteworthy.7
As a major ritual, weddings are often planned months or years in advance, with even small details given consideration. Thus they serve as examples of what people are capable of doing when they take the time to think ahead and plan their behavior. Funerals are the opposite, generally needing to be scheduled with minimal notice because, as a group, Americans do not like to think about and plan them in advance. Often, family members do not even know what their loved ones would have preferred, having never been willing to ask.8 Weddings happen by design, with accident influencing only small components, so they provide a good topic of study for researchers wanting to see what people choose to do after devoting considerable attention to organizing a public display.
Weddings are also worthy of study due to their considerable expense. In 1997, the average American couple spent over $19,000 (Ingraham, 1999). This is an average; obviously many couples spent far more, and the figure has only increased in the last few years. We grant weddings considerable social significance in spending such large sums on their design. Weddings are big business: 1% of the U.S. population gets married each year, but 14% of all sales are related to weddings (Lavin, 1992). The wedding industry earns $40 to $100 billion per year, depending on exactly what is included in the figure (Puente, 2000). A display of wealth has become such an expected requirement that many families willingly go into debt to pay for the ceremony. “‘Over the years, I’ve seen fathers, even very wealthy fathers, tell their daughters, “I’ll give you a blank check to put a down payment on a house” instead of an expensive wedding,’ [wedding planner Marcy] Blum says. And not once has anyone taken it’” (Puente, 2000).
As happy occasions, there are few restraints on discussing weddings, the way there might be for sadder, but equally complex, occasions such as funerals. Weddings have sad aspects (i.e., for parents, a wedding may serve as the marker of children having reached maturity and leaving home), but only a few of the people I interviewed emphasized this interpretation. Like some other rituals, weddings are celebrations.9 Like other celebrations, weddings incorporate elements of performance as well as entertainment, being both public and participatory (Manning, 1983b).
In these pages, weddings are discussed separately from marriages. Weddings are, unlike most marriages, relatively short and quite public. Marriages begin with the wedding, and last until either the death of one of the couple, their Separation, or divorce. Studying how couples manage their continuing relationship is fascinating, but a topic in its own right.10 I decided to stop my research at the boundary of the wedding ceremony, not moving on to the marriage, for a wide variety of reasons. As others have generally analyzed the relationship of marriage rather than the wedding alone, this requires some explanation. There are at least four rationales for stopping at the edges of the wedding, rather than continuing on to the marriage:
  1. It provides a tightly-hounded event (usually lasting a few hours, but generally including a few days of related celebrations and rituals).
  2. It is a naturally-occurring event (no researcher invented this analytic category, the participants did).11
  3. It is a publicly-celebrated event (performed in front of a crowd of friends and relatives, unlike many aspects of a marriage).
  4. It is a widely-documented event (participants generally arrange for photographs and/or videotapes to be taken, for their own use later).
Each of these factors has implications for research:
  1. Because it is tightly bounded, the actual data I need to collect have some natural limits (essential because I use ethnography as my main method, a method known for the astonishing amount of data it can produce).
  2. Because it is naturally occurring, the participants define what should be included in the event under study (essential given current concern with validity in fieldwork).
  3. Because it is publicly celebrated, my presence as a researcher has little or no consequence for the form (essential given recent critiques of “subjective” research methods such as ethnography).
  4. Because it is widely documented, participants have already determined on their own what is important to record for posterity, irrespective of my research interests (this characteristic also means that weddings occurring before my research began could be easily included in the database).
Marriages cannot be described as having these four characteristics and thus do not have the advantages as a research topic that these entail. Weddings are unique in their condensation of the choices made by a particular couple with regards to their relationship into a single event. They are particularly rich research sites due to this collapsing of much information into a brief occurrence. The decisions made for a wedding often foreshadow the decisions to be made for the marriage.

WHAT KIND OF WEDDINGS WILL BE STUDIED?

All weddings are potentially interesting to researchers, but this book primarily explores intercultural weddings held in the United States. Intercultural wedding is defined broadly, covering five major varieties:
  • international (individuals from different countries),
  • interracial (individuals of different races),
  • interethnic (individuals of different ethnic groups),
  • interfaith (individuals having different religions), and
  • interclass (individuals from different social class backgrounds).12
Any one wedding can combine multiple types. An African American Baptist marrying a White Italian Catholic would appropriately be described as interracial, interethnic, and interfaith, simultaneously. The examples provided in this book document a wide variety of combinations, but clearly not all of those possible are represented in these pages.
A series of related terms are in use by different authors. Intermarriage has primarily been used to refer only to interfaith marriages; mixed marriage has often been used solely for interracial marriages.13 The differences in cultural expectations (understood quite broadly) are most relevant, and I therefore use the single term intercultural to cover a wide spectrum of potential differences between bride and groom. Differences in cultural identity, whatever the source, imply differences in cultural resources available for creating shared meaning, so it is the issue, not the source, of difference that is central.14 Despite the distinctions among these types of weddings, all share at least one characteristic: the need to blend divergent cultural traditions into a single coherent and meaningful ritual. As McGoldrick and Garcia-Preto (1984) pointed out, “Intermarriage requires a degree of flexibility not necessary for those who marry within their group” (p. 362). Although their research investigates interethnic marriages, the same is true of any form of intercultural marriage.

International

International weddings are between individuals who are citizens of different countries. These generally require that at least one member of the couple has traveled from their own home country to that of the other (although occasionally both members have traveled and have met in a third country) and usually entail explicit negotiations leading to a decision about which country will be chosen as home. In her summary of the literature on this topic, Cottrell (1990) found that “People who marry out [outside their own group] are, to some degree, psychologically, culturally, or socially marginal—at least they are not ‘dead center’” (p. 163). This makes sense, and fits with what I have found, although studying who chooses an intercultural marriage was not a main focus of my research. As Varro (1988) suggested, in an international marriage, “an international confrontation is taking place at the microsocial level of the family” (p. 157). International confrontations are large and unwieldy, often remaining unresolved for long periods of time. Weddings are small and manageable, both requiring and permitting quick resolution. As is true of all international confrontations, understanding and patience are required for success. Participants in an international marriage where he’s Japanese and she’s the American daughter of Russian Jews born in Poland, speak for many international couples when they say: “Our home life has been sort of a crosscultural lab” (Galloway, 1992, p. 3). (Crosscultural is a term developed by psychologists, and used by researchers in several disciplines, to refer to the comparison of cultural norms across national boundaries. It differs slightly from intercultural, which emphasizes the interactions between members of different cultures. Here, the more technically appropriate term would be intercultural.) In keeping with this comment, Barbara (1989) found “It is often the case that individuals are ahead of institutions. The barriers erected between countries and groups are not always those which separate individuals” (p. 211). This certainly held true for the international couples I talked to; as the bride of Couple 71 said on behalf of most of them: “the cross-cultural aspect was no problem.” This was a U.S.–Cook Island wedding, in which the bride stressed the similarities between the individuals rather than the differences between the cultures. Presumably this has to be the emphasis if an international marriage is to succeed.
Varro (1988) found two major results of an international union: Either it will lead to great conflict, or to “a more broadminded, even sophisticated, personality, capable of integrating not only the material ‘otherness’ but his or her own” (p. 185). It will take substantial research on intercultural families, not just intercultural weddings, to discover how to ensure the positive outcome; neither Varro’s research nor anyone else’s has yet reached that conclusion. However, researchers have learned something about the circumstances leading to international marriages. Caycedo and Richardson (1995) found industrialization and urbanization increase the likelihood of the international marriages they studied (Chinese-American because family bonds and neighborhood ties are weakened. As industrialization and urbanization increase around the world, this implies that the number of international marriages will substantially increase in the near future. This is probably true for any sort of intercultural marriage, not just international, because there is a cycle at work here. As boundaries between groups become less salient, more people are willing to cross a given boundary themselves, thus weakening it even further.15
Originally, this study only included weddings between Americans of various ethnic, racial, or religious groups. However, a number of interesting cases involving one international participant presented themselves, and I realized that the same essential cultural conflicts were occurring, and so they are included in this book. Clearly there are fewer examples of this type than there might be, and this is why. Cases involving two international participants that came to my attention were sufficiently different from weddings involving one American, so they have been omitted from the final study.

Interracial

Despite the significant social implications of racial differences, physical anthropologists (those who study the topic most carefully) have determined that race is not a valid biological construct.16
Like other social constructs, races are real cultural entities. For many people, membership in a group constitutes an important part of their social identity and self-image. But social facts are not necessarily part of the biological landscape. In multiethnic regional populations, races are merely ethnic groups linked to vague, inconsistent, and stereotypical ideal phenotypes. (Cartmill, 1999, p. 659)
Because race has social, although not biological, significance, interracial couples and their biracial (or multiracial) children serve as a disruption of the expected norms whereby everyone fits into one particular category. In the spring of 2000 there was much public discussion over the new racial categories made available in the census form, permitting individuals to identify as members of more than one racial group for the first time.
Because they are a disruption of the expected, interracial weddings are still rare, although more frequent than they formerly were. Depending on the source cited, only 1% or 2% of weddings in the U.S. currently cross racial lines.17 Zweigenhaft and Domhoff (1991) suggested that “national longitudinal data on intermarriage show that interethnic marriage rates have climbed over the past few decades for all groups except blacks. Black-white intermarriage rates in the United States remain among the lowest in the Western world” (p. 171). To briefly summarize the findings, it seems that people are more likely to intermarry if they have more education (because education both brings groups together and preaches tolerance), live away from their kin (so community norms cannot as readily be imposed on them), are later generation Americans (third generation being far more likely to intermarry than first generation), are older, and in a second marriage (both of which increase the pool of candidates who will be given serious consideration as potential mates).18 Because they acknowledge that “Intermarriage is perhaps the most sensitive indicator that a minority group is being assimilated into the larger social-class system” (p. 171), this is a clear indicator of continuing separation between the races in the U.S.19 Their study documents a program that successfully moved lower and working class blacks into the middle class by providing educational opportunity, yet even the students they studied did not generally marry outside their own group. Based on their evidence combined with that of other researchers, it beco...

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