Dowry Systems in Complex Societies

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Dowry Systems in Complex SocietiesAuthor(s): Stevan Harrell and Sara A. DickeySource: Ethnology, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 105-120Published by: University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3773553 .

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DOWRY SYSTEMS IN COMPLEX

SOCIETIES1

Stevan Harrell

University of Washington

Sara A. Dickey

University of California, San Diego

A puzzling gap exists in current explanations of the occurrence of dowry. Dowry has been regarded, for example, as one type of marriage transaction, as a form of

diverging devolution, and as compensation for the acquisition of a so-called

nonproductive woman. None of the descriptions and analyses that we have

encountered, however, fully or sufficiently explains why dowry occurs where and when it does. After reviewing other writers' views of the functions of dowry we will offer our own proposal.

We define dowry as the transfer of significant amounts of goods from the bride's family (or, indirectly, from the groom's family through the bride's family) to a conjugal fund ofthe new couple.2 This sort of transaction has a rather narrow distribution in comparison with other forms of goods that are exchanged at

marriage. Of the 563 societies listed in the Atlas of World Cultures (Murdock 1981), only 24?approximately 4 per cent?have this form of marriage trans?

action, in contrast with the 226 societies that give bridewealth, for example, or

the 63 that require brideservice. Yet, as Goody (1972, 1976) has pointed out, to

see dowry merely as an aspect of marriage transactions is misleading. Dowry is, rather, one form of "diverging devolution," a type of property inheritance in

which both sons and daughters inherit some share of the parental estate. Dowry is simply that mode of diverging devolution in which daughters receive their

shares upon marriage. Diverging devolution, as Goody (1976:13) has demonstrated, is prevalent

primarily in the highly complex, stratified societies of Europe and Asia. Indeed, if we look at the distribution of dowry in the Atlas of World Cultures sample, we

find that sixteen of the 24 societies listed as giving dowry are also listed as having

complex stratification into social classes largely reflecting occupational dif?

ferentiation (Murdock 1981:101). In addition, "in surveying the major Eurasian

civilizations, all . . . were found to be characterized by diverging devolution"

(Goody 1976:21). From this perspective, then, to explain the incidence of dowry is simply to explain the incidence of diverging devolution in complex societies. This Goody has done convincingly in terms of the greater productivity of plough

agriculture and of the consequent social stratification and competition over

wealth, all of which produce a tendency to retain valuable productive resources in

the direct family line (Goody 1976:20).

105



106 Ethnology

Goody has demonstrated the association between dowry and social stratiflca? tion in two ways: by a series of statistical tests that associate dowry and/or

diverging devolution with other factors that tend to occur in complex, stratified

societies; and by a group of descriptive studies that place diverging devolution in the context of a whole set of associated social institutions, such as plough agriculture, complex stratification, homogamy (marriage with someone of the same economic level), monogamy, premarital chastity, and separate kin terms for

siblings. As far as it goes, there seems to be little problem with Goody's (1976)

assertion. But a question remains. If all major civilizations are characterized by diverging devolution, there is still considerable variation among and within these civilizations as to whether dowry is given, and in the size and content of the

dowry. Why do we find that in some societies, and in some communities within these societies, a daughter gets her share at the time of marriage, while in others

she, like her brothers, must wait until her parents die or retire to be able to claim her share? We are up against the dual nature of dowry here. Dowry is not simply a form of inheritance by females in a complex society concerned with lineal transmission of property. It is also a form of marriage payment. But again, it is not

simply a form of marriage payment. No explanation of the occurrence of dowry or of the variation in its size and importance will be satisfactory unless it takes into account both aspects of dowry as an institution?that it transfers wealth to a

daughter and/or her marital family, and that it does so at the time of her marriage. The problem with Goody's (1976) explanation is that it is incomplete. Goody has failed to distinguish the situations in which families in complex societies practice inheritance through dowry from those in which both sons and daughters inherit

only on the death or retirement of their parents. The difficulty expands when we take into consideration not only the presence

or absence of some goods that the bride takes with her at the time of marriage but the amount and value of such goods. We find several case studies of communities in the major Eurasian civilizations in which, although a bride may bring a trousseau or other small portion with her at the time of marriage, she gets nothing else (dowry is small, and makes up the daughter's entire inheritance) or she gains a considerably larger portion, often including land or other productive property, at the time of her parents' death (dowry is small, and does not constitute the

daughter's entire inheritance). For either type of small-dowry situation we find cases in which communities

with small dowries can be contrasted with communities in the same society, either coexistent or separated by time, and characterized by large dowries. Cases of the first type (a small dowry comprising the entire inheritance) include the villages of Edo period Japan (Nakane 1967:153), which can be contrasted to the villages of modern Japan (Smith 1978:193); the lineage communities of rural Serbia in the nineteenth century, which can be contrasted to those of the present century (Halpern and Halpern 1972:18); and the communes of rural Guangdong prov? ince in China in the 1970s, as contrasted with the 1930s and 1940s, when dowry was much larger (Parish and Whyte 1978:181-88). Bulgaria in the twentieth

century also seems to have followed this pattern (Sanders 1949:55). Cases of the second type (a small dowry that does not constitute the daughter's

entire inheritance), include villages in most ofthe less commercialized mountain? ous regions of Spain, as contrasted with wealthier plains villages (Brandes 1975; Pitt-Rivers 1961; Freeman 1970; Lison-Tolosana 1966), and certain towns in

Sicily (Gower Chapman 1961:97). Clearly, there are many communities in

complex, stratified societies in which dowry payments are rather insignificant, and to show that the hypothesis that dowry can be explained as a way to transmit part of the inheritance to daughters in complex societies is inadequate. Not only is there huge variation within complex societies in terms of the size of the dowry?



Dowry Systems in Complex Societies 107

varying from just a few clothes to a major part of a family's estate?there is also

great variation in the time at which a daughter receives her share of her family's inheritance. A satisfactory explanation will take both kinds of variation into account.

Alternative Explanations of Dowry Systems

Goody (1972, 1976), of course, is not the only theorist who has tried to explain the nature and occurrence of dowry. Marvin Harris (1979:306) has stated:

This institution cannot be understood merely as a mechanism of property devolution. Men pay dowry on behalf of daughters, not on behalf of sons; almost everywhere in Eurasian peasant societies the woman's share of family property is inferior to that of her brothers and usually consists of movable wealth instead of land. It is therefore incorrect to say that dowry is a form of pre-mortem inheritance; in many instances it is a form of female pre-mortem disinheritance, functioning not to devolve landed property but to consolidate its control among the senior male heirs.

In many Eurasian peasant societies, such as Thailand (Keyes 1975; Potter 1977), much of Greece (Bernard 1976; Allen 1976; Casselberry & Valavanes 1976), parts of Spain (Lison-Tolosana 1976) and France (Le Roy Ladurie 1976), and in

the Basque country (Douglass 1975), however, daughters' shares equal or on occasion even exceed those of their brothers. In these cases, dowry cannot function to disinherit the female in the sense that Harris seems to claim. And even in cases where the daughter's share is less than that received by her brother or brothers it may still include land or other productive property or goods that would be convertible in terms of cash value into productive property. Such, for

example, was the case in much of Galicia (Lison-Tolosana 1976), in Maronite and Shiite villages in Lebanon (Peters 1976), in central Italy in the early twentieth

century (Silverman 1975), and in recent times among the pastoral Sarakatsani of

northwestern Greece (Campbell 1964). While a few counter-examples do not necessarily disprove Harris's (1979)

contention that dowry operates almost everywhere in Eurasian peasant societies, this function fails to account for the incidence of dowry. In most of subsaharan

Africa, the woman gets very little or nothing from her natal family upon her marriage and ordinarily nothing later on. In contrast, while the Eurasian

daughter's share is commonly less than her brother's, and often excludes

productive property, she nonetheless receives something. The problem remains

as to why the complex Eurasian societies settle their daughters' claims by giving them anything at all; that is, why does it take some kind of dowry to disinherit

them while in African societies the daughters are disinherited from the beginning,

getting very little any where and nothing whatsoever in most societies? We have

come no further than Goody's (1972, 1976) original assertion; in those societies

in which a family's standing is determined to a great extent by the wealth it

controls, that family must be able to pass on that wealth to all of its children

regardless of sex. We have still said little about the function of dowry as a

marriage payment. A second alternative forms a more serious objection to dowry as a mechanism

of property devolution and concerns the aspect of dowry as a transaction

accompanying marriage. Until fairly recently, anthropologists regarded dowry as

the inverse of bridewealth. Bridewealth was a marriage payment from the

groom's family to the bride's while dowry was just the opposite?a payment from

the bride's family to the groom's (White 1948). In actuality, these two forms of

marriage transaction differ in ways other than merely the direction of payments. The most important difference, as Goody (1972:5) has pointed out, is that

bridewealth becomes part of a circulating fund (at least legally) likely to be passed on as bridewealth for the recipient family's own daughters-in-law. In most African



108 Ethnology

cases, at any rate, it remains separate from the subsistence goods necessary to the survival and growth of the newly established family. Even in those cases where cattle function as both bridewealth and subsistence goods, there are different rules of access to cattle for milk and for bridewealth (Gulliver 1955:132-33).

Dowry, by contrast, creates a conjugal fund legally belonging not to the extended family of which the new couple is a part but to the couple itself. It is an

integral part of the couple's estate in both subsistence goods and wealth, which are in any case not so clearly distinguished in complex as in African societies.

Nonetheless, we believe that this distinction between conjugal and circulating can be overemphasized since in many cases it is possible for the dowry, especially if it includes productive goods such as land, to be used, if not sold, by the extended

family as part of its resources and for its conjugal aspect to come into play only when it is inherited by the next generation. This was certainly the case, for

example, among both farmers (E. Friedl 1962:55) and herders (Campbell 1964:302) in Greece as well as among the Himalayan Sherpas (von Fiirer- Haimendorf 1964:67).

As long as the income from a bride's dowry is used for the support of the family she marries into we can speak of a dowry as at least partially a payment to the

groom's family when marital residence is patrilocal. With reference to such cases we can consider a third alternative explanation; that dowry is in effect compensa? tion paid to a bride's family for taking in a "non-productive" female member. This

explanation has been stated by Divale and Harris (1976:523), who describe

dowry as "compensation for the cost of maintaining an economically burdensome woman or as payment for the establishment of political, economic, caste, or ethnic alliances valuable to the bride's family." In other words, the bride's family stands to gain from the marriage and the groom's family loses, so compensation has to be paid. Spiro (1975:98) has sounded a similar note in trying to explain marriage prestations?not only dowry and bridewealth but also the rarer "male dower" that he found in his own field research in Burma?as occurring where "the cost-benefit ratio of marriage to its principals is unbalanced."

Such explanations?that is, of dowry as a simple economic transaction between two families, functioning to even out the economic imbalance created by marriage?have been criticized by Comaroff (1980:7) as an "economistic" ap? proach, unable to "illuminate the meaning to marriage payments." While we

prefer symbolic to purely materialist explanations of cultural phenomena such as

dowry, our principal task is to demonstrate that hypotheses of dowry as

compensation are inadequate on empirical grounds. In many cases, neither the occurrence nor the size of dowry is associated with a manifest economic imbalance in the value of the marriage to the two parties.

To demonstrate that hypotheses of dowry as compensation are empirically inadequate, we must divide them into two parts. Consider first the second of Divale and Harris's two assertions, that dowry sometimes serves as "payment for the establishment of political, economic, caste, or ethnic alliances valuable to the bride's family" (Divale and Harris 1976:523) where the value of these alliances to the bride's family is not balanced by a comparable value to the groom's family. If it were balanced this way, then this kind of social value to the groom's family would serve as repayment for the social value to the bride's family. This

explanation could only apply, however, where the dowry comes wholly or

predominantly from the bride's family and does not have a large indirect

component. It could not apply, for example, to the Chinese and Japanese cases, both of which include sizable portions of indirect dowry (Freedman 1966; Smith

1978); to the Serbians, whose dowry has included an indirect portion since its introduction in the late nineteenth century (Halpern 1972:190-92); or to many groups in India, where bridewealth and dowry payments in fact occur together most ofthe time (Tambiah 1972:71). It does not apply to cases such as the village




of Alona in Cyprus (Peristiany 1968), and the community of "Belmonte de los Caballeros" in Aragon (Lison-Tolosana 1966:158), where both husband and wife

bring important property to the marriage. In none of these cases can dowry serve as compensation for the greater value of affinal ties created for the bride's family since, in effect, the transaction is not an unbalanced one.

If this explanation is inapplicable to situations where there is little imbalance in the transaction itself, it is also inappropriate for those cases in which there is no evidence that the affinal ties created are in fact of more value to the bride's family than to the groom's. It is safe to assume that in cases where marriage is ideally homogamous, with both sides looking for an equal match, the affinal ties created

by the marriage will be of approximately equal value to both families. On the other hand, where marriage is clearly hypergamous, then dowry may indeed be seen as compensation for her family's establishing connections with higher-status people. Goody (1976:14-17) has shown that the giving of dowry is associated with

homogamy, but there are also many cases where hypergamy is the rule. For

example, in rural West Ireland in the early twentieth century, farm families often tried to marry their daughters into merchant families in the towns. The dowry, which in this case ought to be large enough to approximately equal the value of the groom's family's shop (Arensberg and Kimball 1940:368-69), is clearly seen as payment for the favor of the bride's inclusion in her husband's family (1940:135-36). But in the same society, considerations of providing a large dowry are just as important in farm-farm marriages as they are in farm-town marriages. There are, of course, other complex societies in which hypergamy is the ideal and we can expect that in such cases a lower-class family might well need to increase the dowry if they wish to marry their daughter into a family of high status. Just such a case is outlined in Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, where a prince of declining fortunes reluctantly accepts the marriage of his

nephew to a bourgeois damsel of almost unlimited means; the large dowry her

father is willing to pay has a lot to do with the prince's eventual acceptance of the

marriage (Tomasi di Lampedusa 1960). In general, however, while cases of

hypergamy may have an effect on increasing the size of dowry payments, in many societies they constitute too small a proportion of dowry-paying marriages to

serve as an explanation for the existence of the dowry. If compensation for the creation of unequally valuable alliances cannot explain

the occurrence of dowry, we still need to consider the other part of Divale and

Harris's (1976) hypothesis that dowry serves as compensation to the groom's

family for maintaining an economically burdensome woman. If it is true that

dowry is given to the groom's family in order to "take a daughter 'off one's

hands'" (Plog and Bates 1980:268), then we should expect to see a higher incidence of dowry in those societies in which the woman is, in fact, considered

to be economically burdensome. The simplest way to do this is to test whether or

not dowry is more likely to occur in cases where the wife does little or none of

the income-producing work of the household. We have extracted from the sample in the Atlas of World Cultures 58 societies

that are listed as having complex stratiflcation into social classes, since it is in such

societies that we expect to find diverging devolution with or without dowry. Of

these 58 societies, sixteen are listed as giving dowry. We tested Divale and

Harris's (1976) hypothesis by comparing the complex stratified societies with

dowry to the complex stratified societies without dowry, to see whether the

difference is associated with a corresponding difference in women's agricultural or

pastoral work.3 If Divale and Harris are correct, we should find dowry dis-

proportionately in those cases in which women do little or no agricultural or

pastoral labor. The results of such a simple test are shown in Tables 1 and 2. Table

1 tests dowry against the sexual division of labor in agriculture, Table 2 against the

sexual division of labor in husbandry.



no Ethnology

Table 1.

DOWRY AND THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN AGRICULTURE IN

COMPLEX SOCIETIES

Performed exclusively Performed exclusively Equal or Total or predominantly by or predominantly by equivalent males; or no females contribution agriculture by both sexes

Dowry 11 0

No Dowry 32 0

Total 43 0

X2 = .37 P - .83

Although there are no complex societies in the AWC sample in which the women do the bulk of the agricultural work, there appears to be no significant difference in the likelihood of dowry being paid between those societies in which women are "nonproductive," contributing none or a minority of the agricultural productivity, and those in which their productivity matches that of men.

Here again, there seems to be no support for Divale and Harris's (1976) hypothesis. Where females do not engage in husbandry, either because the men do all or most of the work or because there are no animals to husband, women

are, if anything, (the difference is not statistically significant) less likely to bring dowry to their marriages than in those cases in which the women do participate by either dominating or sharing equally with men the tasks of husbandry.

Table 2.

DOWRY AND THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN HUSBANDRY IN

COMPLEX SOCIETIES

Performed exclusively Performed exclusively Equal or Total or predominantly by or predominantly by equivalent males; or no females contribution husbandry by both sexes

Dowry 9 4

No Dowry 30 4

Total 39 8

X2 - 2.46 P = .29



Dowry Systems in Complex Societies i i i

Thus we find that there is no association between the giving of dowry and the

agricultural or husbanding nonproductivity of the female. That is, if nearly all

complex societies have diverging devolution, we cannot use the amount of labor the daughters contribute to the economy of their families of marriage to explain why some give daughters their portions at marriage and others make them wait until their parents die. Dowry, it appears, is not a compensation for a nonproductive woman. Grooms and parents everywhere are interested in the value of the

dowry that a prospective bride will bring in but this is natural enough in a system in which they will have to dower their own daughters (and even if only a small

portion of the dowry is retained by the groom's family, the distinction between a

conjugal and a circulating fund is blurred) and where dowry is an accustomed source of family resources. But parents do not seem to be more interested in the value of the dowry in those cases in which it is going to cost them and/or their son more money or labor to support the bride.

If the data on women's contribution to agriculture and to animal husbandry seem to east doubt on the function of dowry as compensation for the inclusion of a nonproductive woman in a family, none of these data take into account a woman's economic contribution in terms of domestic labor, which is more likely to be dominated by child-rearing, cleaning, washing, and preparation of food than it is by feeding chickens or weeding the vegetable garden. ln other words, the data that we have presented are biased in the direction of making women look less

productive than they are. From the limited number of time-allocation studies that have been done it appears that domestic labor is more burdensome, in general, in

complex societies (which are likely to give dowry) than it is in simpler, nondowry-giving societies (Minge-Klevana 1980:281), the notion of compensating for an unproductive woman begins to verge on absurdity. It would certainly seem absurd to the Chinese mother-in-law, who cannot wait to have a daughter- in-law in the household to take over the dirty work, or to the Japanese parents who assume that the daughter-in-law will be the first to rise and the last to retire, in order that she might better wait on the other members of the household (Dore 1978:159).

We thus can see that neither social stratification and diverging devolution by themselves, which do not account for the time in the life-cycle when a woman

receives her inheritance; nor disinheritance, which contradicts the fact that a

woman who gains a dowry is always inheriting something; nor compensation for

an exchange that is to the disadvantage of the groom's family, which ignores the

many cases in which the groom's family is not at any kind of disadvantage, can account for the presence of dowry. Neither can any of these factors go very far in accounting for the differential size of dowries either within a community or from one community or one society to another. If we are to understand the

incidence and size of dowries we must first recognize that dowry is indeed a form

of inheritance and then go beyond this simple fact to demonstrate the types of

situations in which this inheritance is given inter vivos rather than mortis causa.

Dowry as a Social Statement

We propose that dowry can best be seen not only as a form of diverging inheritance but also as a means of a family's public display of its wealth, and thus its social status, on the occasion of a daughter's marriage. We thus expect dowry to occur in situations where there is social stratification, and therefore the need

for diverging inheritance, and particularly where a family wants to display its

wealth publicly. This should occur when: (a) there is unequal status among those

families who frequently interact and intermarry; (b) this unequal status is partially or wholly determined by economic wealth; and (c) access to this wealth varies

sufficiently over time that there is conscious competition for wealth and its

concomitant status. Let us examine each of these conditions in turn.



ii2 Ethnology

Unequal Status among Families

There are many communities that are part of societies in which social inequality exists and is based on wealth but where differential status based on wealth is not an important consideration within the community. For example, Bedouin groups in the Negev and in Cyrenaica are both part of systems of unequal exchange and

unequal prestige between themselves and town dwellers. But within the Bedouin

communities, there are factors that prevent status from being based on wealth.

Primary among these are the undeveloped nature of private property and the

large number of rights over property that are held by the patrilineage. In spite of the Islamic legal provision that a daughter should receive a share of her father's

property that is equal to half the share received by her brothers, a Bedouin

daughter receives no property, not at the time of marriage nor at any other time

(Marx 1967:102, 114; Peters 1965:128; 1976:70-71). A similar situation existed in the German-speaking Swiss village of Kippel.

John Friedl (1974) describes this community as egalitarian. Families display an extreme concern with maintaining their agricultural holdings that, until very recently, provided their entire livelihood but their respective prestige has little to do with these holdings. Aspects of community economic control override the

family's exclusive attachment to its own holdings; both co-operative labor and

grazing rights on the Alpine meadows are regulated by community associations (J. Friedl 1974:23-24; 47-56). In Kippel, where even the possibility of marrying depends on one partner or the other coming into an inheritance, the woman's inheritance is not conceived of as dowry, nor is it displayed in any way (J. Friedl

1974:27). Rather than a woman's inheritance being given to her in order to

display her family's status as part of her marriage, as in a dowry system, a woman's

marriage only happens when she is already secure in that inheritance. Or

alternatively, the marriage has nothing whatsoever to do with her inheritance

since, in some cases, it is the husband's coming into his own that allows the

marriage to take place. In the above cases, there is an ideology of egalitarianism and a degree of lineage

or community priority against family rights to property that militate against the

open display of family wealth, so frequently a part of dowry-giving. In both cases, the communities are part of larger societies where economic differences between families determine those families' prestige but the relationship between economic differences and prestige does not operate within the intermarrying community. After all, it is the intermarrying community that will be impressed by the display of a family's wealth as part of marriage proceedings.

Status Partially or Wholly Determined by Wealth

Although it is difficult to find communities within complex, stratified societies in which variations in prestige within the community are not based primarily on

wealth, such unusual situations exist, and they shed light on the importance of

display of wealth as part ofa dowry. One example is the traditional Indian village, where differences in caste status were defined by criteria that made no mention of and were unaffected by differences in wealth. In the classical Indian legal tradition, castes ranking below Brahmins were not allowed to make the most

prestigious kind of marriage, that involving a dowry (Tambiah 1972:69), but by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries non-Brahmins were giving dowry in

many parts of India (Tambiah 1972:87-88), despite the fact that ascriptive caste

ranking denies the legitimacy of this particular display of status on the part of a caste that ranks below the highest in the system. Non-Brahmins who subse?

quently began to display their wealth in the form of dowry were denying neither the validity of the hierarchical nature of the caste system nor its implicit inequality; they were extending those principles to incorporate considerations of



Dowry Systems in Complex Societies i i 3

relative status within caste groups that were more often than not dependent on wealth.

Although dowry is an important marriage transaction where family status is based on wealth, the relative economic status of intermarrying families is not its

only concern. There are instances in which a family whose lower status results from something other than relative poverty can compensate for this lower status

by paying a large dowry; as when a Sarakatsani family wants to marry off a

nonvirgin bride (Campbell 1964:111), or when prewar Ashkenazi families in East

Europe wanted to marry their daughters to men whose prestige depended on their own learning or the religious standing and learning of their family's ancestors (Zborowski and Herzog 1952). But a family's ability to compensate for its lower status by making a large, publicly displayed gift of dowry to its daughter is clear evidence that wealth matters.

Competition for Social Status

While wealth is important for determining social standing in an intermarrying community, it does not lead to dowry as a means of publicly displaying that wealth unless there is some competition or possible disagreement about whose wealth is indeed superior. Cutileiro's (1971) study of five villages in the southeast of

Portugal describes a situation in which each community contained representatives of three well-delineated classes: latifundarios, proprietarios, and seareiros (tenants). These classes were quite stable and nearly endogamous. Yet none of them gave anything but a trousseau to the bride at the time of marriage, even though the rule of equal bilateral inheritance at death of parents was observed by all (Cutileiro 1971:45-55, 95). Similarly, in the English midlands of the thirteenth century, where feudal forms of tenure restricted mobility severely, dowry excluded

productive property (Homans 1941:140-42). Although these cases are not strong evidence that the lack of economic mobility in an already stratified system will

prevent the giving of dowry, they do seem to indicate that this factor is important in keeping the dowry small.

If dowry reaches its full form in communities where families are concerned to validate their social status by the display of wealth, we would expect this display to be an important motivating force for people who give dowries. The dowry there is a public statement of a family's wealth and status, meant to be noticed, discussed, and taken into account whenever questions of relative status arise, as

they will in fluid and competitive status systems. The cultural meaning of dowering is poignantly illustrated in Ved Mehta's

(1979) account of his mother's marriage into a middle-class Lahore family in the

1920s. The girl's father, Babuji, concerned that this suitor not slip through his

hands, is determined to impress him with the lavishness of the dowry.

"She will have plenty of changes of clothes," Babuji said. "For winter, for summer, and for monsoon?day wear and evening wear. There are, of course, the usual ornaments of twenty-two carat gold. In addition I plan to give you two thousand rupees. I would like to give you more but I have four daughters."

The suitor turns down the gift of a watch as he owns one.

"What about a motorcar?" Babuji asked. "I already have a motorcycle." "That's dangerous," Babuji said. "A married man should not ride one of those things." "One day, I hope to have a motorcar," Daddyji said. "A motorcar would look impressive in the dowry, and it would be a good talking point for the neighbors," Babuji said. "Many prominent Lahoris are giving motorcars in dowries these days." (Mehta 1979:45).

An ethnographic example comes from the field work of one of us (Harrell). A

young woman in the Taiwanese village where he lived was to be married the next



ii4 Ethnology

day to a man from the local town and the groom's brothers had come, as is the local custom, to pick up the dowry. They had not, however, come in proper style. They had ridden the truck on which the goods were to be transported, rather than

hiring a taxicab to precede the dowry. Furthermore, the truck they had brought was ragged and small; it was doubtful whether it would hold all the furniture,

clothing, motorcycle, television, refrigerator, sewing machine, stereo set, gas range, small appliances, grandfather clocks, and other goods that the bride's brothers had assembled at much expense. When the naive ethnographer sug? gested that they might make two trips, he was laughed at for not understanding the public statement made in a dowry.

Freedman (1966:55) describing the situation of Southeastern Chinese families, states:

a bride-giving family must, in order to assert itself against the family to which it has lost a woman, send her off in the grandest manner they can afford. And it is no accident, therefore, that dowry and trousseau are put on open display; they are not private benefactions to the girl but a public demonstration of the means and standing of her natal family.

We find a similar description in Rheubottom's (1980) account of marriage in a Macedonian village. Here, dowry consists of three parts; trousseau, money, and furniture. Of these, only the trousseau goes on public display, perhaps because

villagers in this area still express an egalitarian ideology (Rheubottom 1980:235). But the display function of the trousseau is very clear from Rheubottom's

(1980:228) description:

The size and quality of the trousseau is taken as an indication of the wealth and prestige of the bride's household. Since material goods are put on view for all to examine, it represents a public display of standing; indeed, those present are careful to evaluate the evidence. Old women in the village are particularly keen critics of these goods and, upon arrival at the bride's home, make straight for them to gauge their extent and quality. After they finger them and discuss points of difference, they arrive at a composite estimate of the trousseau's worth. Members of the bride's family are then questioned and cross-questioned in order to obtain their own estimate. These two estimates are compared and the result passes quickly around a village.

Differential Incidence of Dowry

The preceding illustrations of the communicative function of dowry are

nothing but examples. The problem remains to demonstrate that this is an

important factor in determining which communities give dowry and which do not. We can show, of course, that dowry occurs primarily in societies where the concern is to make a match; ofthe sixteen complex stratified societies listed in the Atlas of World Cultures as giving dowry, twelve are "agamous," meaning they have no rule of endogamy or exogamy based on kinship or territorial criteria. The other four cases occur in "demes [with] a marked tendency toward local

endogamy" and in "segmented communities [with] the absence of any indication of local exogamy" (Murdock 1981:94-95). In other words, the lack of formal rules about how spouses should be related or where they should come from clears the

way for considerations of an economic match. But this is weak evidence, even for the association between dowry and making a match, and it really says nothing about the association between dowry and status competition.

In fact, we cannot use the Atlas of World Cultures to test the validity of such an

association, nor can we make any kind of a cross-cultural statistical analysis without coding numerous ethnographies ourselves and applying to our choices all the rigorous criteria that must be used to avoid Galton's problem. Even if we were to do this we would probably be left with so few examples that we would not be able to test them statistically. Clearly another approach is called for.

Our alternative is to demonstrate the association between dowry-giving and status competition by intra-cultural comparison. If we can find at least two



Dowry Systems in Complex Societies i i 5

communities within the same cultural tradition, one that gives dowry and one that does not, we can then examine the other variables along which these communities differ. One can also take a historical approach. Where there has been the

development or the demise of dowry-giving in a particular community or society, we can look for any historical changes in the stratification system that might have

accompanied the change in marriage exchange customs. Such a comparison can demonstrate that within any particular society, the factors we have listed as conducive to dowry are indeed associated with the presence or absence of dowry. In fact, this kind of comparison allows us to go beyond a single society. Where we find that the differences between dowry and nondowry communities in one

society are parallel to the differences between dowry and nondowry communities in another society we can assert with some confidence that the same factors are at work. One can amass both synchronic and diachronic examples of how these factors operate in a variety of social contexts to provide sufficient evidence that the operation of such factors is independent of specific cultural traditions. We

begin with some synchronic comparisons of different communities in the same

society. Perhaps one of the clearest cases on record is that of variation within the

regions of Spain subject to the inheritance laws of Castile. Four ethnographic case studies illustrate our point. In the mountain community of Valdemara (Freeman 1970) there is little economic distinction among households; in fact, the comun de vecinos itself exercises certain economic rights in common, such as the grazing of all vecinos* stock on fallow fields and the communal ownership of a threshing machine purchased in 1965. Here there is no distribution of productive property at the time of marriage, all inheritance comes at the death of the parents. The

daughter gets linen and furniture as a marriage portion and may bring clothes to

the nuclear family she and her husband establish. The son is given usufruct to

some plots of land but pays rent to his father, who retains ownership (Freeman 1970:73). Similar customs obtain in the relatively egalitarian community of

Becedes in the Sierra de Bejar (Brandes 1975). Here the bridegroom's family gives jewelry to the bride and the bride and groom both contribute to the establishment ofthe conjugal household, usually at the time of marriage (Brandes 1975:165). But the parents retain ownership of the land until they die. When a father can no longer work he sharecrops with his children's families (Brandes

1975:120-21). In both these cases, the absence of prestige differences based on

wealth is associated with the absence of significant dowry in productive goods. A third case is described by Pitt-Rivers (1961). Here, although there are

considerable variations in wealth among village families (Pitt-Rivers 1961:34-46), there is at the same time "a strong reluctance to accord superior status to

[members ofthe pueblo} who are economically superior" (Pitt-Rivers 1961:65).

Dowry, though not unknown, is rare here. In fact, it is quite unusual for a

husband or wife to receive any productive property from parents while the

parents are still alive (Pitt-Rivers 1961:99). It is not the fact of economic

distinctions, but the recognition of such distinctions as at least partially determin?

ing social status, that is necessary if a community is to have a significant dowry system.

For Spain this relationship seems confirmed by a community in Aragon (Lison-Tolosana 1966), where concentration of landownership in a few hands has

led to a stratified system of owners and sharecropping tenants, with apparently no

countervailing tendency toward ignoring these economic distinctions. There

dowry is crucially important for making a good marriage. A son must receive his

rights to a plot of land outright in order to be married and even though a daughter is only required to bring furnishings and linen to the marriage her family will

often include a plot of land in her portion as well, "so as not to be outdone"

(Lison-Tolosana 1966:158). If one partner to the marriage has a higher education



n6 Ethnology

that can become part of the marriage portion and substitute for the property that would otherwise be given (Lison-Tolosana 1966:161).

Significantly, in all these Spanish communities inheritance is, by law and

custom, equal and bilateral. The issue is not one of transmission of property through females?that happens in all the communities?but of the timing of the transmission and of the assertion and validation of a family's status in the

community through its display of wealth given at its daughter's or son's marriage. A similar set of examples comes from Turkey, where there is patrilocal

residence, patrilineal descent, and a patrilineal emphasis in inheritance. The

kinship setting is quite different from neolocal, bilateral Spain, but the same kinds of differences between communities that give dowry and those that do not are

present. According to Stirling's (1965) account ofthe villages of Sakaltutan and

Elbasi, a bride brings a trousseau to her marriage but the value of the trousseau is outweighed by the "brideprice" given to her family by the family of the groom (Stirling 1965:186). In the nearby town of Kayseri, however, a vertical marriage transaction?a gift in gold from the groom's parents to the bride?transfers value

greater than that ofthe "brideprice" (Stirling 1965:186). In the town of Tutiineli

(southwestern Turkey) the bride brings a house to the marriage and the groom's family furnishes it and gives the bride substantial gifts. Some inheritance of

productive property goes to sons and daughters at their marriages while the rest waits until the death of the parents (Benedict 1976:234-6). This town-country difference is another example of the association between dowry and economic stratiflcation as a basis for prestige. Stirling (1965:47-49) says that the villages retain certain forms of communal pasturage, and land, while privately owned, is not sold, thus, village conditions are much less likely to be a field for economically based stratiflcation than is the heterogenous and commercial environment of the towns.

Dowry-giving seems to be associated with urban, commercial classes in various societies. In the Japanese and Serbian cases discussed below, dowry actually spread from the towns to the countryside with the spread of a market economy and the consequent association of status with wealth. Lavish dowries seem to have been a part of the marriages of merchant women in Basra in the early 20th

century, at a time when most rural Arab communities gave little or no portion to a bride (Van Ess 1961:27). It may be noteworthy that Islamic law, which

prescribes a half-share in inheritance for the daughter, was developed in an urban, mercantile environment (Rahman 1979:12).

In many societies, upper classes are more prone to dowry-giving than are the

poor. In many parts of India both marriage-by-dowry and marriage- by-bridewealth existed side by side but marriage-by-dowry was the more pres? tigious form (Tambiah 1972:69). Among the poor in southeastern China a trousseau was ordinarily all that was expected by way of a marriage portion but wealthier families gave large dowries that, while excluding land, contained valuable jewelry and large amounts of cash. This represented a considerable economic sacrifice for brides' natal families, despite their upper-class status (Freedman 1966:54-5). In his 1930 survey of Chinese peasants in several

provinces, Buck (1937:468-469) reported that in most peasant weddings the

groom's family spent about half again as much as the bride's, for families with

large farms the costs were about equal. Additional evidence that within a single society dowry-giving tends to be

associated with wealth-based status competition comes from cases where a

community that previously had neither dowry nor wealth-based status competi? tion developed both simultaneously, usually through the process of incorporation into a market economy. This process is clearly seen in the recent history of rural

Japan. During the Tokugawa and early Meiji periods (seventeenth-nineteenth centuries), peasants paid little if any dowry. The institutions of the corporate




village and the legal restriction of class mobility meant that peasant families had few chances for economic mobility as long as they remained in the villages. Even

though there was some wealth-based differentiation within the village, an

egalitarian ideology militated against the display of those differences (Smith 1978:204). With the rise of industrial capitalism, the removal of legal barriers to class mobility (Dore 1978:40; Beardsley, Hall, and Ward 1959:56), and the commercialization of the economy as a whole, the institution of dowry spread from the cities, where wealth-based status differences had been established since the rise of the merchant class, to the rural areas (Nakane 1967:153^. By the mid-twentieth century in some communities, the yuino or betrothal gift (which had once been like a bridewealth [Nakane 1967:153]) had become but a minor, indirect part of the dowry (Smith 1978:1934; Beardsley, Hall, and Ward

1959:324-325). A similar process took place in the Balkans. During the fourteenth century

dowry occurred only in those cases in which women who had no brothers, and thus would ordinarily have married uxorilocally, nevertheless married virilocally and took their inheritance with them. This is not really diverging inheritance from the standpoint of their own individual families (Hammel 1980:249). More

recently true dowry in land has reached the villages of Serbia. Whereas whatever

goods were given with the bride in 1870 consisted chiefly of money and

movables, by the middle ofthe twentieth century some land was also given as part of the marriage portion (Halpern and Halpern 1972:18). Halpern (1967:192) attributes the growth of dowry in real property to Western ideas, but he also documents commercialization of the rural economy going on at the same time

(Halpern 1967:34-36, 87-88) and shows how class differences within village communities developed in the 19th and 20th centuries (Halpern 1967:166-169). It is not merely coincidental that dowry has also increased in importance in the modern period.

Finally, there is a case in which a once-flourishing dowry system has reverted to

something resembling a true bridewealth system with the disappearance of stratification based on wealth. We refer to the southern province of Guangdong, Chinese People's Republic, after the collectivization of agriculture in the 1950s. In the 1940s and 50s a betrothal gift to the bride's family usually covered only a

part ofthe expenses of providing the bride with a suitable dowry. By the 1960s and 1970s social prestige was no longer based principally on wealth but more on

political considerations. In the 1970s, the dowry had shrunk to a small trousseau while the betrothal gift had become a true bridewealth, used by the bride's family to find a bride for its own son, and had increased even in proportion to peasant income, which had itself gone up in the last 30 years. This change happened in

spite of the prohibition of both dowry and bridewealth by the Marriage Law of

1950 (Parish and Whyte 1978:181-188). Dowry has practically vanished with the

elimination of wealth-based stratification and in this case the direction of causality is clear. The elimination of wealth-based stratification was a conscious, intentional

change carried out by a ruling political party. It seems clear that this caused, and

did not simply accompany, the change away from the dowry system. In support ofthe dowry-as-compensation hypothesis, one might object that the

decline of dowry in Guangdong villages resulted not from the elimination of the

status system based on relative wealth, but from the entrance of women into field

labor for the first time, a process that more or less coincided with the collectiviza? tion of land ownership and agricultural labor. If this were true we would expect to find especially small dowries, or special lack of emphasis on dowries, among that one group of Chinese whose women traditionally labored in the fields?the

Hakka. But Hakka women seem to have had more personal control over some of

the wealth received in their dowries than did women of other Chinese groups

(Cohen 1976:180-191; Wolf 1972:135), and there appears to be no evidence that



n8 Ethnology

the dowry was smaller in Hakka communities. The increase in brideprice in the

Guangdong villages after collectivization may well have to do with the increase in the value of women's labor, but the decrease in dowry seems to have come from another source. After all, in Taiwan, where women's labor is now valuable also, but where small-scale capitalism means that even ordinary families can compete for riches and status, both bridewealth and dowry have increased dramatically in recent years.

Why Dowry is not only a Social Statement

All the foregoing comparisons point to a single set of conclusions; while dowry is a form of premortem inheritance that goes to a daughter upon marriage this does not explain the variation in the practice of dowry giving. We must also consider the function of dowry as a display of a family's wealth and thus of its status. Having established this, however, we still need to deal with objections that come from the other direction; i.e., the assertion that dowry is not, in fact, a form of inheritance at all but simply a means of displaying a family's wealth at the time of the marriage of one of its daughters. This position is articulated, for one case at least, by Rheubottom (1980). After noting that dowry is perceived by Macedonian villagers as a woman's rightful compensation for the premarital contributions made to her natal household, Rheubottom (1980:230-231) notes that:

This suggests that dowry may plausibly be regarded as a form of inheritance; as equivalent and complementary to the shares which will eventually devolve to the bride's brothers . . . There is some evidence in the data from Skopska Crna Gora to support this . . . Nevertheless, this explanation makes little logical sense in the Crna Goran context. Why, in a patrilineal, virilocal society would the wife-givers endow the groom with rights over the bride's labour, her sexuality, her reproductive capacity, and then give the couple a substantial amount of clothing, cash and furniture as well?

The apparent absurdity of the question itself suggests the answer. The bride's family does not endow the groom or his household: they endow the bride. But they do not endow her in order to balance the amount her brothers will receive as their inheritance . . .

Dowry and inheritance resemble one another neither in timing, value, nor the manner in which they are allocated.

Rheubottom (1980:248) concludes that "dowry in Skopska Crna Gora, then, has little to do with the devolution of property . . . But . . . it has everything to do with relationships, their quality, and their transformation."

Contrary to the conclusions Rheubottom draws from his material, his case

actually supports our explanation of dowry. We agree that dowry has much to do with relationships between and within families and that it is the bride who is endowed. But we disagree that the endowment ofthe bride is not inheritance and that it has "little to do with the devolution of property." The passage of property from the bride's parents to the bride and her husband is, by any standard, the devolution of property. That the dowry comes at a different time from the male inheritance, that it is worth less, and that it is allocated differently simply indicate that this community has two ways of devolving property; one for sons and one for

daughters. The one for daughters is arranged in such a way that at the same time as it arranges the inheritance it also makes important statements about social

relationships. Rheubottom's (1980) case thus fits well with our model of dowry systems.

From these various kinds of evidence we believe that we can now see more

clearly what dowry is in complex societies. It is not a way of disinheriting a

daughter nor, in most cases, a way of compensating a woman's husband's family for the burden of supporting her, nor for the favor of making them into in-laws.




It occurs even where the bride makes a substantial contribution, or where both families create important ties through the marriage. Similarly, it is not an automatic response to the need to keep wealth within the direct family line in

monogamous, stratified societies. Many such societies give portions of inheri? tance to both sons and daughters, to be sure, but there are other ways of doing this besides the extravagant display of dowry at the time of marriage. Indeed, in

many communities, even a neolocally resident and economically autonomous nuclear family cannot claim either the husband's or the wife's rights of inheritance until that spouse's parents die or retire. Dowry seems to be a way of doing two

things at once: (1) giving a daughter all or part of her share in inheritance, and (2)

displaying the status of the family that gives it and, to a lesser extent, of the family that receives it. It is also more than just a giving of part of the inheritance to the

daughter and more than a way of displaying a family's wealth. It is a demonstration to the community that a part of the inheritance (and preferably a generous one) can go to a daughter, a demonstration that she comes from a good family.

NOTES

1. We are grateful to Edgar Winans and Ted Adams for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2. In some societies, such as the Burmese (Spiro 1977) and Ilocano (Lewis 1971), grooms rather than brides are endowed. This is quite a rare pattern and although it is susceptible to some of the explanations proposed in this paper it differs in certain ways from the more common female dowry and will not be considered here. 3. Other types of subsistence could have been considered as well. Sanday (1973) and Barry and Schlegel (1982), for instance, have measured the percentages of female contribution in agriculture, domestic animals, fishing, hunting, and gathering. We felt that agriculture and husbandry would be sufficient for our purposes, however, since together they account for the major subsistence form of the great majority of societies included in the Atlas of World Cultures. Moreover, as Barry and Schlegel (1982:187-188) have recently documented, high or low female contribution to any one subsistence form tends to correlate with a respectively high or low contribution to all other forms practiced within a society.

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Dowry Systems in Complex Societies