Marriage/Kinship In Chinese Culture

Chen and I both started talking about marriage and kinship in his culture. Very First we started talking about the marriage in the Chinese culture and Chen said ” People often have a ceremonial ritual within society that involves marriage arranged between families. He also mentioned about one wife that’s when I understood that he is basically pointing up monogamy within Chinese culture. The other thing came up was incest and he said that ” we consider incest if couple have the same surname or last name. also People prefer having a boy rather than a girl because boy gets married and continues the family line of paternal clan

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continuing on marriage rules and all, he said ” in our culture there are some very important rituals which includes three letters and other manners that are supposed to be done. going more deeply he said ” there is a request letter in which groom’s family sent a request to bride’s family. there is a gift letter which accompanies the gift given by groom’s family to bride’s family. and the last letter is wedding letter which confirms the wedding. The other manner he mentioned were that ” proposal, birth dates, Bride wealth, wedding gifts and wedding ceremony is considered really good.

Discussing about polygamy he said ” laws and legislation does not really prohibit or encourage polygyny, however it may be possible that polygyny is limited in upper class because of financial situation of men while among the other people monogamy is considered as a norm. Going more deeply, explaining Polyandry and asking about it he said ” No way, it very immoral, prohibited by law and there are no cases that can be seen.”

Going on to the kinship part he said ” we have several rules for it such as maternal or paternal lineages are distinguished, the relative age of sibling relation is also considered, the gender of the relative is distinguished and most importantly the generation from the ego is indicated. furthermore asking him about the extended family he said ” extended family can be considered due to paternal lineages, maternal lineages, nephew and nieces, grandchildren etc.

This all information seemed to be very difficult to elaborate i terms of writing every single rule of his marriage and kinship. Going through the interview I realised that It has been difficult for the girls father for following all the rules because they have to do a lot of spending and gifts etc with a nice big wedding ceremony. This can be seen as a reason of female infanticide in china in some past years though its now gradually decreasing.