Management Laity - A Han Chinese Villages, "bride Price" And "dowry" Thick Description,

Brideprice and Dowry have been analyzed in anthropological studies in terms of meaning, function and many other aspects. The main points concerned about the two involve in the theory of marriage payment, marriage endowment and so on, which relevant researchers all consider as "interpretation or discussion of marriage prestation". However, we may easily find out that their functional analysis in a western style are based on some sort of Utilitarianism and therefore not a interpretation of the meaning of habitual conducts. By means of Geertz's ideal type of "local knowledge" and the concept of interpretation, this paper, to start with, would describe the local scene of "song"——phenomena involving human and matter and also a process in itself, which has some connection with anthropological Brideprice and Dowry; then clarify the relation between Chinese li and total prestation. Meantime, we intend to make a thick description of the concepts of Brideprice and Dowry, pointing out that it is both necessary and reasonable to examine them in the context of total prestation.The ethnographic description is mainly based on the information, thoughts and feelings from the preliminary field research, conventionally choosing a Han village, S, as the unit of investigation. Direct observation and semi-structural interview are the methods used. Regardless of whether there are local expressions in native point of view about "brideprice" and "dowry", if there is anything new in this paper it would be that the traditionally mechanical flow of gifts is reviewed in a coherent process——"song". Besides a brief definition of issues and methods in chapterⅠ, the paper can be divided into the following parts:ChapterⅡis concerned with the local scene of "song" which is relavant to Brideprice and Dowry. The native point of view of shi is of great significance to song. Song involves no concept of property right, and the cash and various commodities related to Brideprice and Dowry are mostly preparations for hunshi, used as tools for marriage, without any sense of western interests and utilitarianism.ChapterⅢis expected to explain the relation between song which involves the flow of marriage gifts and such functional elements as market, power and ideology. Song shows the interaction between custom and other institutions and also helps understand Chinese social transformation. The event song we concerned about is shaped largely by the implicit lishu; also being relevant to the flow of gifts, this life strategy in some degree can be interpreted as the total social fact——total prestation.ChapterⅣspecifies the inclusiveness and availability of total prestation to "brideprice" and "dowry". Brideprice and dowry do not merely represent transfers of property between groom family and bride family, not just the compensation of women's productivity. Both of these two themselves are closely related to the customs and etiquettes, and have something to do with other functional facts such as legal systems and social relations.