A Comparative Study Of Marriage Customs In Chinese And Western Cultures

Marriage customs can reflect the traditional culture and the level of civilization in the culture. From that the values, religious beliefs, attitudes towards love and marriage, aesthetic values, national psychology, etc. can be revealed. However, due to the cultural divergences, marriage customs differ in various cultures, which leads to people’s different attitudes towards marriage.Now with the depth and width of cultural exchange in Chinese and western countries, people’s different attitudes towards marriage have become a hot topic, which arouses lots of scholars’attention. However, these researches have some defects. Firstly, the analysis of marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures is not complete, which leads to the imperfection in the explorations of the causes. Secondly, most previous studies attribute the different marriage customs to the external reasons of culture, without penetrating into the deep cultural reasons. Therefore, it is both of practical and theoretical significances to have a comprehensive analysis of marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures so as to sum up people’s different attitudes towards marriage and to further find the internal cultural reasons in it.The theoretical basis of this paper is the theory of surface structure and deep structure in culture. The surface structure which can be seen in daily life is mutable and visible, such as behaviors, clothing, food, architecture, music, art, and customs and so on. While the deep structure which refers to human’s values, worldviews, thinking patterns, religious beliefs, etc. is invisible. It hides under the surface culture so that one can get it only through careful and scientific analysis of the surface. Therefore, the comparative study of marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures which plays the part of surface structure is essential when dealing with this paper. Through the analysis of surface structure, the deep structure of people’s different attitudes towards marriage can be explored so that their cultural causes can be discussed.There are five chapters in this paper. Chapter one is the introduction. Chapter two is the literature review on the existing studies on marriage and marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures and the theory of deep structure in culture. Chapter three makes a comparison of both traditional and modern marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures and find that marriage customs in both cultures have been changed and simplified. However, the deep structure that is reflected by them is still kept unchanged. Therefore, the attitudes towards marriage in two cultures are still the same despite the passage of time. Chapter four generalizes the different attitudes towards marriage in Chinese and western cultures through the comparison of the marriage customs and further explores the internal cultural causes of the differences from the perspectives of philosophy and religion. Chapter five is the conclusion.Through the comparative analysis of marriage customs in Chinese and western cultures, this paper discusses the different attitudes towards marriages in the two cultures and explores the internal cultural causes that Chinese people are greatly influenced by Confucianism, while marriage in the west is influenced by their philosophic thinking on love and their firm beliefs in Christianity so as to help improve the cultural exchange between Chinese and western countries and help people form the right views of marriage.