A Study Of Exchange Behavior In Weddings In Mobile Villages

In the Chinese native acquaintance society,reciprocal exchange permeate all aspects of people's daily life.Wedding,as one of the most important ritual activities in rural life,is an important occasion for people to exchange gifts.But the previous research often takes the traditional village as the reference,and does not fully consider the influence of the "mobility" of the village.This paper selects a newly demolished village in northern Zhejiang Province,taking the exchange behavior in the villagers' wedding as the starting point,and tries to explore the influence of the flow brought by the demolition on the exchange behavior in the rural wedding.Based on the theory of gift exchange and reciprocity at home and abroad,this paper classifies the exchange behaviors in a Chen Village's wedding into three main bodies through field investigation and comparative analysis before and after demolition: the first is the marriage investment between the newlyweds,mainly the bride price and dowry;the second is the relationship between the wedding host and the guests,mainly for gifts and banquet;the third category is the mutual aid and gift between families,mainly manifested in the villagers' labor mutual aid and the food.The study found that in the mobile situation,the wedding host's return form(impromptu banquet)changed,and the mutual aid and gift behavior disappeared.Through the analysis and summary of the reciprocal logic and the principle of reciprocity between different subjects,this paper holds that the differential influence of demolition and flow on the exchange behavior between different subjects in rural weddings is due to the difference of their reciprocal logic.The marriage investment between the newlyweds and their families is based on the mutual benefit between the two families.The relationship between the wedding host and the guests is to seek the double balance of "economic rationality" and "moral rationality ".The mutual aid of labor force and food gift between villagers depend on geographical relationship and rule of etiquette in rural social relationship network.The reciprocal logic behind the exchange behavior of different subjects is determined by its position in different relational networks.In addition,the exchange behavior in country wedding permeates three reciprocal principles of morality,human feelings and rationality.In reciprocal communication,people will not only be bound by moral obligations from within the village and even the whole society,but also imply rational calculation and trade-off based on many factors,considering the human ethics and emotional relationship between each other.In the mobile situation,villagers actively construct new interactive rules to adapt to the new environment.The flow of villages will lead to the decline of villagers' collective identity,thus causing the gradual elimination of village cultural boundaries.Behind the change of wedding exchange behaviors,villagers' sense of community is gradually declining.