Marriage Payments: A Riddle for Anthropologists

This volume will certainly not end generations of disagreement among anthropologists over the meaning of marriage payments or prestations, but it promises to add an interesting and useful approach to the subject. The volume is a product of a symposium held at the University of Manchester in the winter of 1976-1977, to delineate a new and more satisfactory paradigm by focusing on semantic and symbolic properties of marriage payments. The idea of organizing such a symposium grew out of conversations among members of the anthropology department at Manchester, who expressed dissatisfaction over existing paradigms. They eventually invited other British participants. Geographically, the case studies in the volume represent East Africa (Parkin on the Mijikenda of Kenya; Burton on the Mursi of Ethiopia), South Africa (Comaroff on the Tshidi of Tswanaland), the Middle East (Peters on the Cyrenaica Bedouins), Melanesia (Strathern on the Melpa and Wiru of New Guinea), Indonesia (Barnes on Eastern Indonesian groups), and Yugoslavia (Rheubottom on the Yugoslav Macedonians, the Skopska Crna Gora). The essays are as varied in content as they are in geographical representation; however, they share a common theme which the editor, Comaroff, drawing heavily from the case studies, describes in detail in the introductory chapter. Individual case essays are very interesting and insightful; however, I shall concentrate on the central theme of the volume, except as noted toward the end of the review. What are our current approaches to the study of marriage payments and why are they inadequate? The editor of the volume, Comaroff, begins to address this question by drawing the reader's attention to the immense variability in marriage payments: variability with respect to content and timing as well as to structural context and symbolic ramifications. Yet, current paradigms (structural functionalism, Marxism, and structuralism) have generally attempted to reduce marriage payments to a single analytic class. Such an effort raises doubts not only about their conclusions but also their methodology, as the case studies in the volume show. Another problem with current approaches is that they treat marriage payments as a causal factor in the social order (for example, of marriage stability for the structural functionalist; class domination for the Marxist; and development of marriage by exchange for the structuralist). The case studies show that none of these is universal. In a clear and stimulating manner, the editor then outlines some of the specific problems with each of the three approaches and presents an alternative paradigm. Economic and jural treatment of marriage payments illustrates the inadequacy of the structural functionalist approach. In the economic sphere it seems that structural functionalists are not always careful to distinguish between economic and commercial functions. For example, Spiro (1975) has argued that marriage payments are an economic compensation for a productive or reproductive loss of one group to another; that bridewealth is not paid where the cost-benefit ratio is balanced; and that the absence of in-