page_title: Family
section_title: Dowry, bride price and dower
hierarchical_section_title: Family / Economic issues / Dowry, bride price and dower
caption_attribution_description: English: This photograph shows the traditional, formal presentation of the bride price (also known as "sin sot" or "dowry") at an engagement ceremony in Thailand.
context_page_description: In human society, family is a group of people related either by consanguinity or affinity. The purpose of families is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Ideally, families would offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and participate in the community. In most societies, it is within families that children acquire socialization for life outside the family. Additionally, as the basic unit for meeting the basic needs of its members, it provides a sense of boundaries for performing tasks in a safe environment, ideally builds a person into a functional adult, transmits culture, and ensures continuity of humankind with precedents of knowledge.
  Anthropologists generally classify most family organizations as matrifocal; patrifocal; conjugal; avuncular; or extended.
  Members of the immediate family may include spouses, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. Members of the extended family may include aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and siblings-in-law.
context_section_description: Dowry is property (money, goods, or estate) that a wife or wife's family gives to her husband when the wife and husband marry. Offering dowry was common in many cultures historically (including in Europe and North America), but this practice today is mostly restricted to some areas primarily in the Indian subcontinent.
  Bride price, (also bridewealth or bride token), is property paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. It is practiced mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South-East Asia (Thailand, Cambodia), and parts of Central Asia.
  Dower is property given to the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage, and which remains under her ownership and control.
caption: A traditional, formal presentation of the bride price at a Thai engagement ceremony.
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