Definition:
A form of marriage transaction in which “the bride’s kin transfer wealth to the bride ‘s household as a party of the marriage contract” is called dowry.
Explanation;
Dowry is a substantial transfer of goods or money from the bride’s family to the bride and groom (Jack Goody 1973). In the classic formulation the transferred wealth remains with the newly married couple and is often defined as the property of the bride alone. It is said to constitute a “conjugal fund” on which the new couple can draw for household needs (Tambaiah 1973).
Dowry is not an exchange of goods; it is only transfer of goods from the bride’s kin to the bride. A family has to have wealth to give a dowry, but since the goods go to the bride, no wealth comes back to the family that gave the dowry (Ember and Ember 1997:173). To be brief, dowry is not a payment to a man or to his kin group, nor is it to be understood as an exchange for his services in marriage. Rather, a dowry is the woman’s share of her inheritance, which takes with her at the time of marriage, as a sort of early inheritance, the dowry, is available to the newly married couple for their own use (Tambaiah 1973: page 64).
Dowry sometimes occurs in the form of “indirect dowry“. In “indirect dowry”, elements of both bride-price and dowry get intermingled, what happens is that the groom’s kin convey wealth to the bride’s family and the bride’s family instead of retaining it by itself for its own use, convey a part of it to the bride as part of her “conjugal fund”, This practice resembles bride-price in terms of the source of the transferred wealth but dowry in terms of its disposition. Therefore, it is labeled as “indirect dowry” (Goody 1973: 20). For example among the Basseri of Southern Iran the groom’s father assumes the expense of setting up the couple’s new household. He gives cash to the bride’s father who uses at least some of the money to buy for his daughter household utensils, blankets and rugs (Barth 1961: 18-19). When dowry is paid both woman and property more in the same direction (Tambaiah 1973)
Frequency:
Dowry is a rare form of marriage transaction. Only 3% of the 1,267 societies described in the Ethnographic Atlas (1986) practices dowry. World’s Ethnographic Sample (Murdock 1970) shows that 24 out of 542 (4.43% societies practice dowry. New Codes for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Schlegel and Eloul 1987) shows dowry as normative in 6% of the 186 societies
Examples:
Dowry is infrequent, it is not randomly distributed It is almost entirely restricted to two world regions:
- The Circum-Mediterranean and East Asia (Jackson and Romney 1973, and
- The far-flung colonial societies that trace their ancestry to these two regions (Dickemann 1979, 1981).
Payment of dowries was common in Medieval and Renaissance Europe where the size of the dowry often determined the desirability of the daughter. This custom still practiced in parts of Eastern Europe and in sections of southern Italy and France, where land as a major item is provided by the bride’s family. Parts of India also practice dowry (Ember and Ember 1997: 170). In the Circum-Mediterranean and East Asia regions, and the colonial societies that were ruled by the European powers, dowry is strongly associated with hypergamy, that is, with the tendency for women to marry men of higher social status or greater wealth than themselves (Dickemann 1979, 1981).
Where it prevails, dowry typically involves movable property: money, jewellery, furniture and other household items. Domestic animals, even servants. It seldom includes a share in the bride’s patrilineal estate of land and buildings. Thus, while dowry has been called a “premortern inheritance” given to daughters, it typically lacks the real -property component due to sons at father’s death, Evidence that the dowry is truly the bride’s property comes from rules regarding its disposition in case of her death or divorce(Tambaiah 1973).
Theories regarding the practice of dowry:
In contrast to the societies with bride-price, societies with dowry tend to be those where women contribute relatively little to primary subsistence activities, where there is a high degree of social stratification, and where a man is not allowed to be married to more than one woman simultaneously (Frederic L. Pryor 1977: The Origin of Economy: A Comparative study of Distribution in Primitive and Peasant Economics, New York: Academic Press, pages 196-299).
Why does dowry tend to occur in these types of societies? Different anthropologists proposed different theories as answers to this question.
- Evelyn Boserup (1970) has argued that the occurrence of dowry depends on the sexual division of agricultural labour. She argues that bride-price societies are characterized by substantial female agricultural effort, considerable female economic independence, and a high incidence of polygynous marriage, whereas dowry societies exhibit low female contribution to agriculture, dependence of women and their children on their husband’s economic support, and low incidence of polygyny (Boserup 1970) In essence , Boserup predicts bride-price where women pay their own way via substantial contributions to their own and their children’ s subsistence. In contrast, her model views dowry as prepayment made by a woman (or by her kin) that guarantees future support for her children under circumstances where her own contributions to subsistence are small.
- Alice Schlegel and Rohn Eloul (1988) have argued that marriage transactions are best understood in terms of the property rules that characterize different kinds of societies. They predict bride-price in societies that are “egalitarian in the use of productive resources” or “where such resources are commonly held”. In contrast, they predict dowry and indirect dowry where private property is the norm, where wealth differentials are significant, and where families attempt to concentrate wealth as a means to gaining and maintaining power and status. Their insistence that dowry and indirect dowry are motivated by the same factors stems from their focus on the alleged alliance-building and wealth-concentrating functions of the two; unlike bride-wealth, both dowry and indirect dowry keep wealth within the kin group (Schlegel 1993).
- Steven , C.Gaulin and James S.Boster (1190) derived their model from the literature on animal mating systems (Orians 1969; Acock 1993). Among non-human animals an unequal distribution of resources (e.g. food, shelter) leads to an unequal distribution of mates, that is, to polygamy. In the human species there are many highly stratified societies marked by large wealth and power differentials would be expected to translate into polygyny, with women clustering with those men who control the largest share resources. This expectation is correct in many cases, but there are important expectations, in some of the most stratified societies monogamy is enforced by law. This novel circumstance – the conjunction of strong wealth differentials and a prohibition on polygyny-spurs a novel kind of mating competition. Where there are no wealth differences among men there are no resource-related reasons for women to compete for mates. Similarly, where there are no wealth differences but men acquire mates in proportion to their wealth, wealthy men are not worth competing for because the wives of wealthy men will be forced to share resources with more co-wives. These co-wives effectively cancel any advantage of having a wealthy husband, In contrast to these cases the novel circumstances of stratified monogamous societies strong wealth differentials conjoined with a prohibition on polygyny change this dynamic ,The wives of wealthy men no longer have their resource advantage diluted by the demands of co-wives ; thus women are expected to compete for such husbands and dowry emerges as one vehicle of this competition.
These three models share several features. In agreement with other writers on the subject (e.g., Dickemann 1979, 1981) all the three suggest that dowry is competitive, For example, Boserup’s model implies that when women contribute little to subsistence they will be forced to compete for husbands to support them; the other two models are explicit about the nature of the competition – either for status and power or for better reproductive opportunities. Furthermore, none of these models suggests that competition will be limited to potential brides. If martial opportunities differ and women can gain by competing for the best, their close kin are expected to be (and are) active participants in the competitive process.
While the theoretical merits of each model can be debated, direct test of their validity are more enlightening. Each model implies that dowry will emerge only where particular casual factors occur. Thus, each model can be tested by examining whether dowry is restricted to those societies exhibiting its hypothesized casual factors. In such tests (Gaulin and soster 1990; Gaulin 1993) dowry emerges as much more tightly associated with the conjunction of stratification and monogamy than it is with private property rule or with low female agricultural effort. This pattern of association suggests that dowry is primarily a manifestation of reproductive competition for wealthy monogamous husbands.