Key Moments in Life: Marriage and Eligibility |
| Marriage | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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Because marriage is not believed to be the concern of the spiritual forces of nature or the wilderness, the art forms that are associated with marriage are rarely sculptural, but more often take the form of gifts that are offered from husband to wife (and the reverse) goods that are publicly displayed by the wife as a sign of the wealth and character she brings to the marriage, and payments of prestige objects that are made by the family of the groom to the family of the bride. Such payments are often called "bride-wealth" or "bride-price" in the literature, and they are mistakenly thought of as a system of buying a wife, but in fact this is a system by which surplus goods are redistributed throughout the community, because the very same goods that are "paid" to a woman's father are in turn used by him to "purchase" wives for his eligible sons. |
Door Lock |
Bamana people,
Mali |
| Marriage | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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It has been argued that such a system commodifies the bride and thus dehumanizes her, but others also make the argument that the system defines her value to the marriage in a concrete way and that it contributes to the stability of the marriage, because were the marriage to end in divorce the bride wealth must be returned to the groom's family, and if it has already been invested in "bride-wealth" for the bride's own brothers this can be difficult indeed. The "bride-wealth" creates a bond between the families which forces them to invest in the success of the marriage. When there is trouble between husband and wife the relatives on both sides intervene to find a solution. The male-female couple from the Dogon people of Mali represents the ideal of pairing that is necessary for procreation. The linking of the male arm around the woman's neck emphasizes the bond that is created by marriage. |
Primordial Couple |
Dogon people,
Mali |
| Marriage | 1 | 2 | 3 |
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Marriage immediatly follows initiation among many African peoples because both events serve to break the bonds of the individual with childhood and the unmarried state, integrating the individual into the adult community. Among the Woyo people of western Zaire and Congo, a young woman is given a set of carved pot lids by her mother when she marries and moves to her husbands home. The lids are carved with images illustrating proverbs about relations between husbands and wives. If a husband abuses his wife in some way, or makes her unhappy, she serves the husband's supper in a bowl covered with a lid decorated with the appropriate proverb. She can make her complaints public by using one of these lids when her husband brings his friends home for dinner. The carved figure on this lid represents a cooking hearth with a pot on three stones. Divorce requires only the scattering of the stones, and it takes three to support the pot. |
Lid for a Serving Pot |
Woyo people,
Congo and Zaire |
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Marriage |
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