It isn’t like this is completely unknown closer to home. How is an engagement ring any different in any case? There’s even a rule of thumb that it should cost 3 month’s salary. Is giving an engagement ring or a dowry functionally equivalent to buying a person? Then there are other money-related imbalances of power:
Even at a dating level, there seems to be an uncomfortable amount of perceived entitlement associated with paying for food and drinks.
I think there are a number of issues that relate to the balance of power in a particular marriage model. Dowries can be a way for the bride to have some security if things go wrong. It can be seen as evidence that the future husband is serious about the relationship and will provide for the family. Arranged marriages are not necessarily forced, and our society’s discomfort with them isn’t necessarily shared by others. As in the west, it’s possible to change cultural practices to make them more equal while maintaining some of their distinctive elements.
While most pronounced between genders, this is also reflected in the wider way in which most of Western society exchanges gifts. There’s often an expectation of something for a gift, or at the very least it’s intended to send a signal to reinforce the relationship, whether an intended lover or a family member or even say a boss.
Rarely, in my experience, are gifts given simply for the joy of giving. In fact, the only occasions where I think gifts are routinely given wholly unselfishly are when they are given by parents to their children, and even then it’s often also a signal to others of the ability to provide luxuries for one’s family. At its worst, parents might use gifts to buy forgiveness for their own perceived inadequacies as parents, or to curry loyalty from children when custody is shared with a separated spouse. Basically, Westerns be acting selfish all over the place.
As the spouse of a translator, I’m also mindful of the language gap which may be losing something in translation. I wonder if the people who see this as slavery would still see it that way if the English-language media called it a dowry instead of buying a wife. English is not the Romani language.
Just to reiterate what I said earlier, I do think dowries and arranged marriages are sexist. But a lot of the poverty and insularity of Romani culture survives because they’re discriminated against in countries that see them as interlopers despite having lived in many of them for longer than America has even been a country. So sneering at their traditions won’t help the young Romani who want to change those traditions. Access to better education to lift the Romani out of poverty will give more agency and power to them and their children will gain more sense of self-determination to break from or hold with tradition because traditions will no longer be a matter of survival.
I get that you’re reacting to the colonialist tone of calling arranged marriages slavery, and I basically agree with objection to that tone. But respectfully, consent when options are limited is not the same as consent when there are viable alternatives. As you yourself point out, America’s working poor routinely endure treatment that they shouldn’t have to because they have no real alternatives. Few in America are as poor as most Romani.
As the girls explain in the video, they are a closed community and they don’t want to marry people who are not Roma. That’s the main limitation here, as far as I can see.
They also say that they would like more education to pursue their dreams. That their parents remove some of the girls from school so they don’t meet boys with whom they might elope. And both girls and boys in the video indicated a desire for more freedom in how they choose one another. One of the girls interviewed in the video said she has refused to marry the husband chosen by her family, that she has a non-Romani boyfriend and that her parents would not be pleased with her for that. For the poor, family and community are everything.
Mind you I don’t disagree with your point. But I believe people with fewer options are naturally more reluctant to upset the apple cart. I just don’t think it’s a black and white issue. In fact, I thought the video showed both sides of the issue, both from the Roma’s and the journalist’s very different perspectives, quite sympathetically.
I don’t think it’s oppression. But I do think less poverty and more educational opportunities confer options not open to most Roma children.
Have you watched the entire video? They start out in a very typical sensationalist tone decrying “a market where brides are sold” only to admit at the end that it wasn’t really a market at all, but a big speed-dating service, a watered down way to try and keep their ancient ethnic tradition in a modern world. In centuries past women were married off with no choice, but from what I saw the women do have some choice now (they even interview one woman who opts out of the entire Roma tradition and remains single.) Nobody here is defending slavery, I think articles 16 and maybe 27 apply more accurately to this situation.
IMHO, moral absolutism is perilous within a society, all the more so when applied by one society to another. Ultimately I do and always will hold individual self-determination higher than any tradition, my own or others, but I also acknowledge that means nothing unless individuals are free to uphold traditions I myself find distasteful. Now one could argue that young women and men do not know any better and rely on their parents, which is part of how tradition propagates. The problem with arguing against a tradition by saying people only follow it because they’ve been indoctrinated is that it leads easily to arguments by false consciousness which between cultures has been used to excuse forcing a more “civilized” culture on “savages” who were said not to know any better. In my opinion, a tradition will prosper or fail on its own merits when the people it belongs to are given access to education and economic opportunity.
I’m not asking this sarcastically, but did you watch the entire video? If you truly believe this is slavery, then Article 4 would apply. But that seems like a very unrealistic assessment of the practice shown in the video.
As @some_guy mentions, Article 16 seems far more relevant.
I kind of felt that the speed-dating comparison was a bit off, despite some similarities. This is watered-down arranged marriage from what I saw.
I absolutely reject the notion of assigning dollar value to people.
This culture is perpetuating seeing women as only sexual objects. Then layers get added that the younger (as young as 13!) and whiter blue-eyed girls fetch more of a price than older darkies.
I do find it extremely distasteful. I think if these women, and the Romani in general, are given chances for education and economic opportunities currently closed to them by prejudice and ghettoization, that almost all will choose to shed this tradition and it will slowly go the way that the dowry in its other forms has in liberal Western society. I will not mourn it. But I’m a brass tacks kind of person. India’s 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act has been a spectacular failure. European countries attempting to outlaw it among the insular Roma with whom those countries have never had much mutual trust would surely be even less effective, and there would only end up being even less public scrutiny as it became something they could not talk about with gadjos (outsiders). So if I want to see the practice relegated to the dustbin of history, I believe increased opportunities are the most effective means of facilitating that.
True. But these are features of the mating dance in all cultures, which doesn’t make them any less repugnant, but I don’t think they’re in any way particularly unique to arranged marriages. The one caveat is that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting a prosperous spouse; I only object to the belief that it must always be the husband, and I think many seek it superficially in America where conspicuous consumption gets elevated above real financial stability.
I consider the earning potential for any human (what they can earn in value as a result of their labor and ingenuity) to be separate and distinct from their value as a human. Certainly, some people can earn more than others, and everyone wants financial security for their family.
It did make me chuckle seeing those Roma dudes wearing 1980s-style phat gold chains around their necks.
Well met. I’m a Grand Experiment type of person. This weekend, I’m celebrating my belief that every individual has the inalienable right to life, liberty, and to pursue their own mutant version of happiness. We may not all get there together at the same time. But if we keep the guiding light ever in sight, we all will get to the promised land.
As a human, couldn’t agree more. As a spouse, I think it’s reasonable to weigh the combined earnings potential of both partners in a marriage, especially with regards, as you said, to the financial security of their family. In a non-capitalist or at least post-scarcity culture of sufficient abundance that earnings didn’t equal survival, it wouldn’t be necessary. But in a capitalist society at our level of development, we have to plan to take care of the base of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Ditto.
I’m certainly on board with that! I just want to make sure we pursue that goal in a way that won’t backfire and/or denigrate the very cultures of the people for whom we want those rights.
Another small caveat. Since I don’t believe in any Higher Powers, I don’t think any right is, as a practical matter, inalienable. But there are some from which I believe people never should be alienated. Thomas Paine was on the right track. We just need to realize that even if I’m wrong and there is some kind of deity in humanity’s corner, it’s up to us to defend our rights if we want to hold on to them. And the best way to do that is to take care of each other by watching out for each other’s rights. All humans are siblings
Engagement rings are falling out of favor, and I don’t know anyone that adheres to the 3 month salary prescription of jewelry sellers.
Rules around food and drink buying during courtship are also getting squishier, and I believe that is because they come with the same problems, some men expecting sex in exchange for them, or feeling resentful that they have to buy them at all.
What security does the bride have with a dowry? What power does she really have to leave, with no education and not being allowed to work? Do you honestly believe the family is saving the dowry as insurance?
The dowry is just income for families who don’t have sons, and the families view it as such.
I never implied it was up to me. But it is one of many “traditions” that aren’t helping it’s people get out of poverty, and in which women suffer most to maintain.
