英文摘要 |
Though De Munck (1996) argues that “love” may have a place in arranged marriages, the richness and complexity of sentiment in prescriptive marriage has long frustrated anthropological understanding. Is there a place for romantic sentiment or personal emotion in a restricted marriage system? This paper aims to understand the intersection of prescriptive marriage and individual sentiment through an ethnography of Miao elopement in eastern Guizhou. Today, much like before 1949, marriages occur after a brief courtship; they may or may not involve romantic love and divide more-or-less evenly between pubic marriages and elopements. Public marriages revolve around, and must come to terms with, the positive rule of prescriptive crosscousin marriage within village endogamy. Elopements violate village endogamy, are finalized when the bride crosses the doorsill with her groom in the middle of the night, and occur without her family’s prior consent or knowledge. This essay considers elopement form the perspective of a bride’s weighing the uncertainties and special ambivalence of an alternative cognatic marriage against the certainties and general ambivalence of a restricted marriage moreover, elopements make intelligible Miao ambivalence about the collective marital ideal and individuality. |