Cross Cultural Marriage

What is a good cross-cultural definition of marriage? To me it’s important to get a better understanding or learning of what cross, culture, and marriage means.

Culture to me is something learned. It is a state of manners or taste such as a personal preference. Culture is a preferred choice over something. It can also be a tradition.

To cross something means to intersect them, to transverse. So cross-culture would be to intersect ones group or various fields. It’s interactivity between members of different groups, a mixing of traditions.

Marriage is a joining of a man and a woman and becoming husband and wife. It is a joining for life (unless divorce.) Marriage is a union of two people.

So my definition a of cross- cultural marriage would be a union of a man and a woman of two different cultures or who’s upbringing is different from your own.

What are some of the problems that emerge from attempting to apply a single definition across cultures?

Problems can be because marriage is looked upon so differently in different parts of the world. Your views on marriage differ depending on how you were raised to think.

Examples are Americans for the most part believe marriage is a union between one man and one woman. Then you look at Hijras and marriage between men or the Sudan marriages where woman take on another woman as her husband.

Another perfect example is from our readings about marriages in Nepal and Tibet. How a woman will marry brothers and to them that is normal.

In what specific ways do unilineal descent groups act corporately (or as small corporations?)

I think it rests on the functions of the unilineal descent group’s economics, the politics, and what religion they practice. I believe the strength of its corporation is determined by its structural or size of the group. They shape persons identity, they regulate marriage, and kin of both the bride and the grooms side of the family and also must have approval, also they control such things as the property or land and animals.

What is gender stratification?

Well it implies the same as gender ranking. It’s a form of sexism. It’s a society’s unequal distribution of privileges between two sexes whether it is wealth, power, jobs etc.

For example it is the concept that the man is the bread winner and the woman is the nurturer.

If women are not allowed to hold important positions in religious activities, does that indicate stratification? That is a tough one. To me the obvious answer would be to say yes, gender stratification would be present if you look at our society and how most Americans think today but I guess that depends on what part of the world you