[Fahad Alshammari]

[Institution Name]

[Dr. Tom Sloane]

[11/19/10]

The Celebration of a Bedouin wedding

Introduction

The Bedouins are a group and a kind of people who usually live in deserts with tents along with camels and sheep's to provide their living expenses. The Bedouins are from the Middle East, they still exist but unlike how it used to be before. They are known for being generous, helpful and support of each other. They have a long deep history with a strange culture. The men of the Bedouin order and their women's obey them immediately without arguing back.

Discussion

The Bedouin marriage, for example, requires both bride wealth and ad uxorem dowry. For the Dogon of Mali, the combination is bride wealth plus bride service. Some groups, however, seem to favor configurations in which the outcome is balanced, as with the Chinese of the T'ang and Sung dynasties or the Cheyenne, for whom bride wealth and ad maritum dowry were usually more or less of equal value. The aim of this type of reciprocal exchange is therefore more juridical than strictly economic.

Choosing the groom:

Most studies of marriage in Bedouin society deal with the traditional features of accepted marital patterns. For instance, Marx (1972) describes Bedouin marriage as tribal, as its familial relations are traditionally based on a patrilineal, endogamic hierarchy, meaning that one can only marry one's first cousin. Furthermore, prior to the marriage, the couple cannot meet each other, and most marriages are the result of matchmaking on the part of both the bride's and the groom's families.

Love is considered to be forbidden in Bedouin society, because it means free choice, and such a choice could be of a mate from another (forbidden) tribe, which would threaten the tribal social order. Thus, love in Bedouin society is expressed through poems, traditional songs and big events, such as weddings. Very few studies examine the mechanisms that Bedouin women adopt to cope with the constraints of traditional norms regarding love and marriage. One exception is Alkrenawe's (497-509) research on polygamous marriages, which presents the coping mechanisms used by women to survive tension in the relations between wives in polygamous marriages. However, this study disregards the situation of educated women, who have also recently become part of polygamous marriages. Lewando-Hundt's (83-124) study on the power of Bedouin women is highly relevant to the discourse of feminism and resistance, in that it reveals informal ways of coping in traditional settings, but she, too, fails to address the coping mechanisms of educated women in marital situations.

Engagement

The Bedouin feminine self that has experienced liberal values of modern Israeli society through exposure to higher education is a self that is torn between personal autonomy, freedom and individuality, on the one hand, and the cultural expected feminine self, which is communal, embodied in the collective and the tribal, on the other hand. This segmentation leads to the creation of multiple selves in different contexts. On the one hand, as the first members of their community to make a change (in terms of education), these ...