Tag Archives: marriage

Turkish Marriage Ritual

Nationality: Turkish, American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 12, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Turkish

Informant C is 20 year old and studies Journalism. She is half Turkish and speaks Turkish as well. Her mom is Turkish and is from the Eastern Turkey area, about 200 miles west of Syria. Her entire family is scattered over Turkey and have resided in Turkey for many generations. Many of them are involved in agriculture.

So every region of Turkey kind of has its own folklore and I like the Black Sea’s folklore and there’s a region called Trabzon in it. Its kind of seen as the more wild and I don’t want to say less domesticated, but there’s just not as many people living up there. We have some relatives that live near Trabzon and there’s this really famous town named Çarşıbaşı. And when someone gets married to test to see if the marriage is a good idea, they come to the house and you know how like in some places you have to carry the bride over the threshold, there’s this vine that you break into 3 pieces and you plant them into the ground. And if they sprout that means the marriage is going to be successful and if they don’t you’re kind of doomed. People in Turkey are very into agricultural rituals, folklore, and even mysticism.

 

Analysis:

Here informant C tells about an agricultural ritual that predicts if a couple will have a successful marriage. Marriages are very important and the entire community always wants them to be successful and will often perform rituals to see if this will be so. Because the area is so agricultural it follows that their marriage ritual would also be agricultural. Rituals are also often performed at liminal moments, such as when a couple gets married.  Growing of the vine may symbolize growing of a marriage and with it, prosperity.  In this ritual like many others, we see an emphasis on the number 3.

FAMILY PHOTO

Nationality: Italian-American, Portuguese-American
Age: 55
Occupation: Engineering Professor
Residence: Boston, MA
Performance Date: 3/25/15
Primary Language: English

“It was August and it was my wife’s family reunion up in New Hampshire. We were gonna get married that September, so the wedding was right around the corner. At the time they were really into taking photos of the family together. So we all set up to take a photo, when all of a sudden my wife’s grandmother stopped everyone and said, ‘Okay, so we need to take on with Lenny and then one without.’ So that’s exactly what we did. One month before getting married! After coming up there for years, being the only boy she ever brought around to her family. One with and one without.

So we still will joke about that. Whenever anyone new, like a significant other or whatever, comes to the family, we’ll jokingly say, ‘Okay now one with and one without.'”

ANALYSIS:

Obviously this is just a funny moment that would get passed around in a lot of different families. There is something funny about the old members of the family being able to be so blunt and particular. And so when they repeat the phrase to someone else or tell the story, they are laughing at that moment and how blunt she was.

In a more folklore vein though, it definitely represents a liminal moment for this family. Here they are, at this reunion and this outsider is about to join them in the next month. By the next year he will be officially taking pictures with them. How people manage that liminal moment is different for everyone. Clearly her grandmother cared about the informant, as she took the picture with him in the first place, but she also cared about her family and did not want any hurtful pictures around in case things went sour. It may seem to be a little over-the-top, but to me it feels like she is trying to handle this moment before he officially enters the family.

Any Woman should be Lucky to Marry a Cornell Gentleman

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Preschool Teacher/Student on Leave
Residence: Bronx, NY
Performance Date: 3/20/14
Primary Language: English

Item: When you get married at the chapel at Cornell the building was not designed with a room for her to prepare and wait.  The only room separate from the main building is the crypt, which happens to also be the place where the founders are buried.  So the legend goes that if the bride gets cold feet, the ghosts of the founders will rise from their graves and escort her down the aisle because any woman should be honored to marry a cornell gentleman.

I first heard this story when I went on a college tour of Cornell, but I asked my friend about it, since she goes there.  She liked the story because along with being fun and mystical it makes her school look good, since any woman would be lucky to marry a man who went there.

I think this is an interesting superstition because it is very connected to the liminal aspect of the marriage ritual.  The legend is about the time right before the marriage occurs, while everything is still in flux and everything can still go wrong.

A Rose to Remember

Nationality: American
Age: 48
Occupation: Proctor
Residence: Rancho Cucamonga, CA
Performance Date: 21 April 2014
Primary Language: English

The informant (A) has been married to her husband (D) for 24 years. They got married in a non-religious outdoor ceremony when A was 24 and D was 29. Though I do not recollect them being overly romantic while their children were at home, this changed slightly after their youngest son left for college. I asked A if she remembered anything she wanted to share with me about her wedding and told me of a practice that the reverend suggested on their wedding day and they continued to do for a couple years after their wedding. The reverend was of no special importance to them other than that he could legally marry them. When the reverend was talking to them before the ceremony, he said that they should give each other a single red rose whenever they needed to remember that they loved each other enough to get married. This could be in response to an argument, a special day like an anniversary, or just because. A continued to say that she gave D a red rose on their anniversary, and they maybe did this a couple of other times in the first couple years of marriage, but as life went on they forgot about the practice when other things became more important. A did not seem upset that she and her husband had stopped the practice. It was just something to do.

The romantic nature of a red rose itself has little to do with this gesture other than being a pretty story. The red rose could be replaced with anything: a favorite candy bar, a stuffed animal, a card. The meaning to this gesture seems to be in the kindness of remembering to give the red rose rather than the red rose itself. Effectively, giving the red rose simply says “I remember that I love you, and I want to show you that I remember.” A and her husband stopped doing this a couple of years after they got married, which coincides with when they had their first child. This is the point at which I think that they ceased to be a “couple” and started being a “family,” which does not need special gestures to show that there is love between them. A rose pales in comparison to looking at a child that you created with another person. Being romantic and stereotypically sappy does not seem to be a part of A and D’s relationship.

Brides wearing white

Nationality: Mexican
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: California, USA
Performance Date: 4/30/13
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

“Another one of the stories that I grew up hearing was the reason why a bride wears white on the day of her wedding is to like symbolize her purity in entering marriage and also in many ways that it is the happiest day of her life. I learned this from my mom and dad and it’s supposed to be the bride being pure and such or whatever. And I guess a variation of this is how it became a folklore joke I guess because it goes like this: ‘a kid asks his mom why the bride wears white and she says because it’s the happiest day of her life and then the kid asks why the man wears black’. I guess it’s just funny the fact that people joke about a man’s life being over when he gets married.”
Jokes are a very important part of folklore too because they help relieve pressure from social expectations by being funny. And traditions regarding marriages are also very important because they are everywhere and they dictate how many people see their lives with their spouses.