Marriage and Commercialisation in Urban China: Reconfigured Ritual and Evolving Norms

Abstract

This thesis explores the changing meaning and practice of marriage in urban China. It examines the evolution of the social norms that accompany marriage, particularly as they are influenced by commercialisation and the emergence of the wedding industry. In doing so, I focus on the roles of state, market and society in recreating these norms, such as marriage age, ideals of masculinity and femininity, and class-inflected idealisations of the future. I conducted fieldwork in Shanghai and urban Shandong between 2015 and 2017. My ethnographic material consists of interviews with informants—young people experiencing or facing marriage, their close family members and kin, and wedding industry employees—as well as participant observation at dozens of weddings, photographs gathered while attending weddings, and the WeChat postings, both images and words, of many of my informants. I pay particular attention to the manner in which young Chinese adults experienced the marriage market as they negotiated the commercial wedding industry and state and familial pressures to marry. Thematic and critical perspectives identified and explored include ‘individualisation and kinship’, ‘tradition and modernity’, ‘class, distinction, and consumption’, and ‘the changing role of ritual’. Each of these themes help illuminate the development of the commercial wedding industry, the strategies adopted by the state in order to control marriage, and the imaginaries of self that inform constructions of a normative vision of marriage past, present and future. Ultimately this thesis responds to a need for further anthropological enquiry into marriage, commercialisation and consumption in China. Show more