Culture Shock, Part 1

[letitbe]

While planning our summer travel, my wife got a book called "Culture Shock! India." Incidentally, it is highly recommended for anybody who is thinking of paying a visit here or just wants to expand their horizons. However, as I was reading it, there were a few things that I simply couldn't quite comprehend

Comments

[janya]

For all the strangeness of arranged marriages, they appear to work - families that result last and produce ridiculous number of offsprings. And those offsprings continue to choose family as their first priority.

As a matter of fact, none of the above is true for western-style "love-based" marriages.

[letitbe]

Actually, most educated Indian families limit themselves to one or two children and have been doing so for a few decades now. In fact, if the first child is a boy, they often stop at that.

As for the fact that these marriages last, the repercussions of getting a divorce are twofold: you will be most likely disowned by your family and you will stay single for the rest of your life. Incentives are such that a divorce is absolutely the last resort.

[janya]

Educated Indian families are a drop in the bucket.
Average birth rates are 2.73kids per woman, with population growth of 1.28% (estimated 2006 figures, from Wikipedia).

Repercussions for going outside the social norm are always apropriate to the norm, simply because they have survived the test of time - not just decades, but centuries.

[letitbe]

Judging by the current rate of change in the Indian society, it is likely that these norms will be completely altered within the next 10 years. What happened in the U.S. and Western Europe in the 60's and in Russia and China in the 90's is about to take place here. The fact that India is largely an English-speaking country with full access to American media and music is only bound to speed up the process.

[janya]

What makes you think there is a causal relationship between the stability of families, the average number of offspring and pre-arrangement of marriage?

How about this theory: the stigma associated with divorce contributes to the "stability" of families, while the high rate of poverty makes the large number of children a necessity, rather than a choice. As a matter of fact, neither condition is generally true for western-style countries.

[janya]

Stability and importance of family and pre-arrangement of marriage are all pieces of the same puzzle, and they work together. I.e. if any of these pieces did not fit, the whole picture would have fallen apart and would get replaced by a different social order.

I am not sure how poverty makes large number of children a necessity, unless it is accepted practice to sell children and live off that income.

Stigma of divorce is not a cause, but a consequence of importance of family. If that stigma was the only thing that was holding too many hugely unhappy marriages together, it would not succeed. Either family would have become a sham rather than a real thing (accepted practice of having a love relationship on the side in catholic Europe in middle ages), or people would learn to ran away from the stigma (Nothern America a few decades ago), or a cultural revolution of some sort would be brewing. However, family continues to be very important, and a lot of people choose arranged marriages even if they have a choice.

[janya]

Poverty makes large number of children a necessity in a number of ways; almost too many to list here. For example, low wages and non-existent government pensions force parents to rely on their children's support after retirement. Poverty is associated with high child mortality, so the larger the number of children, the higher chance of enough children surviving to provide such support. Poverty reduces access to two forms of birth control - education and contraception - hence driving the number of children up. Finally, the practice of getting paid by the groom's (or bride's) family is accepted in many countries, and is not much different from selling and living off the income. The importance of family and pre-arrangement of marriage may be tied, but poverty and religion have much stronger influence on the number of offspring

[janya]

People always face a choice to conform to the society, or to break away and do their own thing. If conforming on the average is a very unhappy path, more people will choose to break away. Conversely, if the punishment for non-conforming is tough, more people will conform.

If life in arranged-marriage family was really so awfull so often - more people would be quitting their families one way or another, or at least seeking refuge in other activities (thus making family life something less than first priority).

[janya]

No argument here; this is how societies have been changing for ages. The trend seems to be towards giving individuals more freedom at the expense of the traditional authorities - the sovereigns, religious figures and family patriarchs - so we may as well see the number of pre-arranged marriages decline over time. Time will tell whether this is a good trend.

[letitbe]

Before we even get to the subject of divorce, it would help to first understand the concept of marriage in India, which is so fundamentally different from that in the West that much of this discussion does not make much sense in the local context.

First of all, marriages here are not arrangements between two people, but rather their entire families. A divorce is therefore a decision that would affect not just the man and the woman, but all of their parents, siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. And since one's happiness is so dependent on that of his family, how can a divorce possibly make one any happier