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Dowry Payments and the Irish Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Richard Breen
Richard Breen
Affiliation:
The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin
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Extract

In this essay I propose to examine an hypothesis about dowry payments in the light of certain evidence from Ireland. The sources of this evidence are, first, my own data collected during fieldwork in the small community of Beaufort, County Kerry, Ireland, and, second, the work of writers who have studied the question of dowry payment in Ireland, notably Conrad M. Arensberg, Solon T. Kimball, and K. H. Connell. The intent here is to draw attention to some of the deficiencies in Jack Goody's definition and discussion of dowry payments, and to offer alternatives to them. In particular I shall argue that Goody's discussion of dowry is centrally flawed by a discrepancy between the generality of the variables he uses to explain the geographical distribution of the practice, and the specificity of his definition of it. It is the unwarranted detail involved in the latter that leads him to obscure certain crucial variations within dowry systems more broadly defined, and to confuse the issue of the relationship between dowry and bride wealth.

Type
Demography and Dowry: Family and Land
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 280 - 296
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984

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References

1 Arensberg, C. M., The Irish Countryman (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; Arensberg, C. M. and Kimball, S. T., Family and Community in Ireland (Cambridge, Mass., 1940, 2d ed. 1968)Google Scholar; Connell, K. H., “Peasant Marriage in Ireland: Its Structure and Development since the Famine”, Economic History Review, 14:3 (1962), 502–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem“Catholicism and Marriage in the Century Following the Famine”, in his Irish Peasant Society: Four Historical Essays (Oxford, 1968) 113–61.Google Scholar

2 Goody, J. R., “Bridewealth and Dowry in Africa and Eurasia”, in Bridewealth and Dowry, Goody, J. R. and Tambiah, S. J., eds. (Cambridge, 1973), 1–58Google Scholar; idem.Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976).Google Scholar

3 Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 23.Google Scholar

4 Goody, , Production, 20.Google Scholar

5 Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 23.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 25.

7 Ibid., 11.

8 Ibid., 1.

9 Ibid., 17.

10 Goody, , Production, 51.Google Scholar

11 Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 21.Google Scholar

12 Sabean's, David essay, “Aspects of Kinship Behaviour and Property in Rural Western Europe before 1800”, in Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe 1200–1800, Goody, J. R., Thirsk, J., and Thompson, E. P., eds. (Cambridge, 1976), 96–111, suggests that the JCF as Goody intends it represents only one pole of a continuum of possible forms of rights in peasant conjugal households, the other pole being represented by a system where “neither spouse ever inherits from the other, for what each spouse brings to the marriage remains his own personal property however it is administered during the marriage”, (p. 105).Google Scholar

13 Arensberg, , Irish CountrymanGoogle Scholar; Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community.Google Scholar

14 The move from early to late marriage and from partible to impartible inheritance is thought to have had broader demographic consequences. Cousens, S. H., “Emigration and Demographic Change in Ireland 1851–1861”, Economic History Review, 14:2 (1961), 275–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Regional Variations in Population Change in Ireland, 1861–1881”, Economic History Review, 17:4 (1964), 301–21, has identified two demographic patterns in Ireland following the famine. One was the continuation of prefamine trends—high rates of marriage and of natural increase—the other was the typical postfamine pattern of falling marriage rates and population decline. The former persisted in the west of Ireland until about 1880, when this area began to adopt the postfamine pattern already evident elsewhere in the country.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 The main sources on which this account is based are Connell, “Catholicism and Marriage”, 114–17; Crotty, R. D., Irish Agricultural Production: Its Volume and Structure (Cork, 1966)Google Scholar, chs. 2, 3; Lyons, F. S. L., Ireland since the Famine (London, 1979), 34–49.Google Scholar

16 Lee, J., The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, (Dublin, 1973), 4.Google Scholar

17 Lyons, , Ireland, 51–52.Google Scholar

18 Beaufort is a rural area which covers about twelve square miles and forms part of the Catholic Parish of Tuogh. Its population has declined from 1,375 in 1901 to 852 in 1978. Of its 220 households, roughly half are directly dependent, wholly or in part, on agriculture.

19 This, of course, applied only in the case of marriage to the heir to a farm or a business. Nonheirs could occasionally contract local dowryless marriages—for they were themselves propertyless—but usually these men and women either remained unmarried or emigrated.

20 However, although a suitable dowry was necessary, it was not generally a sufficient condition for a match. Considerations of the social status and reputation of the family of the prospective son- or daughter-in-law also played an important role in assessing his or her acceptability. On this point, see Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 367.Google Scholar

21 Lee, , Modernisation, 5.Google Scholar

22 This disappearance is also noted by Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106.Google Scholar

23 Compare this account with that found in Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 107–8Google Scholar, and the quotation from Lee, , Modernisation, 5, that the Irish peasant “takes unto himself a mate with as clear a head, as placid a heart and as steady a nerve as if he were buying a cow at Ballinasloe Fair”.Google Scholar

24 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106, 369, claim that in the cases of women marrying into farms or into shops, the dowry had to be of a value equivalent to that of the farm or shop.Google Scholar

25 For example, writing of the village, Greek of Vasilika, , Friedl, E., Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece (New York, 1962), 56, notes that the bride's health, attractiveness, personal qualities, and virtue all can have a bearing on the size of the dowry she requires in order to marry.Google Scholar

26 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 106.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., 106–7; see also ibid., 368, for reference to “walking the shop”, the equivalent custom in the towns.

28 See Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 108–9, 368, for examples.Google Scholar

29 See, for example, the descriptions in ibid, 290–92, and Harris, R., Prejudice and Tolerance in Ulster (Manchester, 1972), 3–5.Google Scholar

30 Kane, E., “The Changing Role of the Family in a Rural Irish Community”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 10:2 (1979), 153.Google Scholar

31 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 111, 141, 143.Google Scholar

32 Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 507–9.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., 508–9.

34 Breen, R., “Farm Servanthood in Ireland, 1900–40”, Economic History Review, 36:1 (1983), 87–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

35 Examples of this are given by Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 110.Google Scholar

36 Davis, J., People of the Mediterranean: An Essay in Comparative Social Anthropology (London, 1977), 181–82.Google Scholar

37 Friedl, , Vasilika, 49.Google Scholar

38 Banfield, Edward C. and Banfield, L. F., The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York, 1958), 55.Google Scholar

39 Ladurie, E. LeRoy, “Family Structure and Inheritance Customs in Sixteenth-Century France”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, , Thirsk, , AND Thompson, , eds., 37–70, gives comparable examples of areas of western France, Brie and Flanders, where lineage ties took precedence over marriage in the disposition of rights to property, and thus no JCF in Goody's sense could be said to exist.Google Scholar

40 Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 511.Google Scholar

41 See, for example, Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 77Google Scholar, and also Brody, H., lnishkillane: Change and Decline in the West of Ireland (Harmondsworth, 1973), 110–11.Google Scholar

42 This ideal is reported in virtually every ethnography of rural Ireland; some examples will be found in Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135Google Scholar, and Brody, , lnishkillane, 132.Google Scholar

43 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 131Google Scholar; also, Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 517–18.Google Scholar

44 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135Google Scholar. As Goody, J. R., “Inheritance, Property and Women: Some Comparative Considerations”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, Thirsk, and Thompson, eds., 12, notes, the marriageability of a farm widow was a cause of concern throughout European peasant society.Google Scholar

45 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 133–34.Google Scholar

46 Goody, , Production, 25.Google Scholar

47 Connell, , “Peasant Marriage”, 514.Google Scholar

48 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 135.Google Scholar

49 In these cases, ownership of the land was often transferred to the in-marrying son-in-law, and as a consequence these dowries tended to be larger than those paid by women. See ibid., 109–10.

50 I think it fair to say that there is a tendency within anthropology to reject general theories because of a small number of discrepant cases. The arguments advanced by Comaroff, J. L., “Introduction”, in The Meaning of Marriage Payments, Comaroff, J. L., ed. (London, 1980), 1–47, against schemes like Goody's provide an example of this. On the basis of evidence from the Tswana, the Wiru and Melpa, and the Macedonian village of Skopska, Comaroff disputes the association between particular social characteristics and particular forms of dowry payment and claims they show “much greater ethnographic diversity than is often supposed in 'paradigmatic conceptions' of dowry”, (p. 14). Such an approach, which argues that explanation can be forthcoming only if we pay more attention to particular aspects of dowry-paying societies (i.e., to context), manifests an extreme empiricism. The desire for an exact matching of model to data, which, in this context, almost seems to imply a model or theory of dowry for every society in which it is found, offers no scope for a comparative anthropology. My argument has been that one should attempt to determine what seem to be cross-cultural constants; my criticism of Goody is that he failed to distinguish the general from the particular. We should not suppose, however, that there will be no discrepant cases to our theory; the statements of anthropological theory are at best, probabilistic, and not deterministic. This is not to say that we should treat ethnographic evidence in a cavalier fashion, but rather that we should, in assessing the importance of any piece of such evidence for a general theory, see it in the context of the accumulated ethnographic evidence for and against that theory.Google Scholar

51 Spufford, M., “Peasant Inheritance Customs and Land Distribution in Cambridgeshire from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries”, in Family and Inheritance, Goody, , Thirsk, , AND Thompson, , eds., 156–76.Google Scholar

52 Friedl, , Vasilika, 51–52.Google Scholar

53 Ladurie, , “Family Structure”, 41.Google Scholar

54 Connell, , “Catholicism and Marriage”, 121–26.Google Scholar

55 Arensberg, and Kimball, , Family and Community, 141–43.Google Scholar

56 Brody, , Inishkillane, 92–95, 129–30.Google Scholar

57 Banfield, and Banfield, , Moral Basis, 51.Google Scholar

58 Goody, , “Inheritance”, 20–21.Google Scholar

59 Friedl, , Vasilika, 58–59.Google Scholar

60 Goody, , “Bridewealth”, 26–47, has noted that dowry systems in general will, in contrast to bridewealth, tend to place greater emphasis on affinal or alliance relationships.Google Scholar