week 10

Hello there, everyone.

Welcome to week 10's lecture on arranged marriages. Today's lecture is shorter in terms of the actual lecture component. There is a documentary at the end that I'll have you watch. Next week will be a pretty hefty sort of combined lecture that actually spans two weeks, so you can kind of break it down that way if you'd like. This should hopefully give you more time to prep for your final exams in a couple of weeks in other classes. Not this one, though. Again, there are no exams in December.

But speaking of exams, I want to apologize for the tremendous amount of confusion with the midterms, particularly with the short answers. Again, they were supposed to be transferred over from Sakai, and I guess they were just not in the way that anyone expected. The short answers were supposed to be at the end, along with instructions to pick just three of the four. That is obviously not what happened.

I did take a while to decide what to do for those of you who did end up answering the short answer questions because I wanted to be as fair as possible to everyone. So, I conferred with a couple of other faculty members. In the announcement, I did say that only the multiple choice will be marked. I have to stick with that for everyone. I don't feel that it would be fair to grade some of you but not all of you, especially because some students did email me asking for clarity, and I told them not to write the short answers.

But I know that some of you did put a lot of work into answering those questions, so I'm going to come up with like an optional bonus question or two that sort of plays off of or incorporates those questions. I'll post them to Owl in the next couple of days and give you more specific instructions, so keep your eyes out for that. If you answered the short answer questions on the midterm, you should have a bit of a head start because you've already kind of thought about it.

That's my sort of compromise. It's not perfect. Perfect would be going back in time and fixing the problem before it started. That's not an option. This, to me, is what feels fairest. Like I said, I spoke with a few other sociology profs who helped me come up with this, so that's where it's at.

Also, I wanted to say a little bit more about your autobiographies. They're due to Owl on the 25th. A few of you have had questions about it. Hopefully, this will answer at least some of those. What I'm effectively looking for is for students to kind of engage with their sociological imagination, which, if you remember, is the intersection of history and biography.

What does your life, particularly your family structure or your family background, where does that fit in or not with other sociological trends and patterns? Has your life and your sort of familial upbringing been typical or atypical? In what ways? What about some of your relatives? And why do you think this is the case? Why has it been typical or not typical? What might be explaining why it happened?

So, you can point to some social forces and trends and patterns, and this should all be made clear or at least alluded to from the outset of your paper. What I don't want you to say is like A happened, and then B happened, and then C happened, and that's my life. A much better paper would say something like A and B happened, and this can be attributed to reasons C and D.

To be successful, you'll have to first know what the trends and patterns are. Make it clear to the reader that you've been paying attention in class. With that in mind, your textbook can count as one of your academic sources. Note that I'm not going to be a huge stickler for the five-year thing. If it's six, whatever. I just want you to try to stay current or as current as possible with the sources.

It makes a difference to whether you're talking about current stats and modern-day trends. If that's the case, then I expect you to find the most up-to-date info that you can. But if you're talking about your grandma and citing census data from the 1950s, well, okay, yeah, that makes sense too.

Also, have a look at the posted websites for further explanations of what a sociological autobiography is. You can also have a look at the link to a rubric. It's not this rubric, but it is a rubric that should again give you an idea. I believe the last bit of this, the second one, is 3E T O T capital I and then lowercase D.

The scope of the rubric is a bit broader than what I'm looking for. It seems to cover kind of anything and everything sociological, whereas this is obviously for sociology of the family. But it should give you an idea in terms of kind of what I'm looking for and how you'll be marked.

Finally, just one final point, because it did come up in a convo that I had with one of you: definitely use first person for this paper. So, I, me, my—yes, 100%. Please use that. It is about you. Generally, in sociology, using first person is okay and even encouraged because, you know, in research papers, for instance, you want to come up with an argument, something that you're claiming or trying to argue or prove.

Although, careful with the use of the word "prove." It's very common in social papers to read, "I argue that A can lead to B under C circumstances." Okay, thanks, Siri. Your mileage may vary slightly, but I would say unless a prof tells you otherwise, go ahead and use first person.

What you don't want to do in sociology papers or in academic papers in general is to use the second person: you, your, yours. Because theoretically, you don't know who your audience is, so you don't want to make claims or assumptions about them because that might not be true, and you don't want to isolate your readers that way. So, use one instead.

Instead of like, "When you do this," it's "When one does this." Saying "you" can also be a bit too informal. Like, we're not having a buddy-buddy chat here; this is professional writing. So again, first person okay, second person not. Just because, like I said, that is something that came up, so I wanted to make sure everyone had the same information.

Moving on to the actual sort of meat of today's lecture, we'll be asking the question of what exactly is an arranged marriage? How does it differ from a forced marriage? There's a very key distinction.

Then, like I said, we'll be having you watch a documentary called "Meet the Patels." I think it's got like an upper 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and it's certified fresh, so hopefully you will enjoy it as well as find it informative. I think it's about 10 years old now, and I usually like to try to show stuff that's as current as possible, but I don't think it's too far removed from the present-day reality.

Like I said, I think it's a good movie that really clears up a lot of misconceptions about arranged marriage. I'll try to do that a bit, but like I said, I think the movie does a great job of that as well.

So, what do we mean by arranged marriages? In academia, it's really any union that's set up by a third party, and it's more or less formalized, depending on the situation. But it's mutually agreed upon between or by the bride and the groom, and that mutually agreed upon is really important because we'll talk about later in class.

We'll talk about forced marriages. Arranged marriages are not the same. The bride and the groom are both like, "Yeah, I'm on board with this." It's still fairly common in many parts of the world, a lot of Asian, particularly South Asian places or countries, a number of African countries, and Middle Eastern countries and cultures.

In North America, it still exists within specific ethnic communities, like some of the immigrant groups mentioned above, the Amish in the United States, and I think some of the Mennonites here in Canada still practice that. Coptic Christians, Orthodox Jews—it has occurred in Canada, and like I mentioned, it still does for some groups.

Historically, in both New France and in Upper Canada, young people were encouraged by wealthy landowner parents to marry, you know, not for love but for family and property purposes. Nowadays, in a recent study of second-generation South Asian immigrants living in North America, about 25% of participants indicated that their parents would likely arrange their marriage in some way, shape, or form.

As we'll see in the documentary today, it's a negotiation that takes place, and it can happen in different ways. In some cases, there's almost like this kind of dating website, like Tinder, OkCupid, or whatever, only it's like the parents uploading their children's profiles and kind of picking the matches.

In general, though, there are several types of arranged marriages, and each culture has kind of developed its own set of rules and rituals regarding the specifics. So, you know, regarding things like introductions, courtships, negotiations.

In some cases, we see blind marriages where the couple doesn't see or speak to each other until the wedding day. They know about each other; maybe they've seen a picture, but they don't meet until the wedding. In other instances, though, the families are known to one another.

Another defining factor is the negotiations that take place between the two families. Typically, it's the male relatives who meet several times to kind of outline an agreement that's satisfactory for both families. As alluded to, matches are made in various ways.

In small communities where the mating pool is quite limited, members continue to marry particularly cousins. This isn't actually as taboo or as illegal as you might think. If we look at a map of where it's illegal to marry your cousin, it's really only illegal in parts of the US, China, the Philippines, and a few countries in Eastern Europe.

It is actually legal in Canada. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's common. Again, it's just in small pockets that this occurs. However, most customs prohibit marriages between blood relatives.

Other groups that practice arranged marriages may require couples to marry within their ethnic group or religion. Since this endogamous relationship also limits the potential number of matches, negotiations can get pretty aggressive in determining a bride price. But again, it depends on each culture and the specifics therein.

Outside of these smaller pools, suitable partners are found either through a professional matchmaker, maybe a spiritual leader, or informal or formal social networks. Parents, you know, they kind of believe that they know what's best for their child, so they'll spend, in some cases, like thousands of dollars to help in finding spouses for their children.

Even in communities like, you know, a lot of Canadian communities where love marriages have largely replaced the historic customs, the prospective spouses still have to pass the parental test in order to proceed with marriage.

So, it's not at all uncommon to find, you know, people who start dating someone, and then, you know, their parents are instead being like, "No, no, no, no, no. You can't date that person. I found someone I think would be a much, much better match for you."

But since pairings are based on compatibility, couples tend to grow into their relationships, develop trust and companionship along the way. With arranged marriages, it's based on familial compatibility. So, it's not love at first sight, but that grows over time.

Some have suggested that this is the reason why cultures with arranged marriages have some of the lowest divorce rates in the world, while others argue that it's things like social stigma, community ostracism, and really restrictive laws that prevent most separations.

Arranged marriages can be a controversial practice, particularly, I think, in the global North. But proponents of arranged marriages argue that the practice is really grossly misunderstood by modern Westerners who cannot grasp or cannot wrap their head around the concept of marriage before love.

It's not an uncommon one; it's not one that's new or novel. It's happened throughout history. So, yeah, there are plenty of advantages to it. For one thing, it's a stress-free way, or a fairly stress-free way, for the people getting married to sort of find the one.

They're not sorting that out; it's, you know, their family. It gives parents control, and sometimes parents really want that control. It's easier to just say, "Okay, you can take over. Again, you raised me; you know what's best, so we'll let you take care of that."

It also prevents fights between the in-laws since presumably your parents wouldn't set you up with a family that they didn't like. You know, if they liked the kid but they didn't like the parents, it would still probably be a no-go. So, people kind of all get along that way.

It can uphold values and traditions. Like, this is what we've always done; this is part of our culture. So, again, it can uphold that. It can also allow for seamless childbearing. We already kind of know what the rules and expectations are going into things.

But of course, there are disadvantages as well. In a lot of cases, it can deprive couples of the sort of thrill of dating. You know, like the meet-cute and the, "Oh, is it? Is it not? What's it going to be like? What should we do?" Dating can be fun, and it, in some cases, can take away that.

Although, as we'll see with the documentary today, in some cases with arranged marriages, there is still the dating component. But it can also lead to feelings of alienation and sort of a loss of control. Like, things are happening to me and about me, but I don't really have much of a say in it.

I've agreed to the arrangement itself, but, you know, everything's still sort of taking place without me. Sometimes we really, really don't want our families to interfere. Like, you know, parents don't always know what's best for us, and having parents who are constantly checking in on things and saying, "Okay, no, you can do this, but you can't do that," can get really tiring and frustrating.

Love isn't necessarily a priority. You know, you're told that the love will come, but what if I want love now or I want love before marriage? Well, that's not, again, that's not necessarily a priority with arranged marriage. It's more like sort of social compatibility, and that can lead to feelings that you're living with a stranger.

Particularly if it's one of the sort of blind marriages, again, you don't know them; you don't know much about them. But all of a sudden, like, this person is your spouse, and you're supposed to, like, you know, be there for everything or do things with them, and it can get really awkward and uncomfortable.

Finally, before we get to the documentary, one really important note is that arranged marriages are not forced marriages. I alluded to this earlier, but a forced marriage is a marriage in which people are coerced into marrying against their will. This is very different from an arranged marriage, where there is, again, free and informed consent on the part of both parties.

Forced marriages affect young people who may be taken abroad under false pretexts. You know, like, "I've got you this job. Just come with me; you'll make lots of money and be able to support your family." And then it ends up not being that. That's a forced marriage.

Or, you know, maybe you're sort of being forced to get married for immigration purposes. Every major faith condemns this practice, and it is considered to be a human rights violation. So, don't conflate the two.

I will say also that the line can sometimes get blurry, where it's like you have to say yes to this or else. I think that is also a human rights violation. But, as we'll see next, not all arranged marriages have these sort of questionable human rights violations.

The one, or I guess the example that you're about to see, doesn't really speak to that. It's completely consensual, not at all an example of forced marriage.

So, it's available for free at this link: bit.ly/3TFGLF. If it is not available, please let me know as soon as possible.

Then, answer the discussion question posted to Owl. You can either answer the question of how did "Meet the Patels" challenge your understandings of arranged marriages, or given what you saw in "Meet the Patels," would you consider the possibility of an arranged marriage? Why or why not?

That's all we have. Like I said, just a short class to kind of give you a break before heading into the throes of final exam season. I'm happy to meet up with folks who have questions about your autobiographies. I know a number of you have asked questions, and in some cases, it can be easier to answer those questions just through voice or through video.

So, I'm happy to do that. Just, like I said, send me an email and let me know. And there we go.