The Family Contexts of Marriage Timing in Nepal

Abstract

Marriage in most societies constitutes one of the primary transitions in a person's life course. Its significance is heightened by including the interests of networks beyond the couple in societies organized by kinship. Because marriage can carry multivalent meanings for individuals and groups joined by it in these settings, it has been identified as a key moment in the reproduction of social relations incorporating hierarchy, exchange, and domestic group activities in its web of significance (Barnard and Good 1984; Collier 1988). From a somewhat different perspective, demographers have investigated the timing of marriage and drawn out its implications for other population processes in those settings where marriage initiates childbearing (Smith 198 3). Trained in predominantly Euro-American social science. traditions to study predominantly Euro-American people, demographers have focused mainly on the individual determinants of marriage processes. While often acknowledging the wider familial interests brought to bear on marriage timing, they seldom go beyond immediate family members for contextualizing their analyses of these processes. Recent statements by anthropologically sensitive demographers and others point to a union of these traditions (Macfarlane 1986; Caldwell et al. 1988; Greenhalgh 1990). Marriage as just one instance of social action should be subject to the same analytic frameworks found to be productive in other social analysis. If particular marriage forms are evidence of wider strategies of social reproduction (Bourdieu 1976), then the timing of marriage should itself be seen as a part of that process. Thus marriage timing is no less the proper study of anthropology than any other element of marriage behavior. At the same time, marriage timing should be seen to have implications beyond the merely demographic. Here we draw on these two traditions of analysis to explore the differential timing of marriage among the women of Timling, a central Himalayan village in Nepal inhabited by the Tamang and Ghale descendants of migrants from Tibet. We explore the family politics of marriage timing in one setting of the Tamang Family Research Project, a microdemographic study of changing life course experience, family relationships, and fertility behavior in two Nepali communities (Axinn et al.1991 The project involved ethnographic and survey data collection in 1987-88 and 1991, building on earlier fieldwork in Timling in 1981. Our analysis begins with the anthropological insight expressed recently by Jane Collier (1988), that in societies organized by kinship, marriage processes are instrumental to structuring social reproduction. We pursue our argument in light of this principle. Our methodological approach, on the other hand, makes use of quantitative tools of event history analysis which, while well established among demographers as essential methods for analyzing dynamic processes quantitatively (Allison 1984; Teachman 1982; Yamaguchi 1991), are used by only a tiny number of anthropologists (Jones 1989; Kertzer and Hogan 1989; Fricke and Teachman 1993; Hill, in press).(2) DETERMINANTS OF MARRIAGE TIMING Alan Macfarlane (1986), writing in the tradition linking the culture and organization of families to demographic events, has suggested that societies lie along a continuum from those in which familial interests dominate to those in which the interests of individuals prevail. Following on the work of Caldwell (1982), he argues that marriage systems are tied to various other elements of domestic economy and demographic regime. In cross-societal comparisons, high familial levels of organization are generally associated with wealth flows from children to senior kin, relatively early ages at marriage, and higher fertility levels (Thornton and Fricke 1987). Widespread transformations toward individuation in these family-organized societies has occupied the attention of social demographers and family sociologists since the early 1960s (Goode 1970; Caldwell 1982; Caldwell et al. …