The Lack of Hypergamic Implications of Marriage

In marriages that are not "principal marriages" undertaken for purposes of having children "to support the household and lineage," a man may take a wife from a somewhat lower macrostatus level. Newar marriage is for the principal marriage rigidly (and for subsidiary marriages more often than not) isogamous. Lynn Bennett, in her study of Nepali Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetris, notes that although they do not have formal hypergamy (and, in fact, cannot, in that neither the Brahmans nor the Chetri have ranked "clans"), they have a marked informal—what Bennett calls an "ad hoc "—hypergamy. She relates this to Dumont's statement about India that the "hypergamous stylization of wife-takers as superior and wife-givers as inferior pervades the whole culture" (Dumont 1964, 101).^[33] Among the Indo-Nepalese Brahmans and Chetri "marriage itself creates a ritual superiority of the groom's people—and hence a hypergamous situation—where there was formerly equality" (1977, 264). Bennett discusses various ritual and social interactions that indicate the inferiority of a male "vis-à-vis groups to which his father had given a sister or to whom he has given a sister or a daughter. . . . On the other hand, he is superior to the groups from which his mother and his wife and his son's wife have come and they must respect him" (1977, 264).^[34]

This status difference between giving and receiving families is denied in discussion and in action in the Newar system. Among any two fathers-in-law, for example, the eldest is the one given the highest status. There are ways of denying and reducing any possible covert implication of the superiority of the groom's family m the relation of a wife's father to his son-in-law. He may, for example, use his son-in-law

for menial tasks. For example, if the father-in-law is involved in some important family ceremony, he will often ask a son-in-law to supervise the family shop. Among the farmers, when the father-in-law is planning a large family feast, it may be his son-in-law who is expected to travel throughout Bhaktapur giving oral invitations to the prospective guests. In middle-level thar s, after certain of the initiation ceremonies for boys, during which they are purified by having their heads shaved, it is often one of the husbands of a "daughter of the house" who is expected to take the hair cuttings to the river and dispose of them. Such use of a woman's father's sons-in-law and, in contrast to the Indo-Nepalese, the lack of any ritual or social indication of "ad hoc " hypergamy, indicate the absence among Newars of even informal overt hypergamic patterns.