Ethnographic Comparison

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Ethnographic Comparison 4 For Bengalis marriage is a contract that represents family interests and not the young couple to be married. In general, the father decides when it is time for his daughter to get married and who should be the groom. In the Bengali region girls get married when they are between fifteen and twenty year old and boy when they are between twenty- five and thirty years old, making the husband at least ten years older than the wife. The community is endogamous, which means the father will look for spouses inside the same caste, because they are Hindu. In the case of Muslim Bengalis cast is not important, but the father would look for spouses form the same social economic standing. Both families will negotiate the dowry…show more content…
The difference with the Bengali is that kinship can also be matrilineal and kin traced can be consanguine or through marriage. For the laws established by the Islam, marriage is the ideal situation and women are expected to be virgins, they cannot have pre-marital sex or live together before marriage. Also, polygamy is allowed, and in general this only happens in the cases where the husband has the means to support two families. When a woman is a widow she has find the possibility the get remarried, in many cases as a second or third wife, because she cannot work outside from her household. In case the woman loses her husband, and she has young children Kurd traditions forced the woman to remarry her brother in law, this is known as Levirate. Unfortunately, Kurd men do not want to married and take care of other man’s children and widows find a limited market and the customs show that widows married their husband’s b rother. On the other hand, when a husband loses her wife before she has given birth or living young kids behind, the custom says her family or lineage has to provide another bride, which normally is a younger sister. Bengali and Kurds have similar marriage traditions because in both cultures most marriages are arranged and endogamous. When couples get married, the bride move to husband’s household which is walking distance from her family’s household because
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