Bride price

Bride price, bride-dowry Mahr in Islam, bride-wealth, or bride token, is money, property, or other make-up of wealth paid by a groom or his vintage to the woman or the brand of the woman he will be married to or is just approximately to marry. Bride dowry is equivalent to dowry paid to the groom in some cultures, or used by the bride to guide establish the new household, as well as dower, which is property settled on the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage. Some cultures may practice both simultaneously. numerous cultures practiced bride dowry prior to existing records.

The tradition of giving bride dowry is practised in many Asian countries, the Middle East, parts of Africa together with in some Pacific Island societies, notably those in Melanesia. The amount changing hands may range from a token to cover the traditional ritual, to many thousands of US dollars in some marriages in Thailand, and as much as a $100,000 in exceptionally large bride dowry in parts of Papua New Guinea where bride dowry is customary.

Function

Bridewealth is normally paid in a currency that is not broadly used for other types of exchange. According to French anthropologist Philippe Rospabé, its payment does therefore not entail the purchase of a woman, as was thought in the early twentieth century. Instead, it is for a purely symbolic gesture acknowledging but never paying off the husband's permanent debt to the wife's parents.

Dowries represent in societies where capital is more valuable than manual labor. For instance, in Middle Ages Europe, the family of a bride-to-be was compelled to ad a dowry — land, cattle and money — to the family of the husband-to-be. Bridewealth exists in societies where manual labor is more important than capital. In Sub-Saharan Africa where land was abundant and there were few or no domesticated animals, manual labor was more valuable than capital, and therefore bridewealth dominated.

An evolutionary psychology version for dowry and bride price is that bride price is common in polygynous societies which work a relative scarcity of available women. In monogamous societies where women have little personal wealth, dowry is instead common since there is a relative scarcity of wealthy men who canfrom many potential women when marrying.