Svaha! – a light ontology of the institution of marriage.
Words from a happily married. In the opening wedding scene on Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum , the bride was carried on a sedan chair to the groom’s house to consummate the marriage. Traditional Chinese wedding music played along the way, which Mo Yan reckoned was comparable to funeral music, as if the road to marriage was a road to the afterlife. It was an age, after all, when marriage arrangements were by order of the family instead of according to free will, leading to possible tragedies or non-tragedies. Some things of those ages are still telling in modern society. For one, wedding celebrates the union of the individuals, boy and girl, man and wife (as the saying goes, but why can’t it be husband and lady?) in a single (hopefully for most) once-in-a-lifetime moment in life. But behind the scenes it has always been a family affair, with the not so invisible hand pointing at familial preferences attuned to cultural requirements. Beyond a union of the individuals, it is a meta - ...