A Comparison: The Athabascans versus the Amish

            Comparing the year in isolation of the Athabascan girls to the rumspringa of the Amish is difficult, because one is an ethnic group and one is a religious sect. Small similarities are present if one looks closely. Unless they are acting English, Amish girls keep their hair covered just as the Athabascans girls wear their hoods. Amish girls are pulled from formal education systems after eighth grade, but some choose to continue during their rumspringas. Teachers are moving to get their female Athabascan students to remain in school during their year of seclusion, where the girls would have been kept from the public eye before. And lastly, both groups of girls do a considerable amount of physical labor during their liminal stages between childhood and adulthood. For Athabascan girls, they are taught to sew and to bead, spending an enormous amount of their time in doing so. The Amish girls attend to all of their chores, their families, their communities, and their religious teachings.

            There are quite a few differences between the two groups though. One being age: an Athabascan girl goes into her period of quarantine with the occurrence of her first menstruation, putting her coming of age in her early teens. An Amish rumspringa begins at age 16. Another difference is that Athabascan girls are kept apart from people during their ritual, more ritualistically now than in the past, whereas young Amish girls are encouraged to get out and meet people in hopes of finding a man in which they wish to marry, and to experience “worldly activities”.

An Amish girl’s rumspringa is more about experiencing the world and giving into its temptations before conforming to their Amish principles of no technology, drugs, drinking, or the like, as opposed to an Athabascan girl’s year of seclusion in which she learns about womanhood and how to take care of a family, something young Amish girls learn simply by growing up and helping their mothers with younger siblings. Rumspringas show us that the Amish are willing to let their children make the choice between the outside world and getting baptized into the Amish church. They believe that, if they have raised their children correctly, their teenagers will make the most out of their couple years of freedom before settling down with a good, sturdy, Amish man. In conclusion, the rumspringas of the Amish and the year of seclusion of the Athabascan girls hardly have anything in common with one another, other than preparing the girls to settle down into the lives of tradition that their parents have weaned them into.

A Feast Among the Herds: A Mongolian Marriage

            In Mongolian culture, unions between a man and a woman are instigated by the couple themselves as opposed to being arranged in any form or fashion. With a matchmaker to act as a middleman (ChinaCulture.org 2010), the groom to be will send many presents to the home of his bride. The gifts will include meats, skins, wines, fruits, animals, tea, herbs, etc. If each present is accepted and an acceptable bridewealth is paid, the bride’s parents will accept the proposal and a date is set.

            When the groom arrives, he and the parents of the bride go through an intricate ritualized exchange of gifts. They exchange clothing, wine, foods, an entire roasted sheep is presented at one point. This is an interesting ritual to point out, the fact that there is both a bridewealth and a dowry that get exchanged. Normally it is one or the other.

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Mongolian marriages are “contractual agreement between families rather than a religious ceremony” (countrystudies.us/Mongolia). There is little gender stratification in Mongolian society, although men and women both partake in clear-cut activities that are deemed gender specific. Come the day of the wedding, the two families move their camps closer together and they put on a massive party. The bride plays the perfect hostess, serving the matchmakers, her husband’s family, her own family, and all of their friends that have come to celebrate. There are as many celebrants as the newlyweds can afford to feed.

            Mongolians don’t have a set caste system, but they do tend to marry within their class. The Mongolians that continue to raise animals out on the steppes have a habit of marrying other herders. Business people typically marry other business people (countrystudies.us/Mongolia).

As Soon as Her Feet Touch the Ground: A Romani Marriage

            Among the Romani peoples of Europe, marriage traditions vary with every tribe. Some allow courtship between couples. Others thrive on arranged marriages. The Roma most often marry within their communities, their tribes. However, there have been cases of Romani men marrying women from outside of the Roma ethnic group. Heritage is traced through the father in Roma society, and these outside women are usually permitted, especially if they adhere to the Romani culture and beliefs. On the other hand, Romani women are not allowed to marry outside men.

            A common stereotype, as shown in the Romani proverb “As soon as her feet reach the floor, she’s ready to wed”, is that the Roma marry off their daughters at ridiculously young ages, even before she’s had her first menstrual period. This is not true, although Roma are tutored to wed in their mid-teens, between 14 and 16 years old. Being a virgin at marriage is key for Romani women, bringing shame and bad luck to both her husband’s family and her own should she be found out come the night of her wedding. After their wedding, if a man is found to be unfaithful, there are no hard feelings, “it increased the prestige of the man, and sometimes the wife would brag about it and use it to demonstrate the quality of her husband” (romove.radio.cz 2000).

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            The Romani engagement consists of the fathers of the bride and the groom coming together to settle a bride price, more as compensation for the father of the bride for losing a daughter than actually buying the girl. There are two parts to Roma marriages: a ceremonial wedding and a church wedding. The ceremonial wedding is headed over by the tribal chief, and the couple drink liquor from each other’s hands before kissing. From then, they are seen as husband and wife in Roma society. The second wedding takes place in a couple of years, after the woman has proved herself fertile and faithful.