Johannes Lenhard 
What is being paid for in marriage payments? 

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Pedagogy – Science, Theory, Anthropology, grade: 2:1, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: While the question presupposes that a potential ‘trade’ takes place in marriage payments, I argue in this paper that the preoccupation with the ‘things’ traded in for instance most of the structural-functionalist analysis is mistaken. Much more, marriage payments are about social reproduction as a whole. In the course of the analysis, I want to qualify the manifest idea that things are ‘exchanged’ in marriage payments, either immediately or over time, as developed mainly by structural functionalists. According to the traditional paradigm, the single underlying formula is ‘money versus rights’. Rights in this context can relate to very diverging parts of social life as I will show below. Woman, children, sexuality are often – as structuralists such as Levi-Strauss (1977) argue – part of a wider system of potentially reciprocal exchanges. It is important, however, to not