Bride price is directly related to the value of the trousseau and the scale of the festivities. The public examination of the trousseau makes skimping readily detectable, and since the one major aim of the proceedings is prestige, meanness or deceit provide their own sanctions. The public festivities are even more plainly a matter of conspicuous consumption. People said - perhaps an exaggeration - that the bride price represented only one-third of the cost of marrying a son.
Not every one can find the resources for such a display. In fact, the scale of bride price and the scale of the wedding vary with the social rank of the parties and with the social distance between them. Any household which aspires to respectability will demand, and expect to give bride price, but if the household is poor, it may be a much reduced one. Thus, in 1950 a girl was married to a close-by village for only T.L.300. Her father was old and poor, and had not the resources to face largescale ceremonies.
Between brothers, bride price is very much less, and a wedding between father's brother's children is always a small-scale affair, with little or no publicity. During my stay, a girl was married to the house next door to her father's brother's son for only T.L.200 and with so little fuss that I did not know of it till after it had happened. But between less close kin, kinship seems to affect the bride price proportionately less. One man, who told me how he had bargained the price for his son's bride down from T.L.700 to T.L.400 said that this was due to his not very close kinship with the bride's father. The stranger the environment to which a girl is to go, the higher the bride price and the greater the festivities. One nearby village had kin ties with a more prosperous village, Elmalï, some fifty miles away, through migration in the last generation. When a girl was married to this distant place, her whole native village combined to provide entertainment worthy of their more sophisticated affines.
When an unmarried girl marries a man who is already, or has been previously married, this relation between bride price and festivities no longer holds. The price is often much the same as would be asked from an unmarried young man's father, but the