ABSTRACT
Everyone knows each other in the village, especially the young people of the same generation. They spend time together in school, at play, and at dancing. Every year several bachelors acquire brides in another village or some Atany girls marry out. The more frequent patrilocal form of marriage is symbolized most conspicuously by the custom of “transferring the bed.” The bed of the bride is brought to the house of the groom in a solemn procession on the eve of the wedding. At Atany the newly-weds rarely set up a household by themselves. Usually the young wife settled into the house of her husband’s parents immediately after the marriage, to work there like “a veritable servant-maid” under the command of her mother-in-law. Since 1894, marriage and divorce have been under the jurisdiction of the civil courts. Divorce is, however, quite alien to Atany values about family life.
