Peasant Customs and Social Structure: Rural Marriage Festivals in the Magdeburg Region in the 1920s

This analysis of peasant family festivals is part of the wider research programme conducted into the socio-economic development of the Magdeburger Borde in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Although family festivals are a traditional theme of ethnographic research, the intention in this paper is to analyse the complexity of family festivals as an expression of the social infrastructure of village life in the period between 1918 and the 1960s with particular emphasis on marriage festivals in the 1920s.2