Identity

In any wedding, but especially visible in intercultural weddings, the ritual serves as a vehicle for the performance of identity (among other functions).1 It has already been explained how weddings are rituals, and performances. New here is the question of exactly what is performed; my answer is identity. Intercultural wed-dings are especially valuable as sites of identity statements, for any one culture increases in visibility when contrasted with a second. Lukes (1975) told us that “a community is reminded of its identity as represented by and told in a master narrative” (p. 70). A master narrative is an underlying theme used repeatedly by members of a group, and it is certainly possible to suggest that weddings serve as one such master narrative in modern American culture. In other words, each group tells itself a story about itself, and that story serves to reinforce identity. Combining these ideas, weddings can appropriately be described as performance narratives, because each bride and groom is given an opportunity to create, and then display (perform) in public, their own story (narrative) of identity: Who they have come from, who they are now, and who they wish to be in the future. Like other types of stories people tell, weddings not only say what the tellers wish to be true, the telling itself actually makes the statements true, for it is through the display of identity that it becomes real (Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992). For this reason rituals have been termed “dramas of persuasion” (Myerhoff, 1992, p. 156); what they persuade us of is the identity of the performers. Fortes (1983) expanded on this theory:

Displaying self through performance makes an idea concrete. How does one know one is a Jew, or anything? One can only know it, obviously, by showing it is some way; to sit back in your armchair and know gets you nowhere; it is meaningless. So if you want to know who you are, you have got to show it, and anthropologists know that one way of showing it is by performing a ritual or ceremony, (pp. 394-395)

Thus the families of bride and groom want their own cultures shown because they want to see a public commitment to continue them.2 As Grimes (1995) put it, “a wedding rite is a ceremonial realignment, not just an invention, of ties that bind a couple…. In a wedding, two people ceremonially make relatives of each other” (p. 99). But, in fact, they do more than just make relatives of each other: in becoming relatives, they inherit one another’s relatives as well, bringing into being a new, larger family, with themselves at the nexus. As Root (2001) put it: “The most significant product of families is future generations” (p. 78). Children of an intercultural couple are even more closely tied to both sets of grandparents by blood rather than marriage, which may be why even parents who refuse to accept an intercultural son-or daughter-in-law often reconcile once there are grandchildren.