Category Archives: cultural evolution

Arranged Marriages in India

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In traditional arranged marriages, the bride and the groom have limited possibilities in making their choice of whom to marry and how the wedding is planned. Other family members, religious leaders, community elders, or special matchmakers choose a good match for the couple and make sure they get married in the right way.

The freedom of marital choice for prospective spouses and specific practices of how weddings and marriages are organized vary across different collectivistic countries, in urban and rural contexts, and in traditional or relatively modernized societies. There are no universal or common practices for arranged marriages that fit all collectivistic countries. Cultural traditions of arranged marriages vary across traditional societies.

A Collectivistic Perspective on Arranged Marriage

Arranged marriages are quite common in collectivistic cultures because of the high value of individual interdependence in social groups and families. Marriage is a matter of family, not only of a bride and a groom. Although they may feel their romantic attraction and experience love for another man or woman, as it is beautifully depicted in Indian movies, they usually understand that an arranged marriage is a cultural tradition. Therefore, they usually consent to such an arrangement.

They may have a certain degree of freedom in their choice of a partner depending on cultural variations across regions, social groups, and castes in India. However, they have very limited options to decide how wedding ceremonies are organized. This is a significant issue for the family and cultural tradition. The wedding is an important life experience not just for the couple but also for their families and all others involved. The planning, preparations, and rituals engage strong sentiments and feelings.

The collectivistic conception of self in these societies includes not only the individual herself or himself but also other family members and interdependent connections with them. Therefore, a man or woman in a collectivistic culture understands that the choice of spouse and marriage is a responsibility rather than a freedom. They feel interdependent with their family, so they adjust their decisions and actions accordingly. They feel responsible for the family’s interests and for the future of their marriage. Romantic passion is of secondary importance.

The perspectives of Western individualistic cultures and Eastern collectivistic cultures on arranged marriage differ substantially.

Nevertheless, modernization, urbanization, education, and increased social mobility in those societies have moved modern marital practices away from arranged marriages.

What Is the Tradition of Arranged Marriage in India?

Indians typically marry in their early twenties. Parrents or other kin usually arrange the mating process. The cultural patterns of mating and marriage are diverse in different parts of India. These practices also vary in rural and urban contexts and across traditional Indian castes. Variations are observed even within the same geographical regions (Banerjee, Duflo, Ghatak, & Lafortune, 2013).

Indian culture looks at marriage as a social institution from a collectivist perspective. This view considers the selection of a prospective partner as a family matter. So, young men and women respect the kin’s opinion and engage in a discussion with the family. Matchmaking is an important process that may include professional matchmakers or matrimonial websites. The process is perceived beyond the simple dichotomies of arranged versus love marriages. The modern distinctions between these two types of marriage are no longer as clearly apparent as they once were. Contemporary cultural practices do not enforce a choice between the person and the family. Young men and women treat the family’s permission as a significant but equal factor (Bhandari, 2018).

A wedding is a significant event not just for the couple but also for their families. This celebratory ceremony must be perfectly arranged in terms of rituals and timing. The preparation for the event and involvement in it engage intense sentimental emotions for many who attend. In addition, the arrangement of processes and conditions also calls attention to cultural values, norms, social obligations, kinship bonds, and economic resources (Heitzman & Worden, 1996).

Modern Arranged Marriages in India

Nowadays, in India, social and economic mobility, the proportion of the middle class, and modernization have been expanding, especially in urban areas. New generations of educated young men and women from the middle class have more control over their marital choices and the ways in which they marry (Kamble, Shackelford, Pham, & Buss, 2014).

These young people accept arranged marriage as a cultural practice, yet they modernize its meaning. They manage to reconcile the cultural traditions of family-making with their motives for personal growth. They figure out how to live in Indian culture’s modernity (Sharangpani, 2010).

Since Indian society is regionally and socially diverse in terms of religious and cultural practices (Hindu, Christianity, Buddhism, and Muslim), the extent to which modern innovations in traditions evolve varies across different parts of the country, social classes, and castes.

Transformations of Gender Roles and Arranged Marriages in India

Generally, in modern India, arranged marriages are gradually declining. The increasing geographic mobility of the population, changing relationship networks, and social media act as cultural factors of social change. They open up new avenues for young Indians to choose a marital partner and pursue marriage.

Currently, extended families and kin are less inclined and less capable of overseeing the matchmaking of their children. They are less directly involved in the marital process. It is especially true among Indian urbanites and those living abroad (Agrawal, 2015; Allendorf & Pandian, 2016).

Perceptions of gender roles and the status of women are changing. The transformations in the gender image of a new Indian woman are publicly visible. They are pervasive in many personal narratives and web-based representations. The new gender role models combine cultural rootedness and a modern lifestyle in their relationships between men and women. Therefore, the images of love and marriage are gradually changing. They adjust to the new realities and lifestyles (Allendorf & Pandian, 2016; Titzmann, 2013).

Cultural Proxemics and the Immediacy of Interpersonal Communication

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Humans are territorial species, even though their notions of territorial space and proxemics are different from many other animals and vary between hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies. Humans, as social animals, tend to form a sense of in-groups and out-groups, as well as in-group space. People identify certain territorial spaces as “ours” and “mine,” whereas they identify other spaces as “theirs.”

Furthermore, social evolution has been changing how people in different cultures understand basic territorial ideas (Hall & Hall, 1990; Karandashev, 2021).

In another post, I briefly explained the typical Western interpretations of proxemics and immediacy. However, the cultural norms of appropriate spatial distance in relationships and the ideas of personal, in-group, and out-group space vary across societies (Karandashev, 2021).

Proxemics, Personal and Public Space Across Cultures and Individual Differences

How close is too close? It depends on where people live. The cultural traditions of some societies make people sensitive to crowds and situations when others intrude on their personal bubble. They may consider the larger space their personal one. In other societies, people can be less sensitive to crowding and view their personal bubbles as smaller.

Cultural Sensitivity to Personal Space

The cultures of different countries also vary in their territorial concepts and sensitivity. People may feel uncomfortable, anxious, or even aggressive when others invade their personal space or in-group territory. Some can be tolerant of such an intrusion, but only for a short period of time. Others can be totally intolerant. Individual differences in personality, as well as cultural traditions, play a role in all these cases.

Such differences, for instance, are evident in rural and urban cultural settings. Across many societies, women value more personal space from strangers than do men. Older people tend to spatially distance themselves from others. On the other hand, young people prefer closer distances in communication (Sorokowska et al., 2017).

Researchers thought that variations in climate and the availability of air conditioning could cause cultural proxemics in spatial behavior. People in warmer climates tend to keep a shorter distance from others than those in colder climates (Andersen, 1988; Sorokowska et al., 2017; Sussman & Rosenfeld, 1982).

These preferences can differ in different types of relationships. Those living in colder climates often prefer to be quite near their friends, perhaps to stay warm. A warm room makes people socially closer. However, those living in warm climates often get closer to strangers.

Cultural Preferences for Interpersonal Distance

People’s preferences for interpersonal distance vary across societies around the world.

For instance, people in Peru, Argentina, and Bulgaria tend to stay spatially close to strangers, whereas those from Hungary, Romania, and Saudi Arabia want to keep the most space. Americans are different from both groups of those countries; they are somewhere in the middle of the range between these two opposite types of cultures (see Sorokowska et al., 2017).

Personal bubbles of people are relatively small in several South American and South European countries, such as Argentina, Peru, Spain, southern France, Greece, and Italy. They are able to communicate easily across a short distance. For example, in Argentina, many people tend to be “close-talkers” and stand about 1 meter, or a little less, away from strangers when chatting.

In general, people in many South American and South European countries expect less personal space in communication than people in Asia. Some exceptions may occur. For example, people in Romania prefer more personal space, standing a spacious 1.5 meters away from strangers. 

Personal bubbles are bigger in North America and many northern European countries, such as England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. People tend to preserve their personal distance at all times. People in northern Europe generally feel uneasy when someone touches them or brushes their overcoat sleeve, which is related to their cultural feature of interpersonal spatial communication. For people in the north, the conversational distance that is typical of southern European cultures can be viewed as overly close and intimate.

For example, in some cultures, people may crowd instead of standing in line in front of ATMs or waiting for other public services.

Cultural Proxemics Depend on the Types of Interpersonal Relationships

How close we are to our partners, friends, coworkers, and strangers differs greatly across societies.

It appears that we all understand that our relatives and friends may stay closer to us than strangers. Strangers are expected to keep a public distance, while friends naturally stay closer. For example, in Romania, strangers are expected to keep their distance, but friends can creep up on you.

Surprisingly, however, Saudi Arabians are more distant from their friends than Argentinians are from strangers. Hungarians like to keep strangers and loved ones at arm’s length, or at least 75 centimeters apart. Norwegians want their close friends to be close to them (expected to be about half a meter away), even though they prefer a farther distance with strangers.

Proxemics of High-Contact and Low-Contact Cultures

The American anthropologist Edward Hall (1966) proposed grouping societies into contact and noncontact cultures. Their cultural norms define the social distance that people should prefer in interpersonal communication. Accordingly, people from high-contact cultures favor immediate nonverbal behaviors compared to those from low-contact cultures. They may interpret the same distance differently. It depends on their typical cultural norms of spatial behavior. In non-contact cultures, people stand farther apart and don’t touch as much as in contact cultures. We saw some examples of these social norms above.

All societies across the world have been classified into “contact cultures” (South America, the Middle East, and Southern Europe) and “non-contact cultures” (Northern Europe, North America, and Asia). Generally, those in high-contact cultures communicate with a shorter interpersonal distance and greater touch, whereas people in low-contact cultures prefer to keep their distance and avoid touch. Those from high-contact cultures favor tactile and olfactory ways of communication over people from low-contact cultures (Andersen, 1988; Sussman & Rosenfeld, 1982).

Arabs, Latin Americans, and southern and eastern Europeans are the people of high-contact cultures. They tend to keep interpersonal immediacy in relationships. They do this by increasing sensory input, interacting at closer distances, maintaining more direct body orientations, and touching more frequently. Asians, North Americans, and northern Europeans tend to be relatively low in such spatial behavioral tendencies as people of low-contact cultures (Andersen, 1988; Sussman & Rosenfeld, 1982).

Certain patterns of interpersonal special behaviors of people from high-contact and low-contact cultures are visible in many other situations of everyday life and affective relationships (Karandashev, 2021; Patterson, 1983).

What Is the Sexual Revolution?

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The word “sexual revolution” is commonly associated with rapid and substantial changes in cultural attitudes toward sex in the United States of America and many West- and North-European countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, the culture of sexual freedom spread to other modernized Western countries. It was largely a youth movement for freedom of sex and love in those societies.

How has the “sexual revolution” changed the culture of eroticism?

How the Sexual Revolution Changed the Culture

The sexual revolution legitimized sex for its pleasurable and expressive qualities alone. Sex was considered more than just a sexual need of the body. Sexual intercourse for the purpose of pleasure rather than reproduction, without the commitment of a marital relationship, was acceptable. It was culturally acceptable to engage in recreational sex. Thus, sex became a sphere of sensual pleasure.

Sexual Fulfillment in Love

Men and women expected sex to be expressively and sensually pleasurable. The erotic aspect of sex increased its value for a person’s life and relationships. Sexual fulfillment became a condition of true love. The sexualization and erotization of love were the major tendencies of that cultural change. Love and sex finally joined together in the minds of men and women (after centuries of their separation in the cultural norms of old societies). Sex became a means of personal fulfillment and self-affirmation as well.

The pleasurable and expressive qualities of sex received their independent values. The division between sex and love started to grow. Sex became unbound, and romantic love and romantic intimacy turned out to be less important than sex to show love. Sexual expression no longer relied exclusively on romantic feelings. The gap between sex and love seems to be widening. 

The Sexual Revolution in Sexual Equality

The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s–1980s transformed sexual attitudes for both men and women. The double sexual standards for men and women were abandoned as a cultural hypocrisy of the past when male sexuality was viewed as carnal and female sexuality as maternal. It was accepted that female sexual longing is natural in the same way as male sexual yearning. Women received equal rights with men to give and receive sensual pleasures (see more in another post, “The sexual revolution in sexual equality”).

The studies of those years showed that differences between male and female sexual behaviors and attitudes steadily declined (see Karandashev, 2017 for a review).

Sex, Love, and Marriage

In the 1960s, marriage became widely popular in North America and Western Europe, with 95 percent of all people marrying. Men and women married younger, and divorce rates held steady at low levels.

In many modernized countries, love and sexual satisfaction became normative preconditions of marriage. Good sex demonstrated love. The pleasurable and expressive facets of sex were to show love in premarital relationships and marriages. Sexual fulfillment and companionship became the key concepts of an ideal marriage. Sexual dissatisfaction became a legitimate reason for divorce.

Cultural Acceptance of Homosexuality

Shifts in attitudes toward homosexual identity and subculture were another cultural change during the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s. Modernized Western societies decriminalized and devictimized homosexuality and other sexual varieties. Psychiatrists abandoned considering homosexuality as an abnormality and began to view it as a form of sexual diversity.

“The homosexuals” walked forward as individuals with their own distinct psychological nature. Gays and lesbians wanted social inclusion and legitimation. The LGBT movement created a subculture that gave these people positive identities and ways of living.

Modernized Western societies indicated a cultural trend towards a more sexually pluralistic society. Discrimination based on sexual identity was also on the decline in society.

Advancements of the “Sexual Revolution”

All these transformations were landmarks of cultural advancements in sexual attitudes. These were the emerging culture of eroticism, the larger acceptance of human rights for sexual pleasure, the proliferation of pornography, the acceptance of sexual equality for men and women, the greater tolerance toward premarital and nonmarital sex, the substantial increase in cohabitation and rates of divorce, public receptivity to the “playboy” lifestyle, and expanded tolerance toward homosexuality.

All of these cultural trends occurred in the United States and in many Western-European and North-European countries, even though older people didn’t like them. These changes reflected long-term trends.

The Slow Cultural Evolution of the “Sexual Revolution”

The sexual revolt in favor of sexual rights, equality, and diversity happened. Yet, many people still lacked a sense of self and the autonomy required to maintain a sexually fulfilling relationship. Therefore, many men and women were still confused about their sexual rights, sexual roles, and gender identities.

The societies were still in the transitional stage towards a culture of relationships that engaged all these new cultural norms. The “sexual revolution” was mostly a young and rebellious movement protesting against the old-fashioned and rigid sexual attitudes of the past. It was a declaration of human rights for the free expression of sex and love in modernized and individualistic Western societies.

The sexual revolt happened. Yet people of other age groups remained relatively conservative in those societies for a while. They were not easily receptive to such a drastic transformation of cultural attitudes toward sex.

The “sexual revolution” of this kind continued as “sexual evolution” in the following decades, spreading to the minds of older generations as well.

The cultural evolution of sexual attitudes was slower in more traditional countries (Karandashev, 2017).