Folklore
Dabneeg

Overview
In a traditional Hmong wedding, the groom must pay a price for his bride. This is referred to this as the “Bride Price” and use interchangeable with the terms nqe tshoob (“wedding price”) and Nqe taub hau (price of the “bride’s head”). According to anthropologist Kao-Ly Yang, the term nqe mis nqis hno captures a third element of the Bride Price: the payment necessary for the nurturing and upbringing (“price of milk and food”) needed to raise the daughter. Together, he says, these elements make up the totality of meaning of the Bride Price, which equates to “compensation of the bride’s breeding” until her marriage. See LINK.

Bride Price v. the Dowry
The Bride Price is not the same thing as a dowry, which is also given at Hmong weddings. The dowry is essentially the totality of money and gifts that parents separately offer the couple. The key difference between the Bride price and dowry is that the latter has little impact on the social relationships or “contracts” that are entered into as a result of the marriage. Nevertheless, it is typical that the bride’s family will give gifts to the newlyweds as they are able, including cash, household items, clothes, and jewelry in celebration of the new life the couple is embarking on together.

Pre-Wedding Negotiation
The successful conclusion of a Hmong wedding hinges on a negotiation between the groom’s family and the bride’s family the night before the wedding. This ritual, which takes place around a table in the bride’s home, may last hours. Dr. Yang refers to the event as the “social core of the wedding” because it helps to define family and social relationships and is symbolic of a social contract in the sense that two families or clans acknowledge a binding relationship beyond the dyad relationship itself and agree to abide by certain norms of behavior thereafter. A difficult negotiation over Bride Price (which can happen) opens the door for reprisal and bad feelings over time.

Bride Price: A Traditional Perspective
From the day a daughter is born, her parents love and care for her. Whether asking her to help tend the garden in hot weather or overseeing her education, parents devore themselves to their children. As a daughter matures, parents depend on her even more to help out with family responsibilities, such as watching younger siblings, cooking, or caring for grandparents. When the bride is married, she literally becomes a part of the groom’s family, a bittersweet transition for her parents. In this context, it is mistaken to think of the Bride Price, as an attempt to sell a daughter for money. Instead, it is an expression of appreciation from the groom (and his family) to the parents of the bride for love, care, and upbringing of a fine young woman. In large part, the perception of the parents’ success in raising a “good” daughter and future wife determines the Bride Price.

Marriage as a Social Contract
For this reason, there is a lot of pressure built up around the “worthiness” of a bride (and groom) and sometimes the request is denied outright if there is concern about the suitability of one or the other partner in relation to the other. Even when the formal proposal is accepted, the pre-wedding negotiations for Bride Price and they are not always completely genial, and can even take on an adversarial tone at times. However, no matter how tense the negotiation, if a settlement is reached, there is cause for celebration and everyone can leave knowing that the wedding will be a happy event for all.

In addition, the Bride Price has another function that the bride’s parents and relatives believe is extremely important: it serves as a mechanism to protect the daughter in case she is mistreated or rejected by the groom’s family after the marriage. In fact , The bride price is refundable if the marriage gets disrupted and dissolved less than 5 years; and the bride is found to be responsible for the cause of their marriage breakup. Hence, the time limit for the groom and his family to ask for the refund of their bride price is around 5 years. After the 5-year time limit, there is no guarantee that the groom’s family would receive their bride price back from the bride’s family, regardless of who may have caused the breakup of the marriage. The rationale between this 5-year time limit is that by then the bride has made significant contributions in terms of childbearing, food production, and material resources to the groom and his extended family.

Fee Structure
The issue of payment to the bride’s family is quite serious and can be a significant burden to the groom and his family. In the U.S., the price ranged anywhere from $5,000 to $ 25,000. In part, because of climbing Bride Prices, in 2005 the United Hmong International Inc., an organization of Hmong leaders (led by General Vang Pao) announced a cap of $5.000 on the bride price. This decision was announced to clan leaders across the United States who have encouraged Hmong families to abide by it. For the most part they have.

Is the Bride Price Demeaning to Women?
Given the patriarchal nature of Hmong society as well as the sense of very different expectations concerning gender roles, the idea of debating the worth of a women can appear antagonistic to established Western notions of equality. Some argue that the concept of a Bride Price reduces the social value of women to the status of objects or merchandise. One interesting irony is that educated Hmong women are beginning to command a higher Bride Price because of the perceived value of the skills and benefit that accrue to the groom’s family. Is this a sign of positive views about strong, educated women or further “evidence” of exploitation? A modern perspective would suggest that women remain objects to be acted upon without power or voice.

A Counter Argument
The bride price serves a symbolic societal function to contemplate and carry out the unimaginable: giving away forever a loved and cherished human being. When a woman gets married, she totally integrates the new clan. According to Dr. Yang, he Bride price “has to have a cultural meaning, other than a payment of another human being. Thus the Hmong culture defines the bride price as a symbolic gift or a debt.” The Bride price serves as a “symbolic object,”and a guarantee of communication and social capital, “an abstract thing” that “overcomes, sweetens, and annihilates the impossible, the unimaginable transaction of human beings where a human being (the groom) pays a price for another human being (the bride).” See LINK