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Article published In: The Pragmatics of Ritual
Edited by Dániel Z. Kádár and Juliane House
[Pragmatics 30:1] 2020
► pp. 88–115

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“By the elders’ leave, I do”

Rituals, ostensivity and perceptions of the moral order in Iranian Tehrani marriage ceremonies

ORCiD logo with link | Independent researcher
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 18 December 2019
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19021.kou
Abstract
The basis of this study is the view that social ritual practices embody and reinforce the moral order of communities. It takes a step towards providing more empirical research on the ritual practices in lesser studied languages by examining ethnographic data collected during marriage ceremonies in Tehran. Extracts taken from marriage ceremonies and a film extract are examined in terms of recurrence, liminality, embodiment of the moral order and emotivity, elements identified in Kádár’s definition of ritual ( 2017. Politeness, Impoliteness and Ritual: Maintaining the Moral Order in Interpersonal Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The paper makes a theoretical contribution by showing that ostensivity can also be considered an important facet of ritual. In ritual practices connected with marriage, ostensivity is experienced by participants and observers as a means of maintaining the moral order. The paper proposes future areas of research for the theoretical refinement of the concept of ostensivity and further examination of the relationship that ostensivity has with ta’arof (Iranian ritual politeness) and face.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Brief overview
    • 1.2Previous research
    • 1.3Iranian marriage rituals
  • 2.Objectives of this study
  • 3.Methodology and data collection
  • 4.Data analysis
    • 4.1‘Exchange of promise to marry’ (baleh-boroon) ceremonies
      • 4.1.1Interpretation of the ceremonies of “exchange of promise to marry”
    • 4.2Official wedding ceremonies (‘aqd)
      • 4.2.1Interpretation of official wedding ceremonies
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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