Bridewealth

Bridewealth, sometimes called bride price, is money, livestock or other property given by a groom or his family to the family of the bride at marriage, documented across large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Melanesia/Papua New Guinea, where in exceptional cases payments have reportedly reached $100,000. It is among the most anciently documented marriage customs in written history: the Code of Hammurabi already regulates a 'purchase price' paid into the house of a father-in-law, and the Hebrew Bible similarly specifies a payment for a virgin. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic ethnography of the Nuer people of South Sudan (fieldwork from 1930, published 1940) is one of the most influential modern anthropological documentations of the practice. Anthropologist Philippe Rospabé has argued against interpreting bridewealth as a literal purchase of a wife, proposing instead that it functions as a symbolic gesture acknowledging, but never paying off, the husband's permanent debt to the wife's parents. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/