Arranged Marriage

Arranged marriage is the practice of selecting a person's marriage partner primarily through the decision of parents, extended family, or a community matchmaker rather than through the independent courtship and choice of the two individuals concerned, historically documented as the predominant form of marriage formation across much of South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa and Europe, and it remains widely practiced today in many of these regions in forms ranging from fully parent-directed unions to arrangements that give the prospective spouses substantial input or a right of refusal. Anthropologists have generally analyzed arranged marriage as a mechanism for consolidating family alliances, property, and social standing, treating marriage as a bond between two families or lineages rather than solely between two individuals, and have distinguished it from the involuntary or coercive forced marriage with which it is sometimes conflated, since most documented arranged-marriage systems formally require or expect the consent of both parties even where family authority over the choice of partner is substantial. Comparative research on arranged and self-selected, or love, marriage systems has become a significant body of work within the anthropology and sociology of kinship and the family.