What makes a wedding? Why do weddings matter? How does the stuff of weddings - the gifts, decorations, clothing, and symbols - communicate ideas about marriage in different cultures around the world?

This exhibition provides a glimpse into how weddings and marriage are celebrated in five different countries of the world - and also how they are changing - through photographs and objects that we have collected as part of a collaborative research project in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. 

Social anthropology is the comparative study of human cultures and behaviour - including family forms, ritual, religion, politics, and economics - in their social context. The study of the variations between different cultures, and the common humanity which underlies them, is at its heart.

Our research programme, ‘A Global Anthropology of Transforming Marriage’ includes five different projects, each conducted by a different researcher:

Each project has involved long-term fieldwork conducted over a year or more, during which we have lived in these different places and engaged with as many aspects of marriage as possible. Weddings are just one theme of our research, which explores how marriage is changing, and the wider social implications of these changes. The objects you will see here are not comprehensive; they reflect the serendipity of fieldwork.

Although the places and cultures we are investigating are very different, some of the themes that have emerged in our work are similar. Weddings can be occasions for elaborate and costly exchanges between a couple and members of their families; the rituals provide opportunities to do things in a way that is similar to how they were done in the past, but also opportunities for innovation; they connect people to new sets of relatives, and to different generations of their families.