FILIPINO WEDDINGS: BEYOND BRIDE AND GROOM

The two weddings I attended this past month again brought home this thought – that a Catholic Filipino wedding ritual has ramifications beyond the union of bride and groom. It’s a celebration of family solidarity, an event to strengthen alliances with friends and colleagues, an occasion to forge community ties, and a time for Holy Mother the Church to make sure the Lord becomes a partner in the couple’s wedded life. But enough of these manifest functions. The wedding ritual also asserts the primacy of heterosexual unions; the primacy of public rituals over private affairs; the indissolubility of marriage (and the distaste for divorce); the desirability of procreation; the superiority of men over women, and the dependence on families of orientation, now with godparents included, for guidance and support. In short, the ritual -- staged in relatively plush settings to symbolize one’s status – affirms the power of family and church to direct the couple’s life and to propagate an ideology that will sustain that power. So much for latent functions. The point is: weddings enable and constrain, and I feel most couples prefer a ceremony that’s more enabling than constraining. The choice of some couples to defray all wedding expenses (as was the case in the two weddings I attended) is a subtle attempt of bride and groom to lessen that constraint, wield a little power, and assert their independence. I wish the couples good luck! The power of social institutions is not as easy to break as the wine glasses we tinkled to get the groom to kiss the bride.

ASCRIBED AND ACHIEVED STATUS

I have a tough time teaching the notions of achieved and ascribed status because often the boundaries between the two concepts can be fuzzy. Sex and nationality are supposedly ascribed statuses but sex-change operations and naturalization procedures give these statuses an achieved quality. And then there’s poverty: is being poor an ascribed or achieved status? Some will argue that poverty is an achieved status since people who are unable to go to school, find work, fight for their rights, lack social capital, or are just plain lazy will most likely become poor. But how about children who are born into poverty and are too young to fend for themselves? Poverty in this case becomes an ascribed status – “a social position,” in John Macionis’ words, “that someone receives at birth or assumes involuntarily later in life.” Can’t we speak of affluence in the same way? And don’t the statuses of disability and terminal illness operate in like manner? How about an artist whose talents may be both inborn and learned? Even England’s royal Princes, ascribed as their statuses may be, still have to learn to behave like royalty. It seems to me that the concepts of ascribed and achieved status are not mutually exclusive, at least most of the time, and it’s probably best to think of social positions, many of them, as having ascribed and achieved qualities.

WAITRESS IN HAWAII

How come a married, middle-class Filipino housewife, adequately supported by her spouse in the Philippines, decides to work in McDonalds Honolulu as a waitress? Her son, a good friend, tells me the pay is good (eight dollars an hour) and for her mother, the job's a great opportunity to earn her own keep – something she hasn’t been able to do in the Philippines. But why didn’t she work in the Philippines instead? And why, of all things, as a waitress, a job associated with the working class? The answer lies in context. In Hawaii, or any foreign country, a lot of native cultural expectations regarding class, gender, and family life can be bracketed so that migrants can survive according to the norms of the host country. Middle-class Mama has found in Hawaii a way to free herself from traditional cultural norms to pursue personal projects and not alienate herself from her family. By working as a waitress in Hawaii, and in the long run, saving enough money to help secure the family income, she finds herself both liberated from oppressive traditional norms while still maintaining social acceptance with the home culture. It’s no wonder many Filipino professionals can manage to work abroad in lower status jobs and with low pay -- at least in dollars, euros, yen, or English pounds. Echoing Bourdieu, when the field changes, so does the habitus, and the individuals or agents who inhabit this habitus are free to craft a creative responses to the altered circumstances of their lives.