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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

“By the elders’ leave, I do”

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

ORCID logo | Independent researcher

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). 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.

Keywords: ritual, ostensivity, Iranian marriage ceremonies, wedding ceremonies, Iranian ritual politeness (ta’arof), 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
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 18 December 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.19021.kou
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Cited by

Cited by 3 other publications

House, Juliane & Dániel Z. Kádár
2021. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, DOI logo
Kádár, Dániel Z., Fengguang Liu, Juliane House & Wenrui Shi
2020. Reporting ritual political advice in the Chinese state media: A study of the National People’s Congress. Discourse, Context & Media 35 ► pp. 100388 ff. DOI logo
Li, Hui
2022.  Keqi (客气) in historical Chinese: evidence from metapragmatic comments. Journal of Politeness Research 0:0 DOI logo

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