5 Ways to Reinvent Traditions
The Wedding Lab: 5 Ways to Reinvent Traditions
When Ayda and Umair got engaged, coming from two different cultures and traditions — Iranian and Pakistani — they didn’t share an inherited or obvious way to wed. Whose rituals would they use? Which part of each tradition would they honor? Would they include eggs, almonds, and walnuts in the sofre aghd to represent fertility, even if they didn’t want children? How much of their actual relationship should be reflected in the ceremony?
In all types of gatherings, the forms we inherit don’t always match the needs or realities of who we are or how we live now. As we marry people who are different from us across race and religion and nationality, as we legalize and normalize queer marriages and relationships, more and more people are re-imagining their Big Day. Whether you’re planning a wedding (god bless), or want nothing to do with weddings, the modern wedding is a wonderful vessel for us to learn how to make shared meaning across difference.
I’ve been thinking a lot about weddings lately and wanted to share with you five questions to help figure out which traditions to copy-paste, which to edit, and which to cut altogether.
You can apply these principles to any gathering where there’s unexamined expectation around ritual. Think of the wedding as a laboratory for reinvention.
1) What was the origin of this practice, and does it still resonate? Historically, what was the meaning of this act, and what might the meaning be today?
In traditional Hindu weddings, the rites end with the couple walking around a fire seven times, each speaking a vow aloud per round. When Shilpa asked her mother and grandmother why they did the seven pheras at their own weddings, they looked at her blankly. They had never considered the specific vows. “That's just what our people do,” they said. So Shilpa started researching. She found they were beliefs coming from a Vedic text that neither she nor her partner wanted to emulate in their own vows (or marriage). In the first vow, the man directs his wife to “offer him food,” the bride agrees to be “responsible for the home and all household responsibilities,” and only the bride vows to “remain chaste,” with no such requirement made of the man.
Shilpa and her fiancé decided to keep the form but re-wrote the seven vows to reflect the more equitable marriage they hadn’t seen in their own families but dreamed of for themselves.
2) Who is playing what role and why?
A few years ago, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie posted two photographs from her wedding: one of both her parents walking her down the aisle, and one of her first dance with her mother. “I have always felt that Western wedding traditions sideline the mother of the bride – the father walks the bride down the aisle, the father has the first dance with the bride, often the father gives a speech while the mother doesn’t,” she wrote. “We can unmake convention to make things more just, more complete, more beautiful.”
Within every ritual lies a social contract. Who is giving what to whom? What is the symbolism of the interaction? Which part of the family or community is responsible for which function — and why? Most rituals come from very specific moments in time when certain people were assumed to play specific roles and held agreed-upon authority within a community. As you design the actual interaction between the various members of the ritual, begin by asking: How do we want to reflect or symbolize the roles of loved ones in our lives?
3) Does the structure serve your purpose?
Who’s to say you need an aisle? Some couples opt for another shape. People do this for all sorts of reasons. Jess had a huge number of wedding guests, and her partner only wanted to invite a few loved ones, so they ditched the aisle and opted to stand in the middle of a circle for the ceremony.
For some, an inherited physical structure such as an aisle may make sense on your own terms. Before her wedding, Brené Brown told me in an interview, she and her partner decided: "We just want this to be a celebration of who we are as individuals and the life that we want to build together, and if it doesn’t fit that, we’re not doing it." She walked down the aisle to the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” in a short wedding dress with Texas wildflowers. I recently learned of a bride who roared into church on the back of her sister's motorcycle.
For others, the very structure of one big collective event may not serve their purpose. That was true for Dan and John; after they got engaged, one of the grooms realized he was terrified of being the center of attention. So instead of a big wedding, they chose to take their budget and host 10 small dinners at their favorite restaurants for friends all over the country.
4) What are our values?
For their cross-cultural ceremony, Ayda and Umair decided to go long on one specific Iranian tradition: the sofre aghd, or wedding spread. As Ayda explained to me, “a sofre aghd is a traditional table arranged with objects signifying virtues thought to be central to a marriage.” In their case, they kept the form — the table and the ritual — but asked themselves: What are our values? What values will be at the center of our marriage?
They reviewed the traditional objects one by one, along with their meanings. Honey = sweetness? Keep. Coins = wealth and prosperity? Keep the coins but change the meaning to giving and generosity. To add new virtues like laughter and patience, Ayda and Umair added comic strips and chess pieces. “Planning a wedding is already a ton of work and re-imagining this ritual added to that,” Ayda told me. “But, it provided us with an opportunity to check in and be intentional about the values we are in alignment with rather than pledging support for traditions that we may not feel are relevant.”
5) Are there places where our traditions rhyme? What do we share?
Music and dance, for example, offer unique opportunities to mix forms. At an Irish and Iraqi wedding in Melbourne, Iraqi drummers got the beat going, which just so happened to be the same rhythm as Irish step-dancing. At an Indian and West African wedding, the Indian groom entered the parking lot in full attire by hopping rhythmically in a bhangra-style dance, beckoning to his wife. In a white and gold lehenga, she smiled coyly, kicked off her flats, and started dancing her West African Djembe in response — to the same beat.
You can do this, too.
To sum up: the first step for navigating reinvention is deciding which traditions you want to keep. Step two is making these traditions feel right to you.
Yes, weddings are transformative experiences. But when done with intention and thought and conversation and sorting, wedding planning can be a deeply transformative process, too.
As always,
Priya
Inspirations
“The Rise of Wedding Sprawl"
When did a wedding become so many gatherings? Instead of reinventing wedding traditions, Annie Midori Atherton argues in The Atlantic, wedding sprawl reinforces them.
Moral Injuries of War
Jack Saul is a leading practitioner and thinker on healing collective trauma. On June 2nd at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Saul and his wife, Esther Perel, will present his latest project Moral Injuries of War. It’s a designed modern ritual and immersive listening experience that invites audiences to “journey alongside veterans as they grapple with their memories.” And rare for this experience to be open to the public. You can purchase tickets here.
Building Resilient Organizations
Progressive social movements can face the same issues internally they are working to combat in the wider world: racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of inequality and oppression. Organizer and social movement strategist Maurice Mitchell penned a long-form essay that reckons with this dynamic and offers ways to build more resilient, joyful organizations. Required reading for any facilitator.
