Marriage of the Jingpo

The young people Jingpo has sexual freedom before marrying. Formerly there were a few public houses where the young people was, now the parents prepare a room for his daughters, where they receive the boys who visit them. The phases of the process of seduction are realized invariably across the singing. Girls and boys exchange songs that can be listened until the night throughout. The festival of Planting Flowers in the second lunar month is a special opportunity in which the young people is.

Between the Jingpo there has developed a complex writing system that implies the use of sheets and parts of vegetables. In such a way that every sheet takes a meaning, someone as his form, others for his sound. For example, which is called "a thought" it indicates that there is thought the proposal, others by some symbolic relations that only they understand, in such a way that there develops a series of exchanges of messages between the young people who serve to define the positions and feelings of each one, in which the combination of a few sheets with a meaning, with others, they are creating messages of a certain complexity.

All the young people Jingpo before marrying, can sing, and write messages combining sheets. Also they can weave all and embroider. Earlier the 7-8-year-old girls were already good weavers, now how is life in the school, they learn later. Also they have changed the attraction models for men and women.

From 13-14 years the girls begin meeting the boys to sing and to love each other. If there is pregnancy, the men sacrifice an ox to the spirits, and some of them marry this way, although few ones, what they usually do is that the family of the girl takes care of the child, who, on having grown, takes his parents as parents and does not suffer any discrimination.

This freedom of the youth changes when it goes over to the marriage. That has a few very strict rules, and once a young woman of a family marries a young man of other one, one believes a historical relation in which women of this clan will marry men of other, without the inverse, slightly advisable relation happening. They cannot marry cousins of equal name, and the violations of the matrimonial rules are punished very severely, with the death for the man and the exile for the woman. In the family they do usually marry by order of age, and if a girl does it before his older sisters, it must give them a compensation.

The expenses of the wedding are very high. All the details get ready across an intermediary for every side, in such a way that the parents of the fiancés never discuss these matters face to face. The marriages are generally between a man and a woman, and in the nearby times only rich some of them had several women.
Also the marriage existed for abduction.

Another important rite of the marriage Jingpo was the called one "to Cross the Bridge of Straw". With a big religious component, it was a ritual complex that finally, it was marking the beginning of a new way for the newly married fiancée, in the same one chickens and pigs had sacrificed themselves, and every aspect of the ritual had complex connotations. The weddings lasted sometimes up to three days.

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