印度农村的贫困和公共庆典

POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2528 Poverty and Public Very poor households spend large sums on celebrations. Celebrations in Rural India To the extent that these expenditures are central to Vijayendra Rao maintaining the networks essential for social relationships and coping witr poverty, these are reasonable expenses. To the extent that they are status competitions, they may merely increase conspicuous consumption. The World Bank Development Research Group Poverty and Human Resources U January 2001  POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2528 Summary findings Rao examines the paradox of very poor households Development policies that favor individual over spending large sums on celebrations. Using qualitative collective action reduce the incentives for the networking and quantitative data from South India, Rao function and increase the incentives for status-enhancing demonstrates that spending on weddings and festivals functions-thus reducing social cohesion and increasing can be explained by integrating an anthropological conspicuous consumption. understanding of how identity is shaped in Indian society Market-driven improvements in urban employment, with an economic analysis of decisionmaking under for example, could reduce a family's dependence on its conditions of extreme poverty and risk. traditional networks, could reduce incentives to maintain Rao argues that publicly observable celebrations have these networks, and could reduce social cohesion within two functions: they provide a space for maintaining a village and thus its capacity for collective action. In social reputations and webs of obligation, and they serve contrast, microfinance programs and social funds try to as arenas for status-making competitions. retain and even build a community's capacity for The first role is central to maintaining the networks collective action. essential for social relationships and coping with poverty. The second is a correlate of mobility that may become more prevalent as incomes rise. This paper-a product of Poverty and Human Resources, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to study the relationship between poverty and collective action. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Patricia Sader, room MC3-556, telephone 202-473- 3902, fax 202-522-1153, email address psader@worldbank.org. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at www.worldbank.org/research/workingpapers. The author may be contacted at vrao@worldbank.org. January 2001. (25 pages) The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Produced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center  Poverty and Public Celebrations in Rural India Vijayendra Rao Development Research Group The World Bank 1818 H Street, NW Washington, DC 20433 Email: vrao@worldbank.org I am indebted to Sita Reddy for invaluable discussions, and to Francis Bloch and Sonalde Desai for our joint work which informs part of the analysis in this paper. I am grateful to Rama Ranee, A.C. Komala and the National Council for Applied Economic Research for help with conducting the fieldwork, and to Christopher Clague, Karla Hoff, David Marsden, Michael Woolcock, and an anonymous referee for constructive comments.   Paradoxically, families who earn barely enough to survive spend vast amounts of money on celebrations. In the rural South Indian data' I analyze in this paper, a typical household spends approximately seven times its annual income on a daughter's marriage - on celebrating the wedding and on dowry transfers to the groom's family. Moreover, fifteen per cent of its expenditures, on average, are spent on celebrating village festivals. Poor households tend to find such large sums of money by going severely into debt at interest rates that range from 100-300 per cent per year which leads to chronic indebtedness and, sometimes, bonded labor. Despite the importance of these expenditures the Economics literature has largely ignored them, perhaps because they fall into the realm of "non-rational" behavior. However, given their pervasiveness, and the dominant role accorded to Economics in the formulation of policy, this omission can have serious consequences for the design of policy interventions. Money spent on celebrations is, after all, money not spent on food, education, health, and other productive inputs. What explains this paradox? Are celebrations wasteful? In this paper I will examine the factors underlying expenditures on festivals and weddings with qualitative and quantitative data from South India. In this introductory section I sketch a general conceptual model of publicly observable events and the role they play in Indian village life. I will then illustrate this conceptual framework by examining aspects of wedding and festival related behaviors. While the paper relies on fieldwork from the South Indian state of Karnataka, I believe that the analysis is easily generalized to other parts of South Asia. With changes in structure and context, the basic points are perhaps also relevant to human behavior in other non-Western societies. Working within a context with which I am relatively familiar, however, allows me to provide a more nuanced perspective on an important aspect of the cultural economics of behavior in poor households2. In rural Indian life, celebrations tend to mark important transitions: A wedding marks the transition of a woman from daughter to wife and is the central event in her life-cycle (Fruzzetti, 1990), festivals mark important events in the life-cycle of a village - a religious event, or a harvest (Fuller, 1992). They are rituals - marking events that shape identity and meaning. They are also, necessarily, public. If they were private, the change in status would not be recognized because others would not observe the ritual. The public nature of celebrations thus provides an l The data are from two different samples in Kamataka state. 2For an elaboration on this metlhodology see Rao (1997) 2  opportunity for individuals to demonstrate, to "signal3", to the world that an important time has arrived, an important transition completed. As public events they also provide an opportunity for actions to be scrutinized and commented upon, and for judgements to be made. Therefore, celebrations can be thought of as mechanisms where ritual, social and economic status is demonstrated, reified and often enhanced. How do public rituals shape identity and affect preferences? To understand this, it is necessary to understand anthropological conceptions of how Indians define their identities and shape their perceptions of themselves. Louis Dumont (1970), in Homo Heirarchicus, a seminal work in Indian anthropology, argued that Hindu Indians are fundamentally different from Western individuals in that they see themselves within the context of the caste system as part of a strict ritual hierarchy. Their sense of individuality is subservient to their identification with their family, caste and village. Marriot and Inden (1977) modified this to say that an Indian is not an individual, as much as a "dividual. " A dividual's identity is made up of different transferable "substances" that they give and receive in their interactions with others. These substances then come together in a dynamic, negotiated, interactive manner to achieve a sense of self. Thus, personhood is defined entirely in terms of one's relationships to others. In more recent work Mines (1994) takes issue with this to argue that Indians have a well- defined sense of individuality, but that this individuality is quite different the Western prototype. Indian individuality, according to Mines, is more exterior or civic than personal and is crucially conditioned by how others estimate and evaluate the person. What kind of person is he? How influential is he? Furthermore, this "civic individuality" is determined within the context to which the individual belongs: their caste, religion and community. It is also spatially defined by the "size and locality of the constituencies that form a person's social contexts." Thus, one's sense of self is fundamentally influenced by whom one knows and interacts with. Mines further argues that it is an Individuality of Inequality - i.e. people of higher status and rank have individualities that are more strongly emphasized - individuality is graded and ranked. Taking all of this into consideration we see that Indians are strongly driven by status and rank, and this status and rank is not simply a matter of individual or relative wealth but derived from the size and influence of their familial and social networks, and the public demonstration of access to 3 I use this in the technical sense of transmitting information from an informned to an uninformed agent via a costly action (Salanie, 1997) 3  these networks4. The size and quality of one's networks thus have an inherent value, what Appadurai (1990) defines as "the prime value of sociality," and are not only a means to an end. An Indian, therefore, while not entirely Homo Heirarachicus, is also quite different from Homo Economicus. What differentiates Indian individuality from the Western, more than anything else, is a deep anxiety about "What will others think of me?" And what others think of them is fundamentally shaped by their civic identity - How many important people do they know? How closely are they adhering to the behaviors expected from someone in their socio- cultural category - i.e.: are they being "good" fathers, mothers, sons, headmen, or priests? Thus, unlike the caricature of a "rational" individual embodied in most economic models, Indians do not live by consumption alone but fundamentally by the perceptions of others. This perception shapes their identity, their sense of themselves, and their sense of other's sense of them. Their status and role, within the context of their caste and group, therefore drives their behavior. If they do not satisfy the obligations assigned to them by their place within society they will be penalized with a loss of status or rank and looked upon with less respect, perhaps even with shame. This does not mean that Indians are not rational, but merely that their rationality is conditioned by structures and practices derived from their social and cultural context, just as much as it is subject to economic motives and constraints5. Status and rank require constant maintenance (Goffman, 1959). In order to participate in social relationships, people have to know if you are a "good" individual who acts in accordance with the your socially delimited roles. Thus, the maintenance of rank and stature requires public demonstrations of actions fitting the expected behaviors of your rank within your social group. Note that the effort spent in maintaining rank does not preclude individuals from moving up. Wealth, a prestigious job, the acquisition of a rich husband or son-in-law is desired because they are preconditions to the acquisition of greater public regard and respect. But in order to acquire the higher social rank usually associated with greater assets, these attributes of mobility often must not just be acquired but demonstrated by behavior that accords with the class of people who possess such assets. Otherwise, while you may achieve economic mobility, it will not translate into a higher social rank. Non-Indians may also value rank and social status, but an Indian faces 4This helps explain why Westerners upon encountering Indians are often puzzled by their detailed expositions on all the important people they know, or are related to. 5 Of course this is probably true of human beings in all cultures, with the logic of socio-culturally derived incentives changing according to the context - while the logic of economic incentives stays more or less the same. 4  powerful incentives to regularly demonstrate that status because their behavior is under constant, intimate and structured scrutiny. While networks have an inherent value, in the context of the extremely risky, environment of Indian village life the web of obligations that define the extent of one's networks are also central elements of coping strategies against risk and poverty. The recent Development Economics literature has focussed on empirical investigations of informal insurance, measuring the extent to which families are able to smooth consumption by relying on village networks (e.g. Townsend 1994, Udry 1994). It is clear that in the absence of networks life would be unimaginably hard. When crops fail - orjobs are lost - or the main wage-earner dies (all quite routine events in the harsh reality of rural life) one relies on one's friends and relatives to cope. The greater the level of respect and regard your friends and relatives have of you, the easier it is for you to ask for their help. Networks, however, are useful not only for unanticipated shocks but also for more everyday forms of serious but predictable problems. Households with better connections may be able to get access to better jobs (Collier and Garg 1998), or find ways of getting lower prices for food, or they may be able to get better information on potential marriage partners for their children. Therefore, respect and regard do not merely have direct utility, they are also central elements in poverty alleviation strategies. What others think of you is thus not important just for its own sake -- it can mean the difference between life and death. Given this, celebrations, which are a time of intense public scrutiny, become arenas where reputations are managed and enhanced. Life-cycle events become theatres where public reputations are maintained, and stadiums where people compete in games of status competition, going beyond their role as markers of life-cycle events. The rules of the game are determined by kinship systems, ritual calendars, the distribution of wealth and caste, and other structural "endowments" that are slow to change and therefore can be considered as exogenous constraints in the short term. These structures determine the criteria by which people are judged by providing rules for what is considered appropriate behavior. They are part of the capability set (Sen, 1988) available for individuals and families to maximize their preferences. Thus, culturally determined preferences and constraints interact with economic motives to create powerful incentives for expenditures on public celebrations, particularly for individuals seeking social mobility. The format of the rest of the paper is as follows: I present an investigation of wedding celebrations in Section 2, followed by an analysis of festivals in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper and presents some policy implications. 5  2. On Wedding Celebrations6: Wedding celebrations in rural India can seem extremely lavish to an outsider, especially in contrast to the extreme poverty of rural Indian life, with large numbers of people invited for feasts and ceremonies that can go on for several days. Many weddings seem less influenced by norms in the village than by pattems in cities, and celebrations of poor families imitate the more extravagant patterns common in richer families. Take the case of a wedding of a small agriculturist with two acres of land that I observed: His teenage daughter was marrying a young man who had finished his BA and had ajob as a low- level clerk in the city. The groom was dressed in a crisp gray suit, the bride in a silk saree. A large number of guests, including a (minor) local politician had been invited, and the newlyweds were driven away at the end of the ceremony in a large white Ambassador car. When asked why he had spent so much money on a wedding that was obviously well beyond his means, the father said that his daughter had married into a "good family" (the groom's father was a relatively wealthy landowner from another village), and he wanted to have a "show." Thus, wedding celebrations have a lot to do with social status and prestige. Mobility within a village is often achieved by imitating the behaviors of families of higher social orders (Srinivas, 1989). For the parents of a daughter in particular, a marriage is potentially the most important source of mobility since marrying into a "good family" can greatly enhance how a family is viewed by its peers, and a prestigious match is an occasion for great celebration and status displays. This may explain why some weddings are particularly lavish. When a family marries into a rich family it is in their interest to demonstrate this to the rest of the village, particularly if the rest of the village does not know the new in-laws. The most effective way of signaling a family's newfound affinity-derived status is to have as lavish a wedding as they can possibly afford. On the flip side, if a family marries a poor local family - well known to everyone in the village - this may also be an occasion for celebration, but lavish displays are no longer necessary since not much can be gained by signaling. To better understand the nature of marriage expenditures in India, it might help to outline the basic nature of Indian marriage "markets"': 6This section is culled from Bloch, Rao and Desai (1999). 7 Some of these features have become less restrictive in educated urban circles, but they continue to be a defining aspect of village life. 6  1) Marriage is restricted to endogamous groups, i.e.: people are only permitted to marry within a well-defined set of families who make up their sub-caste. 2) They are patrilocal - brides leave their parents' home to live with their husbands. Marriages are arranged for both grooms and brides by their parents, and the preferences of the parents usually drive all the choices and arrangements. 3) Marriage is considered final and, while there are cases of separation, divorce is not an option. 4) The burden of celebrating a marriage almost always falls on the parents of the bride. There is a considerable amount of variation between sub-castes in their marriage and kinship patterns (Karve, 1965). While most prohibit marriage outside the sub-caste, the size of the group can vary a great deal. Some communities in Southern India prefer marriage within a circle of close relatives, usually between a man and the daughter of his elder sister, or between the children of brothers. Such consanguineous marriages are getting increasingly rare because suitable grooms are difficult to find. Another characteristic of Indian kinship systems is the variation in their prohibition against marrying partners who belong to the same village. In the language of the kinship studies, such communities who marry outside their own village are called "village exogamous." In Karnataka State, where these data are from, the northern districts show a tendency towards village exogamy, while in the southern districts the majority do not prefer it and may even have prohibitions against it. Such preferences and prohibitions are prescribed by the customs of the community and are exogenous to the choices of households who may suffer social sanctions by violating them. Getting one's daughter married, within these constraints, is considered an Indian parent's primary duty; to have an older unmarried daughter is a tremendous misfortune with large social and economic costs. The costs of getting a daughter married, however, have been steadily rising in real terms across the Indian sub-continent. In Karnataka State dowries have been increasing substantially for several decades (Caldwell, Reddy and Caldwell, 1991) and dowries in these data average six times the annual income of a family. There are several possible reasons why dowries in India may have increased, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine them8. My focus here is on wedding celebrations, and in particular on the narrow question of whether wedding celebrations are, at least partly, driven by a desire for higher social rank. Every wedding requires a minimum level of expenditure that depends upon norms in the community. A basic celebration may help maintain one's stature within the village, but a lavish wedding represents something else. If you spend more than what is expected this provides the 8 For more on this subject, see Caldwell et. al (1988), Rao(1993), Raheja (1995) and Kapadia (1999). 7  village with new information that helps them update their perception of your social status. In particular, if the bride is marrying a "prestigious" groom, either because he is rich or well educated, then this marriage alliance has status benefits for the wife's family. However, a lavish wedding without some "real" change in status may simply give people the impression that the spender is extravagant. Thus, if families are rational, then this extra money should only be spent when there is new information to communicate. If there is nothing to show off it would not be rational for a father to spend anything beyond the minimum (maintenance level) expenditure required to fulfill his social obligations. Furthermore, even if the bride were marrying a rich groom there would be no new information to communicate to the village if everyone in the village already knew that the groom was rich. The very existence of the marriage alliance provides enough information for the village to update its opinion on the social standing of the bride's family. Therefore, lavish weddings would only make sense when the bride is marrying a prestigious groom and when the village has no information about the groom and his family. The variations in village exogamy provide us with a way to translate this point into a testable hypothesis. When marriage rules prohibit partners from the same village from getting married, then the bride family's home village will not know much about the groom's family. On the other hand if brides and grooms from the same village customarily marry each other, then the village should have very good information on the groom's family. Thus, if lavish weddings serve as a means of increasing status, it is only when the groom is a high status "catch" from another village that we should observe particularly lavish weddings. This hypothesis will be tested by estimating a multivariate regression of wedding celebration expenses on the characteristics of the groom and bride and their families, the number of alternate partners in the marriage market, and whether the sub-caste that the family belongs to practices village exogamy9. I will interact the village exogamy variable with the education and wealth of the groom. If these interaction terms are positive we can infer that it is only when grooms are educated and wealthy, i.e. "prestigious," and from an outside village -- resulting in a lack of information about them in the bride's village -- that marriage expenses are significantly higher. This would support the hypothesis that lavish celebrations are a signal of improved social status -- communicating new information about mobility via a costly action. 9 Note that the village exogamy variable measures the customary practices prevalent in the community to which the responding household belongs. This can be treated as exogenous to the dowry and wedding celebration decisions since they are unlikely to change in the short term. 8  Wealth will be measured by whether the families possess any land since about 40 per cent of the households are landless. To measure the human capital of the husband and wife we use their years of schooling and their ages at marriage. Alternatives in the marriage market are measured by the date of the marriage (to capture exogenous trends), and the ratio of the number of women to the number men at marriageable ages (defined as women aged 10-19/ men aged 20- 29) measured at the year of the marriage for the bride's home district. In addition to these variables I also include dummies for whether the family is Muslim or belongs to a disadvantaged or "Scheduled" caste. Data and Results The sample consists of 800 households randomly chosen from five districts spread across North and South Karnataka State. Seven villages from each district were randomly chosen and twenty households then randomly selected from each village. The marriage data that are employed in this paper were collected retrospectively from the married women in the sample. About a third of the sample did not have any ever-married women of reproductive age and therefore did not answer the women's questions. Of those that did have eligible women, many did not provide complete answers to the retrospective marriage questions, forcing us to drop them from the analysis. After eliminating about ten outliers, we are left with a sample of about 300 women spread across the five districts. There are no significant differences between this sub- sample and the complete sample for those questions that were answered by all the households. Table 1 reports summary statistics from the survey data. The average wedding celebration expenses are about 3,000 rupees, 11 per cent as large as the average dowry which is 26,000 rupees. Average schooling levels for men are 4.3 years and 2.9 years for women. The average age at marriage for men is about 25 years and 17 years for women. The mean marriage took place in 1980, with a standard deviation of 8.4, showing that the marriages span a fairly long time. Over this period, the average marriage ratio is 1.13 indicating a surplus of women in the marriage market. About 9 per cent of the sample is Muslim and 22 per cent belong to scheduled castes. Finally, 68 per cent of the households customarily practice village exogamy. Table 2 reports estimates for the wedding celebration OLS regressions. Looking at the regression with no interactions, we see that grooms with land have celebrations that are statistically significant and about 1,400 rupees higher than landless grooms. Families that belong to sub-castes that practice village exogamy have marriage expenses about 1,500 rupees higher than those who marry within the village. The results of the interaction effects between village exogamy and the wealth and education of the husband are also consistent with the hypothesis 9  presented above. Note also that village exogamy interacted with whether the groom's family has land increases wedding expenses by 2,600 rupees and is significant at the five per cent level. Similarly an additional year of groom's schooling in families that practice exogamy increases marriage expenses by about 280 rupees. Thus, groom quality significantly matters only for those families practicing village exogamy, where the bride's village has no knowledge of the groom's familyl