Chapters 4 and 5 of Framing the Bride examine key gestures and customs of wedding practice in Taiwan as ethnographic phenomena and rites of sociological passage. Chapter 4 covers customary family rites and celebrations, making the point that many of the activities involving the bride and groom are actually meant to satisfy expectations of the older generation. Ritualistic moments, indeed, are often considered "old people's business" but are undertaken by the younger people to accommodate family peace. Marriage negotiations, including maneuvering bride-price (124-6) and number or quality of engagement cakes (126-8), fall into that category. What Adrian calls power rituals, which link wedding-ring logistics and in-law relationships, and fertility rituals, which signify family accommodation, are also part of that. On the other hand customs such as proscribing year-of-tiger people from weddings except as bride or groom, seem to have cross-generational authority (114-15). Adrian observes that many so-called customs are loosely observed or have regional variations throughout Taiwan; however, people can still be shocked if a couple simply ignores Taiwanese cultural custom--especially by flouting elder-generation veto power over all or part of their wedding plans--and makes a project of diminishing Taiwan's special cultural claims, one of which involves filial obligations to elders. To make a wedding too obviously Western is to make rather too public the Western cultural hegemony that seems always looming in the background of Taiwan's wedding trade.
Chapter 5 is devoted almost entirely to the phenomenon of the bridal makeover, wherein a makeup stylist prepares the bride's face elaborately for wedding photography. Why that is significant is rooted in long Chinese tradition and the importance attached to the difference between the bride's presumptive premarital youth and her entry into adulthood--and into the family of her husband. The bridal...