La dot, anthropologie et histoire. Cité des Athéniens, vie-ive siècle avant J.-C. Pays de Sault (Pyrénées audoises), fin xviiie siècle-1940

Abstract

This contribution on dowry – the donation made by the parents to the bride- is presented by two ladies specialized in the study of societies remote in time and space from each other, yet they are convinced that such an object of research demands to crossbreed history and the anthropology of parenthood and practise comparative literature. It proceeds from a four-handed work carried over fifteen years and resumed several times, on the practice of that type of matrimonial transaction in two “household societies”, classical Athens and the Pays de Sault. This last “resumption” of work does not provide anything unknown on the two groups under study. It intends, however, to trace up, starting from two groups which everything seemingly separates, but which have made certain similar structural choices – the household organization of the parenthood system, a two-lineage filiation with a more or less patrilinear bias, the absence of a conjugal community- to which objectives can correspond the choice of that type of matrimonial transaction and into which systems indifferently described as dotal it is apt to be incorporated.