August 20, 2007

Western Economics Meets Chinese Culture: The Result is ‘Corpse Brides’

As The Economist recently reported, in China tradition demands that a man be buried with his wife. If an unmarried male passes, he too must be buried with a special lady friend and the burial ceremony will bind them together forever. How can you ensure that you too will cross over to the other side with your better half? Depends on how much you are willing to pay.

Grave-robbing has found a new market: Corpse brides. However, to satisfy the exponentially growing demand, the necro-matchmakers are now turning to a new source of the dead – the living.

The practice goes back to the Third Century A.D. After being strongly discouraged by the communist powers, it is now reappearing, and, staying true to their newly found capitalist calling, many merchants in the black market postmortem matrimony business are finding that cost-benefit analysis points to murder, not excavation.

In one case, a man strangled six women for sale as corpse brides because it was just more economically sound. These “wet” goods, as new corpses are called, fetch up to 10 times as much as the “dry” ones, or about $4,000.

According to the BBC, in India, the practice of female infanticide is taking another disturbing turn as increasingly wealthy provinces are continuing the practice. The economic argument that insisted that girls are harder to raise, do not contribute as much to the household and cost the family much when at the marrying age is not as relevant. Consequently, the contemporary budgeting in an Indian household is the 50,000 rupees to give the in-laws for raising a girl versus the 500 for an abortion.

Contrary to what many commentators have hoped for, the Western economic freedom that was supposed to free minds from antiquated traditions have only perverted them further by adding a foreign, impersonal side that does nothing to mitigate their repugnance. In a twisted way, these acts seem more familiar because they can now be translated into our currency, giving us a point of reference.

The parallelism between the demand for women’s bodies in China and the disdain for girl’s bodies in India only erodes our understanding of a global market standardizing cultural needs. Instead of a global market that promotes our values and opens the door so that Western ideals can run rampant and destroy the local culture, it is becoming more apparent that after a period of fear for the survival of native culture, the Western economic principles are being internalized.

What we once thought to be our greatest weapon in opening doors and gaining influence may weaken it in the end as our system is used in order to promote described practices like those in China and India. When put into common economic terms, they are catapulted into modernity and legitimated by the terminology and transactions that are so common to us.

When news magazines report shameful acts and break them down by referencing common economic terms, they put them on par with everyday transactions. It is understandable that it is a way for a detached reader to better grasp the situation. Nonetheless, they unwillingly reduce the moral value of the news by doing so.