The golden ties that bind: Boundary crossing in diasporic Hindu wedding ritual

Abstract

The interpretive research in this article goes beyond considering how diasporic consumers cross borders between home and host cultures, to examine how they cross boundaries within their home culture. In keeping with ethno-consumerism, the authors utilize Hindu meaning categories of sacredness, purity, and auspiciousness to examine the wedding ritual among diasporic Hindus. The authors unpack the transformation of outsider fiancées into insider daughters to show how gold is employed to separate, link, and cross boundaries in extended families. This article demonstrates the agency of the relationships between the gold and its givers, in collectively co-creating an aesthetic subject who is a visual representation of a daughter embedded into the collective self of the extended family. In doing so, the authors demonstrate how diasporic Hindus utilize the cultural code of gold to shape and reaffirm collective identity.