WITH THE SCISSORS...

A QUICK MARRIAGE.

Shan State is one of those where the preliminaries of marriage have been reduced to their simplest expression.
When, in a village there, a man and a young woman are in complete agreement to marry, they go together before the chief who holds the necessary authority and inform him of their plan. They have neither consent nor witnesses. Not a single piece of paperwork.
The person before whom they appear ties a cotton thread around their joined wrists; he watches them eat the same cup of rice together and sends them away. That's all. The marriage is regular, legal, and no one would dream of contesting it.
For our part, we find the simplicity and speed of these customs charming. A thread around the wrists: union. The act of eating from the same vessel is a very clear symbol expressing that in the future two lives will be fused into one, and that everything will be shared by those who thus commit themselves, both sorrows and joys. To divorce, for divorce is known there as it is among us, the matter is easy. The couple returns before the chief who united them.

"I declare," says the man, "that I no longer want this woman as my wife."
"I declare," says the woman, "that I no longer want this man as my husband."
"That's good. You are separated," pronounces the chief.

And each goes their separate ways.

French Kabylia.

SHORT HAIR IN THE.. 16TH CENTURY.

As the song says: "They all get their hair cut." But our charming sisters and friends, paying homage to fashion, think they're breaking new ground, which they are very wrong about. This highly appreciated and graceful fashion for Ninon or boyish hair is not new. In the curious Basque country journal Gure Herria, M. H. Garel informs us that the women of Bayonne, Biarritz, and other young girls from Labourd or La Soule cut their hair from the 15th century to the early 17th. Here is a document on this subject:
The German Arnold von Harff, who, in 1499, crossed the Basque country on his way to Santiago de Compostela, said in Old German, which can be translated as follows:
"Item, here in the Basque country, the women wear their heads bandaged high, as men do in pagan lands; Moreover, servants and young girls walk openly in the street with their heads shaved and bare..."
But, in fact, wasn't short hair simply a sign of mediocre status among women, just as close-cropped hair is, among religious orders, a sign of dependence and self-denial?

Renaissance.

Shan State, a State in Burma

The Shan Ethnic Group

More Recent News

Some 7,500 women from Kachin State and Shan State in northern Burma were sold as brides to Chinese men, according to a 2018 report published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Burma - Conflict : The junta returns to northern Shan State with Chinese help

Gure Herria, a Basque periodical

Arnold von Harff, who only married Margarethe von dem Bongart in 1504