That people value ‘people’ over ‘things’ is argued often by anthropologists, but how people value specific forms and qualities of relations as they do in the example of bridewealth is less so. I explore the perspective of Papua New Guinean‐born fathers in Australia as they advocate innovations in bridewealth traditions and thereby enable daughters to marry for love, cultivate a companionate marriage, and create a Papua New Guinean household. Past generations gauged the worth of traditional bridewealth by the quantity and distribution of items given and the number of exogamous clan connections forged as an index of past and future relations between clans. The current generation judges the value of even alternate forms of bridewealth for making new possibilities for those who share in it. If bridewealth enables the transnational household to emerge as the unit of decision making that replaces the clan, then innovations in bridewealth support, rather than undermine, a new normativity of companionate marriage that empowers that much wider net of kin. Drawing on a theory of value as the importance of social action towards the goal of the new normativity of the transnational household, I show how choosing a spouse is cultivated by women's fathers who refuse bridewealth, as often as it is by their husbands who provide new forms of wealth at marriage.

中文翻译：

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父亲对跨国巴布亚新几内亚家庭的建立中的陪伴身份的看法

人类学家经常认为人们重视“人”胜于“事物”，但是人们如何像对待新娘一样，重视关系的特定形式和品质。我探索了巴布亚新几内亚出生的澳大利亚父亲的观点，他们倡导革新新娘传统，从而使女儿能够为爱而结婚，结对联姻，并建立了巴布亚新几内亚的家庭。过去的世代通过所给物品的数量和分布以及伪造的异族之间的联系来衡量传统新娘的价值，异族之间的联系是部落之间过去和未来关系的指标。当前这一代人判断甚至其他形式的结婚礼物对于为其分享者提供新的可能性的价值。如果新娘财富使跨国家庭成为取代家族的决策单位，那么新娘财富的创新将支持而不是削弱伴随婚姻的新规范，这种新规范赋予更广泛的亲缘网络。我以价值理论为基础，认为社会行动对于实现跨国家庭新规范的目标具有重要意义，我展示了拒绝结婚的妇女父亲如何培养配偶，而提供新婚姻的丈夫则经常这样做。婚姻中的财富形式。