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Leslie A. Baxter and Barbara M. Montgomery, B.M., Relating: Dialogues and dialectics. New York: Guilford, 1996.
Recently I attended my niece's wedding and during the ceremony there were many comments made about the oppositions between the bride and groom. One speaker noted that the bride was a European American, raised a Methodist in a small Iowa town while the groom was born in China and raised in New York City as a Zen Buddhist. The speaker continued by observing that the bride was shy and the groom was extroverted. Finally, she concluded saying these seeming contradictions between them were resolved by the enduring love they shared. After the service they performed a Chinese ritual where the bride and groom knelt before the elders of the groom's family and served them tea. The elders' acceptance of the tea signified their acceptance of the bride into their family. The ceremony also marked the recognition of the groom's passage into adulthood, as Chinese young people are considered children until they marry.
After reading Leslie Baxter and Barbara Montgomery's book, Relating: Dialogues and dialectics, what occurred in this wedding ceremony made a lot more sense to me. In their book, Baxter and Montgomery are concerned with advancing a perspective they call "relational dialectics" and this perspective emphasizes a social self, multivocal oppositions, and indeterminate change. In advancing this perspective Baxter and Montgomery provide support for understanding how my niece's wedding both set the groom apart from his family as an adult and bound him to the family with his new bride. Further, the perspective in Relating...