Ritual and Gender Harmony in Jiarong Tibetan Weddings:Music, Tradition, and Women's Agency

This work analyzes the wedding traditions of Jiarong Tibetans as a focus of the intertwining of ritual, music, gender, and cultural heritage maintenance, introducing a new concept of dynamic harmony. The study rejects portraying the wedding ceremony as a cultural tradition frozen in time or as a purely patriarchal event, arguing that space remains for the intersection of tradition and modernization, women's roles, and cultural development in the performance of the wedding. Combining the theory of rites of passage with ritualization, feminist ethnomusicology, and gender performance in the context of Sino-Tibetan borderland discourse, the article shows that guozhuang circle dancing and antiphonal singing can serve as methods of memory transmission, whereas a form of family exchange may reinforce the patriarchal order. The work therefore pays special attention to gender-responsive cultural heritage maintenance as a path to women's empowerment.