General Information about Item:

• Customary Wedding Folklore: Song, Dancing, Rhythmic Clapping
• Language: English
• Region of Origin: America, 20th & 21st centuries
• Informant: Thuy-Vy Nguyen, age 21
• Date Collected: 5-08-2019

Informant Data:

• Thuy-Vy Nguyen is a senior (class of 2019) at Dartmouth College. Thuy-Vy is studying Neuroscience with a minor in Art History. She recently attended her cousin Ivy’s wedding, which was hosted in the backyard of her (Thuy-Vy’s) home. Thuy-Vy grew up in Louisville, KY which is where her immediate and extended family is based.

Contextual Data:

• This tradition is inherently an American one, as the Greek fraternity and sorority system originated in North America and has maintained strong influences in U.S. colleges and universities (exemplified by our own Dartmouth College), although some Greek organizations have branched out with international chapters as well. The bride, Ivy Nguyen, was a member of Kappa Delta during her undergraduate years at University of Louisville, Kentucky. Sororities and fraternities are generally known to be a more dominant part of students’ lives in the South, Midwest, and Southwest regions of the U.S., especially at larger school campuses.
• The tradition itself involves sorority sisters gathering around a seated bride during the wedding reception. The sisters, normally those who the bride knew and maintained close ties to during her undergraduate years, clasp hands, sing, and chant songs that are familiar and nostalgic for them (which reinforces community ties and bonds). As most wedding traditions are inherently rites of transition, this represents a liminal rite of the pseudo family that the bride has built for herself at college providing blessings for her future life with her groom. From a more traditional lens, that we touched upon in class, it can also represent how up to the age of marriage women’s lives predominantly revolved around other women and their social organizations (although this is merely a generalization of similar practices in Slavic rural areas). This tradition does have a slightly more modern bend to it, given that it involves the bride’s sorority, which is a more recent tradition in the larger scheme of wedding folklore, but still deeply rooted and important to the bride. Other Greek organizations have similar traditions (depending on the organization and the chapter itself), ranging from having a coordinated stroll on the dance floor, wearing the organization’s symbolic flower, or incorporating the colors of the organization in subtle ways into the ceremony or into specializing the guests’ gifts and experiences.

Item:

Kappa Delta sisters from University of Louisville gather around the bride

KD sisters sing, chant, and clap rhythmically to ‘send the bride off’

Collector: Michelle Wang