Abstract

The wedding ceremony is a part of a culture; different countries have different wedding ceremonies. There is the tradition of holding a wedding in almost every kind of social civilization. This paper is a study of the differences between Chinese and American ceremony from three aspects: choice of place for ceremony, atmospheres of ceremony, and dresses for ceremony. The paper further explores the reasons of differences between Chinese and American ceremony. The differences between Chinese and American reveal different concepts of Chinese and American culture as well as differences between two cultures.

Key words: Chinese and American wedding ceremony; cultural differences; cultural analysis

摘 要

婚礼是文化的一个部分，不同的国家有着不同的婚礼。几乎在每一种社会文化中，都有举办婚礼的习俗。本文主要分析了中美婚礼在地点选择、婚礼仪式氛围和婚礼礼服三方面的不同差异，并进一步分析了造成这些差异的文化原因。中美婚礼的不同形式体现了中美文化中的不同观念，折射了中美文化的深层差异。

关键词： 中美婚礼；文化差异；文化分析

1. Introduction
Wedding ceremony conveys happiness and leaves oceans of romantic memories. There are many tales about wedding ceremony which are not known to all. Every country, district and race has its own unique specialties, all indicating its own culture and features (Bao 12). The word “wedding” comes from the ancient word “swear”, whose meaning is to declare or affirm solemnly and formally as true. As a matter of fact, this is regarded as the true meaning of wedding by people. Bride and bridegroom need to vote to the god solemnly and formally that they will cherish each other and be never separated until the end of their lives. Wedding ceremony, as a great folk-custom activity, contains the abundant cultural connotation in both China and America (Hofstede 10). In the following context, I am going to analyze the cultural differences in etiquette, apparel and background with some examples, so that people can have more knowledge of the wedding customs which represents national culture in both China and America. And this is one of the aims of this paper.
Here, I will briefly introduce differences between Chinese wedding ceremony and America wedding ceremony. Second, I am going to critically analyze the differences between Chinese wedding ceremony and America wedding ceremony to find its culture differences, which probably from three aspects. At last, a clear understanding about cultural differences between two countries will be presented.