Mating Market Shaped by Collective Religious Rituals

Collective religious rituals provide public settings in which individuals demonstrate commitment and gain social visibility. Research has largely focused on their role in social cohesion, while their relationship with marriage formation remains less well understood. Drawing on detailed participation history data collected in a Tibetan village in western China, we examine how participation in the annual June-Gathering, a major collective ritual festival among Amdo Tibetans, is associated with age at first marriage and the geographic origin of spouses. We distinguish three male-performed costly bodily rituals-mouth-piercing, back-piercing, and forehead-cutting-from statue-carrying, a highly visible collective activity. Event-history models indicated that accumulated prior participation in statue-carrying was associated with earlier first marriage, whereas the findings for three bodily rituals were mixed. In a Bayesian ordinal logistic model, statue-carrying provided the clearest evidence of an association with more geographically distant marriage ties; estimates for the bodily rituals were positive but uncertain. Statue-carrying thus showed the most consistent associations across the two marriage outcomes. These ritual-specific patterns offer limited support for a uniform costly-signalling account and highlight the potential relevance of social visibility and marriage opportunities. However, the observational data cannot distinguish opportunity from signalling processes or establish causal relationships. The findings connect collective religious participation to realised marriage outcomes while underscoring the importance of distinguishing activities within a shared ritual setting.