I wonder if one of the purposes of this kind of polyandry isn’t to keep the birth rate down. The people who are doing this are nomadic Tibetans.
Nomadic peoples usually want to have a lower birth rate than agricultural peoples. It’s hard to migrate when you’ve got a lot of babies or young children to take with you, and nomads don’t need extra kids to help with the farm work. Nomads these days usually live in places that are not suitable for farming, since there are so many powerful agricultural societies that would be likely to displace them if they lived in places that were suitable for farming. See what happened to the Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians for an example of what generally happens in modern times to nomadic people living in areas suitable for agriculture. Land that isn’t suitable for agriculture isn’t likely to produce a huge surplus of wild food for hunter-gatherers, either. These Tibetan nomads probably don’t have a huge surplus of food to feed a growing population.
If several men are only having sex with one woman, that would bring the birth rate down, since that woman can only have one child every nine months at maximum. That may be what is needed to have a sustainable population of nomadic people on what is probably not the best land in Tibet. If you don’t have modern birth control, it’s a reasonable solution- your men get to have sex, but they don’t produce too many babies while doing so. There is the problem of surplus women, though, just like a polygynous society has surplus men (see the “lost boys” in fundamentalist Mormon communities for an example of how this can work if infanticide or sending the surplus people to war aren’t available options). I wonder what the Tibetans do with their surplus of girls.
According to this wiki page, Tibet doesn’t only practice polyandry- in households where there are only daughters, they’ll generally bring in a single, shared husband instead (and occasionally possibly share that husband with their widowed mother).
For those who were wondering what happens to the ‘spare girls’, I guess all who don’t marry into another family just stay at home, and stay single.
You know, this brings up an interesting issue. Instead of killing all their baby girls, why aren’t they shipping them to the U.S.? I certainly wouldn’t complain if we suddenly got a huge influx of Asian girls.
It’s about maintaining her status within her community and family. As a full and free person. If she is not ‘married’ she does not have access to certain status things, that she may be accustomed to. Think of it as a form of old age security, because it’s closer to that than to, ‘baby factories’, that’s just crazy talk!
I would think the society you describe would also be one where babies are born at home, and women are more likely to die in childbirth. It would seem obvious that if Dad is sharing the Son’s wife, then Mom must be gone, right? The life expectancy of females vs males probably balances out the equation.
I meant China as a whole does export girls, not necessarily Tibet. Getting prospective adoptive parents to visit Tibet is probably a bit harder than getting them to come to other parts of China. If you want to export your unwanted baby girls, you have to be able to let people in parts of the world who want baby girls know they are there, and make arrangements for getting prospective parents to pick up the baby girls. That’s not so easy to do if you are a poor nomadic Tibetan. Nomadic people tend not to be rich.
I’m not seeing how the numbers work out for your theory. Assuming there are equal numbers of men and women (which is the normal standard) then polyandry is just going to result in some women remaining single and less likely to have children, thereby lowering the birthrate.
If the high death rate is caused by warfare, then you’ve probably got a shortage of men. If that’s the case, then you already were facing a situation where you were going to have a lot of unmarried women and polyandry would just increase that.
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I was responding to the side argument about polygyny and its causes, not polyandry.
Maybe not technically. But if your half-sister’s brother is your dad, that’s kind of creepy, don’t you think? Just vaguely. And they pointed out they share a common WIFE, so technically, that’s your stepmom, isn’t it?
I think the hardest part would be looking at a baby and wondering whether you or your Father Fathered it. Brother or child? And how does that change your role? The ick factor is just off the charts. And imagine the inheritance problems?
There wouldn’t be inheritance problems if all property was shared between fathers and brothers, if you were automatically considered a co-owner of anything your father or brother owns. I don’t know if this is what they do.
Nomads don’t tend to own a lot of property. If you’re nomadic, you probably don’t own real estate. If you’re poor, as most nomadic people are these days, you don’t own a lot of other property, pretty much by definition. Maybe the issue just doesn’t come up very often.
Yes, it would be icky, though. I bet it’s icky for the women, too.
This statement is a true canard - anyone who is using it is simply saying that they are all for their OWN personal cultural practices, just not YOUR culture’s practices.
Remove the completely artificial stricture of ‘marriage’, and it’s no big deal at all, in any way. It’s not nature making it icky; it’s completely mental.
