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POLYANDRY

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, Polyandry, Polygyny, Polygamy, Monogamy

Polyandry is a marriage structure where a woman has more than one husband at one time.

Polyandry is polygamy in which one woman has two or more husbands at the same time.

It is rare, but when it is found there is often fraternal polyandry, in which the husbands are brothers.

It is a polygamy in which one woman has two or more husbands at the same time.

The term polyandry is also used where a female animal has more than one male mate.

Polyandrist is a person who practises or favours polyandry, that is, a woman who has several husbands at the same time.

Polygamy is marriage with several spouses, or more than one spouse, at once, or living at the same time.

The practice or custom by which one man has more than one wife, or one woman has more than one husband, at the same time.

A marriage structure in which there is more than one spouse at a time: the term covers both polygyny and polyandry.

Polygyny is polygamy in which one man has two or more wives at the same time.

The term polygyny is also used where a male animal has more than one female mate.

Polygynist is a person who practises or favours polygyny, that is, a man who has several wives at the same time.

The dynamics of polyandry: kinship, domesticity, and population on the Tibetan border.
Levine, N. E., University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA.
Abstract: Polyandry, the simultaneous marriage of two or more men to a single women, is cross-culturally rare and has been little studied. The book investigates polyandry as it is practised among the Nyinba, a culturally Tibetan group resident in northwestern Nepal. It uses ethnographic data to explore polyandry's cultural and social parameters and the multiple factors that enter into individuals' decisions to remain in their polyandrous marriages, or, as rarely happens, to dissolve them. This leads to a critique of arguments that find a determinant materialist logic in polyandry and seek its causes in exogenous circumstances. the Nyinba practise fraternal polyandry. Every man who has brothers, with the rarest of exceptions, marries polyandryously, and virtually all the brothers remain in intact, fraternally polyandrous marriages throughout their lives. The linkage of brothers in marriage and their lifelong co-residence are associated with special systems of property inheritance and succession to positions of household authority. Lifelong fraternal unity produces households which are large and complex in composition. The analysis encompasses a wide range of interactions: between concepts of kinship, cultural identity, and ethnic boundaries; between traditional systems; between a polyandrous household system, the constraints of mountain agriculture, and regional economic and labour systems; and, ultimately, between kinship, domestic economy, and population dynamics. Nyinba men's and women's assessment of their own circumstances is discussed as well as the interplay between individual decisions and socio-cultural processes. The book, contributing to kinship theory, demonstrates the powerful role played by ideas about heredity, physical commodity, and social obligation in the Nyinba community. Polyandry among the Nyinba affects interpersonal relationship in marriage and in family life. It is associated with a unique household system, supports a special type of domestic economy, and has a major impact on village political organizations.

Matriarchy, polyandry, and fertility amongst the Mosuos in China
Nan E. Johnsona and Kai-Ti Zhanga, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University
Journal of Biosocial Science (1991), 23:499-505 Cambridge University Press
Copyright © 1991, Cambridge University Press
A survey of 232 households of the Mosuo minority group in Yunnan Province, People's Republic of China, suggested that polyandrous matriarchy did not raise the birth rate per household, but lowered the community birth rate by restricting many women's chances of marrying. The results imply that tolerance by the national government of polyandry within certain minority groups (e.g. Mosuos and Tibetans) will not prevent but may aid the attainment of zero population growth by China in the twenty-first century.

Draupadi’s Husbands: A Brief Study of Polyandry in Contemporary Himalayan Cultures
focusanthro.org
Abstract: The Paharis of India and the nearby Tibetan Nepali are two of the few peoples who practice fraternal polyandry, the marriage of multiple brothers to a single woman. Practitioners and proponents of polyandry offer several reasons for the continuation of this practice, including polyandry’s enhancement of biological fitness in offspring, the abundance of available marriageable men compared to women, polyandry’s economic benefits within the society, and the perpetuation of a polyandrous tradition established in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. However, further research demonstrates that each of these reasons is actually inadequate and nocurrent explanation exists for polyandry’s continued practice among the Pahari and Tibetan Nepali.
Polyandry, the marriage of a woman to multiple husbands, is first recounted not in historical texts, but in the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata, the princess Draupadi is married to the five heroic Pandava brothers, and the Pahari of Himalayan India have continued this practice of fraternal polyandry through the centuries. Paharis, or mountain people, are a separate culture of India characterized by several diversions from mainstream Hinduism, including the institution of polyandry, and a separate linguistic dialect. Their centuries-old trading partners to the north, the Tibetan Nepali, also practice this rare marriage form, which is generally believed to have been introduced to them by the Pahari (Berreman1962). The unique qualities of polyandry and its universal rarity have encouraged continued anthropological investigation among both Paharis and Tibetan Nepali. Several hypotheses have attempted to explain the continuation of polyandrous marriage, including the enhancement of biological fitness, the demographic inequality between men and women, economic benefits in the system of familial partition, and even a particular spiritual devotion to the Mahabharata. However, despite the variety of hypotheses, no conclusive evidence suggests that practice ofpolyandry is preferable to polygyny or monogamy.

The enhancement of biological fitness:
Polyandry does not empirically increase the biological fitness of offspring within amarriage. Although polyandrous marriages do ensure some variation of alleles within a familial population, the probability of transferal of alleles from father to children decreases with the number of husbands within a polyandrous marriage (Beall and Goldstein 1981).

In a polyandrous marriage of only two brothers, the opportunity of a husband to pass half his genetic code to his children is already decreased by half. This, of course, assumes that all husbands are provided with equal sexual access to the common wife, a cultural ideal which is not universally maintained (Levine 1987).

In the case of unequal access, the probability of allele transferal remains reduced for all husbands and is even more significantly decreased for the husbands provided with less sexual access. Additionally, the marriage of multiple husbands does not increase the number of offspring born to a common wife. Plausibly, the common wife might be expected to raise more children to adulthood than a monogamous wife due to her increased sexual access and ensured providing by one or more husbands. Polyandrous marriages, however, produce the same amount of offspring as monogamous marriages – due to the universal gestation periods of women – and in fact have a higher offspring mortality rate resulting in less surviving children (Beall and Goldstein 1981). The decrease in the number of offspring further decreases the chance of transferal of alleles to a further generation. Thus, polyandry “does not appear to enhance the fitness of individuals who practice it, and in fact, seems to entail substantial reproductive sacrifice” (Beall and Goldstein 1981:5).

The demographic inequality between men and women
A general theory presented for polyandry is the insurance of marriage for all eligible individuals in societies where there is a surplus of men (Heath 1955, cited in Berreman 1962). In Jaunsar Bawar, a polyandrous Pahari community, there is an expectantly great shortage of women. However, in nearby and monogamous Garhwal, there is a high surplus of women (Berreman 1962), a trend which suggests that polyandry may be the cause and not the solution to a shortage of available wives. Additionally, in Tibetan Nepali communities, there remain unwed single women who are unable to find husbands because of their status as daughters of an illegitimate union (Schuler 1987).

Indeed, these single women are ill-favored candidates for marriage in a culture which values the wealth associated with legitimacy: Single women are part of a peripheral population which is a concomitant of the system of social stratification, of the narrow principles governing entitlement to status and property (Schuler 1987:70).

Although illegitimacy is not necessarily stigmatized by Tibetan societies, it does preclude the usual inheritance of wealth, making illegitimate daughters less likely to be married into a polyandrous union. This particular social eligibility of women and not their sheer numerical representation is a more accurate factor of the ratio between available men and women in a polyandrous society.

The economic benefits in a system of familial partition
By far the most convincing explanation of polyandry lies in the standard division of familial property among both Pahari and Tibetan Nepali societies. Both societies practice familial partition, in which land holdings and resources are divided more or less equally among all legitimate sons, with smaller land holdings and resources also available to illegitimate sons. Among the Nepali, this particular inheritance is classified as part of the trongba household and a percentage of the family’s inheritance is especially bestowed on the eldest son. In the case of partition, sons form their own trongba households and, if they gain prestige and wealth with their resources, are granted individual lineage names (Levine 1988).With a decreasing availability of resources, the ideal way for a family to retain the wealth of their lands is to keep the lands intact. In order to mitigate the partition of land, brothers are reunited under one household by marriage to a common wife. The sons of their polyandrous union are also expected to marry in polyandry, thus retaining the entirety of family land holdings through generations.

Indeed, the wealthiest of three Tibetan Nepali communities, Ladog, is alsothe one which practices polyandry most consistently, where not only do more women marry brothers, but also marry more brothers within the same family (Levine 1987). Ideal as polyandry may seem to the system of partition, it is not the only form of marriage practiced in either the Pahari region or in Tibetan Nepal. Even in Ladog, 34.6% of the women marry monogamously and another 6.9% of marriages are monogamous marriages resulting from a brother leaving a polyandrous union (Levine 1987). In fact, at the time of partitioning between brothers who leave the union, harmonious familial relationships are often jeopardized as “differential paternity becomes a public issue” (Levine 1987:274) and brothers, formerly the conjoint fathers of all their wife’s children, openly acknowledge their particular paternities. In the case of illegitimate children, the responsibility of which is “socially enforced,” partitioning becomes an even more contentious debate as the rights of illegitimate children threaten the property rights of legitimate ones (Levine 1987:279).

Thus, the economic benefits of polyandryare often outweighed by the number of brothers who partition land from the family inmonogamous unions and the divisive effect of such partitioning among brothers who choosepolyandry.V. Hindu traditionThe Pahari people also offer another reason for the continuation of fraternal polyandry: aparticular spiritual devotion to Draupadi and her husbands in the Mahabharata. TheMahabharata maintains that the Pandavas traversed Pahari lands during their wanderings, and Paharis claim that polyandry is conducted in traditional remembrance of these heroes (Berreman1962).However, the Mahabharata is a poor source in which to find the virtues of polyandry.Draupadi is the only woman of the epic involved with a polyandrous marriage; her husbands arethe sons of a polygynous union, and, in fact, each of her husbands maintains at least one personalwife of his own. Paharis find sexual access between the wives and brothers of monogamousmarriages as acceptable and desirable as the legitimized union of brothers in polyandry, but theindividual wives of the Pandavas would be looked upon with disfavor, as they are not sharedequally among the brothers (Berreman 1962). Thus, the emulation of the Pandavas through polyandry is an insufficient explanation of its presence, since not all marriage traits of the Pandavas are equally respected by the Pahari.

Thus, no solution provided by either the peoples who practice polyandry or variedanthropological hypotheses on the subject succinctly and completely explains its continuedpractice. Polyandry does not increase the biological fitness of offspring; in fact, it decreases the likelihood of transferring desired traits and alleles. The surplus of men in a polyandrous society may be the result of polyandrous marriages instead of the solution, and many single women remain who are considered ineligible for marriage by other social standards. In the system of partitioning, in which complete and continued practice of polyandry is the most sensible means of retaining family land holdings, the total participation of brothers in polyandrous marriages is rare and land holdings are still often divided amongst families. Finally, the same epic text that provides the traditional foundation for polyandry also provides the foundation for an inequality of marriages among brothers and polygyny, neither of which are practiced to the same extent as polyandry in either Tibetan Nepal or the Pahari region. Lack of substantial support for polyandry demonstrates its anomaly among marriage institutions of the world and further studies among other polyandrous cultures in India and Nepal are necessary to discover the benefits of polyandry in a contemporary society.

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