HONEY, WE'RE HOME !

(First appeared in The Davis Enterprise, June 20, 1997, Front page, Lead article)

We are all familiar with monogamy, the legal form of marriage in our culture. Most of us also know about 'polygyny' , an arrangement in which one man has several wives. But few people realize that there is another marriage system known as 'polyandry', when one woman has two or more husbands. And I don't mean marrying one after the other like, for example, Elizabeth Taylor. I mean more than one husband at the same time in the same house.

Typically in a polyandrous system, a woman marries a man plus his brothers, who "share" her. Never knowing for certain whether they are fathers or uncles, the men treat the children born into the family as their own.

Not surprisingly, this type of marriage system is extremely rare. In a survey of 849 societies around the world, only 4 of them - 0.5%- were polyandrous. 16% were monogamous, and the rest were polygynous to some degree.

Graduate student, Kimber Haddix in the Department of Anthropology at UC Davis, is interested in the conditions that might give rise to this unusual multi-husband marriage custom. Her study took her to the remote northwest corner of Nepal, near the Tibetan border. It is here where polyandrous marriage is most commonly found, among the Tibetan communities living in the high, arid Himalayas where the terrain in steep, the air is thin, and the winters are hard.

Haddix spent over a year in a small village, studying the local rules and customs, joining the women in their many chores, and conducting extensive interviews. Why do people enter into polyandrous marriages? What do men and women gain from such unions that they wouldn't get from, say, monogamy? Are there alternatives?

Previous anthropologists have studied Tibetan polyandry and puzzled over its cause. The most feasible explanation is an ecological one. The system is an adaptation to an extremely harsh environment where there is very little arable land. In a society where fathers are required to divide up land equally among their sons (instead of giving everything to the eldest), estates are down to the minimum farmable size. The solution is to pass on the farm, intact, to all sons as a unit.

Furthermore, if only one woman marries the group of brothers, the number of mouths to be fed is limited, which insures what there will be enough to eat for the children born to that family.

Haddix has added several dimensions to this ecological scenario. The people depend, not just on agriculture, but also on animal herding and on trade, which takes men (on foot) away from their homes for many months at a time. The people say that no family can subsist without all three economic activities, which clearly require several able bodies. Keeping brothers together under one roof not only retains sparse land in one estate, but supplies the necessary manpower to support a household.

Although polyandrous marriage is an economic necessity and the cultural ideal, it is certainly not everyone's personal choice. It appears, for example, that men would far prefer to be certain fathers than probable uncles. Polyandry exists when there are no other options. This is why it has developed in very remote regions, cut off from other means of making a living, where there is little chance for men to raise a family on their own. If they could, they would, and sometimes do. In one relatively prosperous valley , for example, fifty percent of polyandrous marriages split, with the younger husbands leaving to remarry monogamously.

From her many hours of gossiping with the women over cups of yak butter tea, Haddix learned that wives aren't wild about the arrangement either. "Too many husbands is too much trouble", they say, complaining about the fighting and jealousy, the concerns over paternity, and the lack of sleep. What are their options?

Clearly in a multi-husband system, there will be "excess" women. Many of them take religious vows and become celibate Buddhist nuns. Rather than live in a monastery, they usually remain on the family farm, helping with the work. Other unmarried women become single mothers and run their own households. They are classed in the same social category as widows.

The type of anthropology that Kimber Haddix and others are pursuing was inspired by behavioral and ecological studies of other animals. Polyandry is a rare mating system in general. It occurs in only a handful of other mammals and birds. Biologists have explained it in terms of particular environmental conditions and the breeding opportunities that result. By using a similar approach with humans, anthropologists are gaining a much deeper understanding of the diversity of human culture.

Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616
e-mail: kjstewart@ucdavis.edu