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Honey, We Love You! By Pranaya Ghimire "Do you take this man to be your husband?" "Yes, I do". " Do you take this man to be your husband?" "I do." "And do you take this other man to be your husband?" "I do." I remember one incident while I was on my way to visit some of the rural parts of Nepal. A "Lami" (marriage performer) was performing marriage of a girl with three men. The three men were brothers form the same family. The girl seemed happy, the three guys seemed happy and their whole family was cherishing the occasion. No one was doing this under any obligation. It was a normal marriage, it was what their ancestors have been doing, it was their tradition, their culture. We all know what monogamy is, the legal form of marriage in our culture. Most of us are also familiar with "polygyny," a practice in which a man has several wives. However, only a few of us realize that there is another marriage system-known as "polyandry" when a single woman is married to two or more husbands: not marrying one person after another; it is the simultaneous marriage of two or more men to a woman at the same time in the same house. (Kelly, 1997) This type of marriage system, not surprisingly, is extremely rare. Thus to other modern cultures, especially Western cultures, polyandry is viewed as an outdated, uncivilized and even sinful practice. However, when reviewed from outside of the society and culture where polyandry is practiced, we are compelled to believe that it is one of the logical choices that other cultures have made under the given circumstances. The practice of polyandry has been found in scattered areas around the world. Some major places, according to Kansas State University (www.ksu.edu/anth5101), include Tibetan fraternal Polyandry, the Nyinba Society in Nepal, Cicisbean relationships in West Africa, the Nayar of India, and the Aache of Amazon and partible paternity. Studies conducted by anthropologists at the University of California and Kansas State University have shown that one of the places where polygamous marriage is most commonly practiced is at the remote northwest corner of Nepal, near the Tibetan border among the Tibetan communities living in the high, arid Himalayas. I am from Nepal, which despite being a small country, has great diversity in culture and tradition. All the way from the base of Mt. Everest to the plains of Terai one can find a wide range of diversified social communities each of them having its unique culture and tradition. Societies practicing polyandry are just a small part of this diversity. About six months before coming to the United States for college, some of my friends and I decided to explore the mystery behind polyandrous marriage by visiting some of the rural communities of Nepal. "Nyinba" can be considered one of the most polyandrous groups in Nepal. Typically in the Nyinba society, polyandry occurs only among the brothers of the same family. Every man who has brothers (with a few exceptions) marries polyand-rously and virtually all the brothers remain in fraternally polyandrous marriages throughout their lives. In other words, a woman marries a man plus his brothers and she is "shared" among them. All polyandrous marriages in the Nyinba society are prearranged. A woman is found as a desirable mate for all of the sons in a particular family. If a brother is unhappy with his situation, he can attempt to "partition " from the family. However, this is unusual. And, if it occurs, it happens only after the partitioning brother has found another wife and after he has survived much opposition from his parents. Each individual father places a great value on having a son of his own. The wife always decides which husband was responsible for "impregnating" her (Levine, 1980). Despite never knowing for certain whether they are fathers or uncles, the men treat the children born into the family as their own. Tshering Nagpo is a 37-year-old mother of eight in a remote village of Dolpo in northern Nepal where she takes care of cooking, cleaning, and cultivation of land. Above all else, she has to take care of her three husbands. "I am happy with the system. It's good. I have no regrets about it," she said with a smile. "But the hard work is definitely here, I have given birth to 12 children but four died." "Polyandry is very wrong", said Kayodensa Tamang, a 19 year old who grew up in a family of four fathers, one mother and six siblings. "It's not good for three to four brothers to share a woman. One will want to dominate and it is not good for the woman." There are many reasons behind the existence of polyandry. The most feasible explanation is an ecological one given by Kelly Stewart from University of California, Davis. "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." Due to the limited resources in the region, residents must control the growth of their population or face starvation. When only one woman marries the group of brothers, the number of mouths to be fed is limited, which increases the probability that there will be enough to eat for the children born to that family. Kimber Hadix, Department of Anthropology at UC Davis thinks that these 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. People say that no family can subsist without all three economic activities, which obviously 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. According to Kelly Stewart, although polyandrous marriage is an economic necessity and the cultural ideal, it is certainly not everyone's choice. Men would far prefer to be certain fathers than probable uncles. Polyandry exists when there are no other options. That's the reason 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. There are examples showing the split of a number of polyandrous marriages with the younger husbands leaving to remarry monogamously. Pranaya Ghimire is a student at Ithaca College. |
