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Polyandry is a marital arrangement in which a woman has several husbands. In Tibet, those husbands are often brothers; "fraternal polyandry". Concern over which children are fathered by which brother falls on the wife alone. She may or may not say who the father is because she does not wish to create conflict in the family or is unsure who the biological father is. [1] Historically the social system compelled marriage within a social class.
When the People's Republic of China annexed Tibet, political systems in many regions of Tibet remained unchanged until, between 1959 and 1960, political reforms changed the land ownership and taxation systems. [2]
Since 1981, the Tibet Autonomous Region government no longer permits new polyandric marriages under family law. Even though it is currently illegal, after collective farming was phased out and the farmed land reverted in the form of long-term leases to individual families, polyandry in Tibet is de facto the norm in rural areas.[ citation needed ]
As elucidated further below, the primary reason for polyandrous marriage among Tibetans appears to be economic: to prevent land, herds, and other assets from being divided and/or to increase the amount of labor available to support the family.
The Tibetan social organization under Lhasa control from the 17th century on was quasi-feudal, in that arable land was divided and owned by aristocratic families, religious organizations, and the central government and the population was subject to those district divisions. The population was further divided into social classes:
These wealthier family units hereditarily owned estates leased from their district authority, complete with land titles. In Goldstein's research about the Gyantse district specifically, he found them owning typically from 20 acres (81,000 m2) to 300 acres (1.2 km2) of land each. Their primary civil responsibility was to pay taxes (tre-ba and khral-pa means "taxpayer"), and to supply corvée services that included both human and animal labor to their district authority. [5] According to Goldstein, the entire family structure and marriage system were subordinated to serve the land and corporate family unit.
The family structure and marriage system of tre-ba were characterized by two fundamental principles:
A "stem family" is one in which a married child is inextricably linked to his natal family in a common household. The "mono-marital principle" dictates that for each and every generation, one and only one marriage is permitted collectively among all the male siblings, and the children born out of this marriage are members of the family unit who have full legal rights.
The family organization was based on these two patterns to avoid the partitioning of their estates. A generation with two or more conjugal families was seen as unstable because it could produce serious conflicts that could divide their corporate family land. As a matter of fact, Tibetan inheritance rules of family land, mainly based on agnatic links, did provide for each generation to partition the land between brothers, but this was ignored to prevent the estate unit from being threatened. Polygamous marriage, therefore arose as a solution to this potential threat.
To elucidate, consider a family with two or more sons. Tibetan inheritance rules gave all males of the family, the right to claim a part of the family estate, so if each son took a different bride, there would be different conjugal families, and this would lead to the partitioning of the land among the different sons' families. To avoid this situation, the solution was a fraternal polyandrous marriage, where the brothers would share a bride. Bi-fraternal polyandrous marriages were more common than tri-fraternal or quadri-fraternal polyandry, because the latter forms of marriage were often characterized by severe familial tensions (reference missing). Different mechanisms were employed to reduce the number of sons within a household, such as making one son a celibate monk, or sending away a son to become an adoptive bridegroom to a family without male children.
Another kind of marriage, although uncommon, is the "polygynous marriage". In a family where all the children were female, sisterly polygynous marriage represented the most common choice. In traditional inheritance rules, only males had rights over the land, but where there were no males to inherit them, the daughters had the right over the corporation’s land. To maintain the familial estate unit, the daughters would share a bridegroom who will move matrilocally (as opposed to the patrilocal principle where the brides move into the husband's family) and become a member of his wife's family.
Bigenerational polygamy was present as an application of the mono-marital principle. Consider a family in which the mother died before the son was married. If the widower remarried another woman, two conjugal families would have been created, leading to the eventual partition of the estate. Bigenerational polyandry, whereby the father shared a wife with his son, was therefore the solution to avoid this problem. Conversely, when a woman with no male offspring was widowed, she would share a husband with her daughter ("bigenerational polygyny"), thus avoiding land partitioning (reference missing).
In these mono-marital stem families, the family head, who had a dominant role in the family, was called trong bey abo (or simply abo). The abo who managed the property and resources of the family unit, was always a male, and almost invariably the oldest male of the elder generation in power. Sometimes, a younger brother would assume the abo role when the eldest male retired.
In taxpayer families, polyandrous and monogamist marriage were the more common forms of marriage, while much less widespread was the polygynous marriage. Bigenerational forms of polyandry were, however, very rare.
The householder class (du-jung or dud-chung-ba [5] ) comprised peasants who held only small plots of land that were legally and literally "individual" possessions. Land inheritance rules were different from taxpayer families, determined by the district authority and not strictly hereditary to the family unit.
The householder family structure — unlike the taxpayer families — lacked the single marriage per generation requirement to avoid land parceling. When a son married he often established a new household and split off from the original family unit. If taxpayer sons married that created succession for the family corporation and bound them to the estate for patrimonial and land reasons. Householder marriages did not incur that responsibility, and they generally married for love and were more often monogamist. The small number of polyandry cases within the householder class were limited to only the wealthier families.
The landless peasants (mi-bo) were not obligated to and did not have any heritable rights to land. Like the householders, they tended to have less polyandry than the taxpayer families.
As has been seen, fraternal polyandry was a form of marriage that was prevalent among the tre-ba class. Traditionally, marriages were arranged by the parents, often when the children were still very young. As tre-ba marriages were decided for patrimonial reasons, the brides' and bridegrooms' personal preferences were of no consequence. In polyandrous conjugal family, the eldest brother was, more often than not, the dominant person in the household. All the other brothers, however, shared the work equally, and had the right to sexual relations with their common wife, who had to treat them equally.
All children were treated equally, and a "father" was not allowed to show any favoritism, even if he knew who his biological children really were, as biological paternity was not regarded as important. Similarly, the children considered all their uncles as their fathers, and a child avoided treating members of the elder generation differently, even if they knew who their biological father was. The children would usually only address the eldest surviving husband as "father". [7]
Divorce was quite simple. If one of the brothers in a polyandrous marriage felt displeased, he only had to leave the household. Polyandrous marriages were often characterized by tensions and clashes for a variety of different reasons. For example, conflicts might arise because a younger brother wanted to contest the authority of his eldest brother; sometimes, sexual favoritism might occur, generating tension among the male partners in the marriage, especially so when there were significant age differences among the brothers.
Polyandry declined rapidly in the first decade after the establishment of Tibet Autonomous Region, and was banned during the Cultural Revolution as part of the "Four Olds". However, it regained popularity in the 1980s as the policies relaxed and the people's commune system broke down. A 1988 survey by the Tibet University throughout Tibet found that 13.3% of families were polyandric, and 1.7% were polygynous. [8] Currently, polyandry is present in all Tibetan areas, but particularly common in some rural regions of Tsang and Kham that are faced with extreme living conditions. [9] A 2008 study of several villages in Xigaze and Qamdo prefectures found that 20-50% of the families were polyandric, with the majority having two husbands. For some remote settlements, the number was as high as 90%. [10] Polyandry is very rare among urban residents or non-agricultural households. Representatives of an American charity working in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, from 1997 to 2010 observed polyandry still being practiced there. [11]
A regulation issued by government of Tibet Autonomous Region in 1981 approved all polygamous marriages before the date of implementation, but not those formed after the date, with no prosecution for violating the regulation. In practice, such a family would be registered as a monogamous family between the wife and the eldest husband. [12]
Polygyny is the most common and accepted form of polygamy around the world, entailing the marriage of a man with several women. The term polygyny is from Neoclassical Greek πολυγυνία (polugunía); from Ancient Greek πολύ (polú) 'many', and γυνή (gunḗ) 'woman, wife'.
Polyandry is a form of polygamy in which a woman takes two or more husbands at the same time. Polyandry is contrasted with polygyny, involving one male and two or more females. If a marriage involves a plural number of "husbands and wives" participants of each gender, then it can be called polygamy, group or conjoint marriage. In its broadest use, polyandry refers to sexual relations with multiple males within or without marriage.
Polygamy is the practice of marrying multiple spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at the same time, sociologists call this polygyny. When a woman is married to more than one husband at a time, it is called polyandry. In sociobiology and zoology, researchers use polygamy in a broad sense to mean any form of multiple mating.
Group marriage or conjoint marriage is a marital arrangement where three or more adults enter into sexual, affective, romantic, or otherwise intimate short- or long-term partnerships, and share in any combination of finances, residences, care or kin work. Group marriage is considered a form of polygamy. While academic usage has traditionally treated group marriage as a marital arrangement, more recent usage has expanded the concept to allow for the inclusion of non-conjugal unions. Colloquial usage of group marriage has also been associated with polyamory and polyamorous families.
Traditional Chinese marriage is a ceremonial ritual within Chinese societies that involves not only a union between spouses but also a union between the two families of a man and a woman, sometimes established by pre-arrangement between families. Marriage and family are inextricably linked, which involves the interests of both families. Within Chinese culture, romantic love and monogamy were the norm for most citizens. Around the end of primitive society, traditional Chinese marriage rituals were formed, with deer skin betrothal in the Fuxi era, the appearance of the "meeting hall" during the Xia and Shang dynasties, and then in the Zhou dynasty, a complete set of marriage etiquette gradually formed. The richness of this series of rituals proves the importance the ancients attached to marriage. In addition to the unique nature of the "three letters and six rituals", monogamy, remarriage and divorce in traditional Chinese marriage culture are also distinctive.
To the Confucians, marriage is of important significance both in the family and in society. The Confucian classic Book of Rites described marriage as "the union of two surnames, in friendship and in love". In the perspective of family, marriage can bring families of different surnames together, and continue the family life of the concerned clans. Therefore, only the benefits and demerits of the clans, instead of the individual couples, are concerned in a marriage. Socially, a married couple is the basic unit of the population; sometimes marriages can affect the country's political stability and international relations ; thus marriage can be related to politics.
The type, functions, and characteristics of marriage vary from culture to culture, and can change over time. In general there are two types: civil marriage and religious marriage, and typically marriages employ a combination of both. Marriages between people of differing religions are called interfaith marriages, while marital conversion, a more controversial concept than interfaith marriage, refers to the religious conversion of one partner to the other's religion for sake of satisfying a religious requirement.
The Seventeen Point Agreement, officially the Agreement of the Central People's Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet, was a document pertaining to the status of Tibet within the People's Republic of China. It was signed by plenipotentiaries of the Central People's Government and the Tibetan government on 23 May 1951, in Zhongnanhai, Beijing. The 14th Dalai Lama ratified the agreement in the form of a telegraph on 24 October 1951.
Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme was a Tibetan senior official who assumed various military and political responsibilities both before and after 1951 in Tibet. He is often known simply as Ngapo in English sources.
Tibetan names typically consist of two juxtaposed elements.
Tibet came under the control of People's Republic of China (PRC) after the Government of Tibet signed the Seventeen Point Agreement which the 14th Dalai Lama ratified on 24 October 1951, but later repudiated on the grounds that he had rendered his approval for the agreement under duress. This occurred after attempts by the Tibetan Government to gain international recognition, efforts to modernize its military, negotiations between the Government of Tibet and the PRC, and a military conflict in the Chamdo area of western Kham in October 1950. The series of events came to be called the "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet" by the Chinese government, and the "Chinese invasion of Tibet" by the Central Tibetan Administration and the Tibetan diaspora.
Melvyn C. Goldstein is an American social anthropologist and Tibet scholar. He is a professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
The Golden Urn refers to a method for selecting Tibetan reincarnations by drawing lots or tally sticks from a Golden Urn introduced by the Qing dynasty of China in 1793. After the Sino-Nepalese War, the Qianlong Emperor promulgated the 29-Article Ordinance for the More Effective Governing of Tibet, which included regulations on the selection of lamas. The Golden Urn was introduced ostensibly to prevent cheating and corruption in the selection process but also to position the Qianlong Emperor as a religious authority capable of adducing incarnation candidates. A number of lamas, such as the 8th and 9th Panchen Lamas and the 10th Dalai Lama, were confirmed using the Golden Urn. In cases where the Golden Urn was not used, the amban was consulted. Golden Urn was exempted for Lhamo Dhondup to become the 14th Dalai Lama in 1940.
The serfdom in Tibet controversy is a prolonged public disagreement over the extent and nature of serfdom in Tibet prior to the annexation of Tibet into the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1951. The debate is political in nature, with some arguing that the ultimate goal on the Chinese side is to legitimize Chinese control of the territory now known as the Tibet Autonomous Region or Xizang Autonomous Region, and others arguing that the ultimate goal on the Western side is to weaken or undermine the Chinese state. The argument is that Tibetan culture, government, and society were barbaric prior to the PRC takeover of Tibet and that this only changed due to PRC policy in the region. The pro-Tibetan independence movement argument is that this is a misrepresentation of history created as a political tool in order to justify the Sinicization of Tibet.
There were three main social groups in Tibet prior to 1959, namely ordinary laypeople, lay nobility, and monks. The ordinary layperson could be further classified as a peasant farmer (shing-pa) or nomadic pastoralist (trokpa).
Tibet was a de facto independent state in East Asia that lasted from the collapse of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty in 1912 until its annexation by the People's Republic of China in 1951.
Polyandry in India refers to the practice of polyandry, whereby a woman has two or more husbands at the same time, either historically on the Indian subcontinent or currently in the country of India. An early example can be found in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, in which Draupadi, daughter of the king of Panchala, is married to five brothers.
The Battle of Chamdo occurred from 6 to 24 October 1950. It was a military campaign by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take the Chamdo Region from a de facto independent Tibetan state. The campaign resulted in the capture of Chamdo and the annexation of Tibet by the People's Republic of China.
Pandatsang Rapga was a Khampa revolutionary during the first half of the 20th century in Tibet. He was pro-Kuomintang and pro-Republic of China, anti-feudal, anti-communist. He believed in overthrowing the Dalai Lama's feudal regime and driving British imperialism out of Tibet, and acted on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek in countering the Dalai Lama. He was later involved in rebelling against communist rule.
In behavioral ecology, polyandry is a class of mating system where one female mates with several males in a breeding season. Polyandry is often compared to the polygyny system based on the cost and benefits incurred by members of each sex. Polygyny is where one male mates with several females in a breeding season . A common example of polyandrous mating can be found in the field cricket of the invertebrate order Orthoptera. Polyandrous behavior is also prominent in many other insect species, including the red flour beetle and the species of spider Stegodyphus lineatus. Polyandry also occurs in some primates such as marmosets, mammal groups, the marsupial genus' Antechinus and bandicoots, around 1% of all bird species, such as jacanas and dunnocks, insects such as honeybees, and fish such as pipefish.