Anthropologists, missionaries, and old "Tibet
hands" have written about the practice of polyandry - an arrangement in
which one woman is married to several husbands at the same time - but most
of these accounts originate from Tibet before 1949. Rapid modernization
and the increasingly long reach of the Chinese state would seem to prohibit
such "primitive" customs. Even people who've spent years in Kham
might not notice the existence of polyandrous families in rural villages.
However, Kham Aid has an incontrovertible witness who says that the custom
is alive and well. The witness is one of our own staff, who comes
from such a family. . Kham Aid program assistant Adrol grew up with
two fathers in a poor farming village in Batang County, two full days'
walk from the county town. His two fathers are brothers (it is unheard
of for unrelated men to share a wife in Tibet). Typically in such families,
the older brother is counted as the head of the family. Children
are attributed to the senior husband whereas in fact no one really knows
who the biological father is, as is true in Adrol's case. . Adrol's parents' marriage was arranged by
their own parents when his mother was only 12 years old. The girl
did not actually live with her husbands until she was older, and her firstborn
child arrived when she was 24, a fairly advanced age in rural Tibet.
According to Adrol, people enter polyandrous marriages because their parents
arranged it, and people respect their parents. . Why do parents arrange for two sons to marry
the same woman? In most cases, the reason is economic. A family
with two adult males has 50% more labor available to do farm-work and tend
animals. One husband may become a trader or laborer and travel far from
home while the other one remains behind to protect wife and children. Two
husbands confer a significant economic advantage. While such families
often originate among the poorest Tibetans, they do not stay poor.
In 2003 some Kham Aid volunteers working in Shadui Township, Xinlong County,
were surprised to learn that the wealthiest family in the town was polyandrous. . Possessiveness is a common trait among both
men and women, so it's difficult to understand how two men could amicably
share a wife. According to Adrol, this is possible because the men
are brothers, so their bond is strong. . Besides the economic advantage conferred by
double husbands, there are other advantages for the shared bride. According
to Adrol, a clever wife can play one husband off the other to get what
she wants. Also, she is much less likely to be abused. Truly,
it is a good deal for the woman, and that's why parents willingly enter
their daughters into such arrangements. Children benefit, too, from the
extra parenting. Adrol seems none the worse for having two fathers
to look out for him. . If two are good, then three or four are better,
right? Such marriages do exist in Kham, and indeed were very common twenty
years ago, but now they are becoming scarce. At Pewar Monastery in
Dege, where Kham Aid conducted an art conservation program in the 1990s,
an old monk was one of "four" husbands. As a monk, he seldom went
home and probably made little use of his wife; indeed, a low position on
the connubial totem pole was perhaps responsible for his choice of vocation. . Naturally, what goes around, comes around,
and polygamy is practiced by Tibetans, too. In pre-1949 Tibet, multiple
wives were a sign of tremendous affluence and were found in the households
of nobles. Nowadays, polygamy is practiced in a much more humdrum fashion:
menkeep mistresses, invariably stashed in locations safely distant from
Wife N°1. For example, one craftsmen met by Kham Aid personnel
in Daocheng had a middle-aged wife who lived with their adult children
in a farmhouse in the countryside, meanwhile he maintained a comely young
mistress in town. . While Tibet is not as remote as it once was,
Tibetan society still has a few odd surprises to offer the unsuspecting
outsider. Perhaps it has some lessons for us as well. . . Kham Aid Foundation www.khamaid.org