A Peculiar System of Polyandry.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 878, 28 December 1888, Page 10

A Peculiar System of Polyandry.

Something about the People of Tibet. The most peculiar of the many remarkable customs of the country with which our latest war has brought us in contact is polyandry. One of the most recent writers on the subject is the late Mr Andrew Wilson, who devotes a chapter of his work, ‘ The Abode of Snow,’ to Tibetan polyandry. Polyandry is that species of polygamy in which the wife has more husbands than one, and it prevails wherever the Tibetan language is spoken. Tibetan polyandry has the pecularity that the husbands are all brothers, or, at the least, very nearly related, so that the woman becomes the wife of a whole family. It does not appear to be in any way connected with the Tibetan religion, but to owe its existence to the poverty of the country and the desire to limit the population.. It is practised by all classes of the population, rich and poor, and is only superseded by polygamy, or multiplicity of wives, where the people have been much in contact with Hindoos or Mohammedans. Nr Wilson met a case in which one woman was married to six brothers, one of whorA was quite a boy, but be thinks in most cases there are only two husbands, not because five or six were objectionable, but because families with more than two brothers are not common. He attributes the fact that the system works peacefully, to the calm, unimpassioned temperament of the people, who subordinate all other interests to those of the family. The children are regatded as scions of the house lather than of any individual member of it; all the husbands are treated as the fathers of the children, and there is no noticeable difference in tbe relations of a child to the different fathers The surplus women left by the system are provided for in the Lama nunneries, where they learn to read and copy the Tibetan Scriptures, and to engage in religious services. The choice of a wife for the family is the right of the elder brother, and the contract he makes involves marriage contracts with all the other brothers. The system is said to have existed in Tibet since prehistoric times, so that its

origin is lost in antiquity. The notable end which it serves is that it restricts peculation in regions where emigration is difficulty and where the means of subsistence cannot be easily increased; Captain Turner says that * the influence of this cUstorh on the manners of the people has not been unfavourable. • ■ To [the privileges of unbounded liberty the wife here adds the character Of mistress of the family and companion of her husbands.’ On the other hand, it struck Mr Wilson that so many husbands meant for the women only so many more masters, and so much more toil and trouble!