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(Kimber McKay) Thank you.
I came to talk to you tonight about my research in the Nepalese Himalayas,
and what itís taught me about marriage. Iím a cultural anthropologist
and Iíve studied marriage and family systems now,
cross-culturally, for 20 years. A lot of us in America have a template in
mind when we think about marriage and family.
We have a set of ideas regarding whatís normal, even ideal, with respect to marriage and family.
And it doesnít occur to a lot of us to wonder where that template came from.
I came to the topic from the perspective of my own family.
My parents divorced when I was young, they remarried, had more biological children,
and adopted yet others from another country. So, my ideas about family
were fairly flexible from a pretty early age. By contrast, my ideas about marriage
were much more rigid. They were informed by what I saw around me
growing up in rural New Hampshire in the 1970s and the 1980s.
And like many Americans, I internalized the idea
that a good and proper marriage involved a relationship between one man and one woman.
I never thought to question that template, or where it came from,
or how other people in other societies might organize their ideas, or their template.
So, when I became a student of cultural anthropology,
and decided to focus on marriage and family, I started to question that more seriously.
In order to complete my studies, I had to choose a society where I would go
live, learn the language,
and spend over a year living with people and coming to know their way of doing things.
So, fast-forward to 1995, and I found myself walking along with 11 quarters
[chuckles] up this valley. carrying the ridiculous and now embarrassing
amount of stuff that I imagined I was gonna need
to make it through a year of living there. So this is in Humla district
in Nepalís Northwestern corner. Right off of the border with Tibet
in a place that lacked roads. The nearest road from the Nepal side
was a three week walk away at my pace. And, the villages lacked electricity,
toilets, running water, telephones, and modern health care.
To get there, I flew in on this air plane, landed on a gravel runway,
and started walking. To get to my field site,
I had to walk between 8 and 16 hours, and there were lots of villages to choose
from. Eventually I chose this one.
Itís a little village called Karami with 300 residents, and it had a hot spring,
enough said. So I stayed there for a year
talking with the people who lived there, and coming to understand their way of living,
and their thoughts about family and marriage. The reason I was attracted to this place is
because they have a very unusual marriage system
where, typically, people start out their marital career polyandrously,
which means that women have multiple husbands. But, in fact, this system has a lot of flexibility,
so many people are monogamous. Some people are polygynous,
which means they have multiple wives, and thereís a tremendous amount of
flexibility and open-mindedness with respect to
how to define marriage in that society. So, the day I arrived,
I met my friend Carchun Lama. Which is somebody I was to become
very close with. Carchun was the same age as me.
And she had five husbands at that time and three children.
I, by contrast had no husband and no children, and this was a subject
of great concern for my friends, who were to spend many hours advising me
about how to tackle the obstacles they forsaw in my future;
finding a husband, and withstanding the rigors of pregnancy, labor,
and delivery at the advanced age of 26. [laughter]
But, their concern for me was vastly overshadowed by their concern for my boyfriend,
who live with me for a little while, and the serious error in judgment
he seemed to be making, having chosen a woman so lazy,
and so evidently incompetent, whoís content spending her days
asking inane questions about marriage and family,
sitting around writing about them in her notebook. So, I had a lot of adventures in this place,
and many experiences that were mind-expanding. But, of all of those experiences,
both for me as a cultural anthropologist, and for me as a human being,
the most mind-expanding of all was coming to understand
the flexibility in their system of defining marriage and family,
and coming to understand what it was like to live in a place with no single way
of arranging relations between spouses, or a single set of ideas about
a good and proper way of marrying or providing for your family and household.
Now, anthropologists have been interested in this topic for hundreds of years.
There arenít a lot of things that are universals; things that all societies do.
But, one of the things that nearly all societies do
is put into place a system of practices regulating relationships between spouses,
between spouses and in-laws, and between spouses and children,
and this is what we refer to when talking about marriage.
Beyond that, we donít get very much more precise.
And the reason for that is because of the incredible variability that
we see across societies, with respect to marriage.
So, many people will note that itís very common for monogamy to occur.
Beyond monogamy though, even more societies either permit or encourage
polygamy in one of two forms. Either polygyny, where there are multiple
wives, or polyandry, much less common,
where there are multiple husbands. Beyond those kinds of marriage,
we see many societies, both historically and contemporarily
in all different types of societies permitting same-sex marriage.
The levirate, where, if a womanís husband dies,
she can expect to be remarried to his brother, and societies with the sororate,
where, if a manís wife dies, he can expect to be remarried
to any available sister that she might have. We even see societies where
something called ghost-marriage is practiced. And thatís where, if a family has a child
who dies before reaching the age of marriage and reproduction,
they can marry his spirit to any community-member,
and any children she might have would be attributed to the spirit-spouse,
thereby continuing the lineage through her. So, one thing that anthropologists of marriage
come to understand is that there are lots and lots of different
forms of marriage that work across societies. Moreover, they permit people to thrive
and even to prosper. They donít have to fit any particular template.
Now, among these types, fraternal polyandry is one of the least common.
In Humla, how it works is; a woman marries a man and his brothers.
So, her co-husbands are each otherís brothers. And, in some families,
this is very advantageous, because, in Tibet, on the plateau,
where this kind of polyandry used to be common, and in the high Himalayan valleys of the Nepalese
of Nepal and India. Arable land is at a premium.
So, maintaining the estate of land where food can be grown by these farmers intact
from one generation to the next, when the brothers marry all together
and share a wife, can be very advantageous, and so, people were very aware of that,
and talked about that with me. In this family, there were
three brothers and co-husbands, and one wife.
And I was very close to this family and observed how they, sort of, arranged their
life and their household
given their polyandrous status. And what happened in this family
was typical for polyandrous villagers. One husband might be absent for
long periods of time engaging in pedestrian trade.
Another husband might be up with the yak pastures; high-elevation yak pastures,
for a better part of the year. And a third husband would be home
looking after the agriculture. So what that meant for the shared wife
was that it would be rare for her to have all of her husbands home at the same time
competing for her attentions. And so, one of the things thatís
very special about this group of people is that theyíre very candid
and respectful of the reality that not all women are suited to this task.
Itís typical for people to begin, at least, their marriages polyandrously.
Some people stay polyandrous for the duration of their adult lives.
But other people choose other marriage forms. This was my research assistant; Manga Lama,
and he is a person who had brothers, so technically, he could have started out
his marital career marrying polyandrously, sharing one wife with his brother.
But, because of their personalities and desires for marriage,
they decided that they wanted to separately marry one wife,
and they never entered into a polyandrous union.
Eventually, the first family that I showed you,
after nearly 20 years, transitioned out of polyandry,
and into separate, monogamous households. Now, that decision, and Mangaís decision
to not enter into polyandry, were not met with any particular concern
by the community. And no assignment of negativity,
or value judgment, or guilt and shame accompanied those decisions.
And thatís typical of this group of people. Theyíre very candid about the fact
that different personalities are suited to different marital arrangements.
Moreover, they understand that what you may be suited to as a young adult
may be different to what youíre suited to as you age.
And given the long, relatively long, life that Humlese enjoy,
their needs can change. This is my adoptive younger brother
Ander Lama, making friends with his first trout, here in Missoula.
And he spent some time here with me. Last week he was in Humla.
We were chatting on e-mail and we thought, wouldnít it be fun
to make a video of our friend Anda Lama, whoís a polyandrous women; two husbands,
and see what she has to share with you about her thoughts regarding polyandry.
So, here is Anda talking in here own words. [video playing]
(Kimber) I love that one of her husband chimes in at
the end ëit all works great, unless somebodyís drunk.
[laughter] Sounds like a lot of families I know.
[laughter] So, thereíve been lots of changes
over the last couple of decades being in and out of the villages.
Iím very proud to work with an organization called the ISIS foundation
that brings hygiene, and sanitation, and health and education projects to people there.
and that allows me to wear my other hat to pursue my other passion which is pit latrines.
Because, I firmly believe that every Humlee household should have
a toilet that they love. Other forces of change are at work.
Recently, in fact, over the last decade, Nepal went through a civil war.
And the insurgents campaigned, in part, on asking Nepali people to really scrutinize
their traditional culture. In Humla, they went after polyandry in
Despite these forces of changesÖ change, polyandry has continued.
We just resurveyed the villages, and, fully 30% of households
still have polyandrous marriages. And, of the monogamous marriages of today,
more than 70% of them in Karnali used to be polyandrous.
So both polyandry and the flexibility of the system
are persisting. I donít wanna portray Humla as some kind
of conflictless Shangri-La, cause itís not.
Thereís conflicts over lots of topics. But one conflict that they donít have conflict
over is the definition of marriage.
And I believe that that has everything to do
with the flexibility inherent to the system. And theyíre compassionate,
and empathetic and wise recognition that characterologically,
and in terms of personality, different people are suited
to different arrangements. Moreover, what theyíre suited to can change
as time passes and needs change. So, Iím not advocating that
we all start marrying polyandrously. I donít know how you feel about your brothers
or how you feel about your husbandís brothers, but Iím guessing fraternal polyandry
might not be your first choice. What I am advocating for, however,
is that we look closely at howÖ how narrowly weíve defined
marriage in our culture, and we ask ourselves
where that template came from. As for me, given the opportunity,
and based on 20 years of thinking this over and observing this incredibly
remarkable, flexible society, I would advocate for a more flexible system.
One that avoids guilt and shame, and which recognizes, and respects,
and, indeed, uplifts more than one good and proper marriage configuration.
So, in conclusion, Iíd like to turn to the question
that I asked myself as a young adult over to you.
If you had the opportunity to redefine the template,
what would it look like, and why? In Tibetan: Thuk-je-che,
thank you. [applause]
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