Polyandry

Polyandry is a type of polygamy where one woman is married to two or more men at the same time. It is the opposite of polygyny, which involves one man and multiple women. When a marriage includes multiple husbands and multiple wives, it is called group or conjoint marriage. More broadly, polyandry can also refer to a woman having sexual relationships with several men, whether or not she is married to them.

According to the 1980 Ethnographic Atlas, which surveyed 1,231 societies, 186 were monogamous, 453 practiced occasional polygyny, 588 had more frequent polygyny, and only four practiced polyandry. However, polyandry is actually less rare than these numbers suggest, because the Atlas only counted examples from the Himalayan region (eight societies). More recent research has identified at least four additional societies that practice polyandry.

In Nepal and parts of China, Tibetans practice fraternal polyandry, where two or more brothers share the same wife, and the wife has equal sexual access to all of them. This practice is linked to partible paternity, the belief that a child can have more than one biological father. Several ethnic groups in India who practice polyandry trace their customs back to Draupadi, a character from the Mahabharata who was married to five brothers, though local practices are not always fraternal. Polyandry is thought to be more common in societies with scarce resources.

It is believed to limit population growth and improve child survival. Although it is a rare form of marriage, it occurs among both peasant and elite families. In the Himalayan mountains, for example, polyandry is tied to land scarcity. Marrying all brothers in a family to the same wife keeps family land intact and undivided.

Successional polyandry

If each brother married separately and had children, the land would be split into plots too small to sustain the family. In contrast, very poor people who owned no land were less likely to practice polyandry in Buddhist Ladakh and Zanskar. In Europe, the same problem of land division was avoided through impartible inheritance, where most siblings were disinherited and many became celibate monks or priests. Unlike fraternal polyandry, where a woman has several husbands at once, successional polyandry involves a woman marrying one husband after another in sequence.

This form is flexible: the men may or may not be related, and the arrangement may or may not be hierarchical. In a hierarchical system, one husband is considered primary and may have special rights, such as fathering a child. Secondary husbands can take over if the primary husband becomes severely ill, is away for a long time, or is otherwise unable to fulfill his duties.

In an egalitarian version, all husbands have equal status and rights. Each husband has a wedding ceremony, and all share paternity of any children the woman bears. This form combines polyandry and polygyny: women are married to several men at once, and those same men may also marry other women. It is found in some African tribes, such as in villages in northern Nigeria and northern Cameroon.

Associated polyandry

Typically, one of the woman’s husbands is chosen to marry a woman from another tribe, who also has multiple husbands. This double-polyandrous union creates a marital alliance between tribes. The system reduces land fragmentation and diversifies domestic activities. Also called adelphic polyandry, this is when a woman is married to two or more brothers.

Fraternal polyandry

It has been found in parts of Tibet, Nepal, and northern India, as well as in some central African cultures. The Toda people of southern India once practiced fraternal polyandry, though monogamy has become common there recently. In contemporary Hindu society, polyandrous marriages in the Malwa region of Punjab appear to prevent the division of farming land. Fraternal polyandry serves a similar purpose to primogeniture in 19th-century England, where the eldest son inherited the family estate and younger sons had to leave home.

Primogeniture kept estates intact by allowing only one heir per generation. Fraternal polyandry does the same by keeping all brothers together with one wife, producing only one set of heirs per generation. This strategy becomes less effective as the number of brothers grows.

Some forms of polyandry seem linked to the need to keep aristocratic titles or agricultural land within kin groups, or to the frequent, long-term absence of men from the household. In Tibet, the practice was especially common among the priestly Sakya class. The female equivalent of fraternal polyandry is sororate marriage. Anthropologist Stephen Beckerman has noted that at least 20 tribal societies...