Significant Concept: Goldstein’s article focuses on the convergence between the domestic group. defined as those persons that live in a individual family together. and the family group. or people who view themselves as relations. within a certain Tibetan society near Limi. Nepal. Harmonizing to the article. the thought of polygyny – the pickings of more than one married woman by a individual adult male – is practiced by consanguine brothers for chiefly economic grounds in add-on to grounds of tradition. Because of the clip demand of the subsistence economic system. a adult male puting up a monogamous family would happen it hard if non impossible to farm. pull off the animate beings. and attention to his hubby responsibilities. The writer likens the pattern to the former Western pattern of primogeniture. or land granted to the eldest male inheritor. that was practiced in the last century.
Goldstein farther explains that the signifier of bride-sharing that is practiced allows the brothers to bask a “more secure and higher criterion of living” . as each adult male would retain entree to the household estate and belongings instead than spliting it amongst all the familial inheritor. In this same context. the article provides the decrease in population growing ( and “reduction on the resources” every bit good ) polyandry provides as another possible. though mostly discounted. ground for the pattern. Because the dirt is waterless and mostly infertile. merely choice countries of terraced land are available as farming area to the Tibetans. The sterility of the dirt coupled with the harsh Himalayan clime introduces a looking transporting capacity of the part ; that is. at that place seems to be a bound to how big a population the land can back up. The article concludes by discoursing the diminution of polyandrous matrimonies. and even goes so far as to depict that the pattern may be wholly gone within a individual generation’s clip.
Discussion Item: The article makes me funny how frequently persons from a more industrialised part paying visit to a tribal or otherwise distant part and exposed to societal elements different from that which is typically seen in their ain civilization justice the people whom they are sing. or conclude that their patterns are “uncivilized” . “barbaric” or “disgusting” without halting and taking the clip to believe critically about the economic. political and societal grounds behind the pattern. every bit good as the branchings of altering it.
The article specifically mentions a old visit to the Tibetans by Jesuits who saw the polyandrous matrimony construction and concluded that the pattern had to be the consequence of female infanticide. In that instance. the Jesuits likely sought to act upon the Tibetans to abandon their no uncertainty “sinful” and “immoral” ways and alternatively. choose for the type of monogamous relationships sanctioned by their God. Supposing the Jesuits had been successful in act uponing such a alteration without a commensurate alteration in farming engineering. what would hold happened to the quality of life and criterion of life of the Tibetan people?
