In Remote Asian Land, Women Wed Several Men

She had to hike up a mountain to get there.

Past barley fields and grazing yaks, treading along the stony paths that led to the high Himalayan valley regions that border Tibet and Nepal.

Nestled in this remote area of northwestern Nepal is a tiny settlement of ethnic Tibetan Buddhists, the land of the Nyinba, where UCLA anthropologist Nancy Levine found one of the last flourishing polyandrous populations, a society where women marry several men.

“When people talk about exotic marriages they usually start the discussion with polygamy,” said the professor, who lived with the Nyinba for two years in the 1970s and more recently between 1982 and 1984.

“But polyandry once existed in many places throughout central and southern Asia.”

Sociobiological studies of the culture by Levine reveal some telling facts of Nyinba life.

Marry Every Brother

Women simultaneously marry every brother in a neighboring family from the oldest son down to the very youngest.

Should a mother-in-law give birth to a son after a Nyinba woman has married all of her other sons, then the new baby becomes a husband too. The Nyinba wives often help rear some of the husbands during their infancy and childhood, developing sexual relationships with them in later years.

The largest number of husbands for any one Nyinba wife was seven, Levine found during her study periods in their village.

But several households often join together, she said, giving rise to very large families, such as the one she visited in 1983 that consisted of 18 men and women of three generations.

There were three brothers and their common wife; five of their sons and their sons’ wife; four granddaughters, three grandsons and an unmarried teen-age girl.

The average age of marriage for a Nyinba woman is 19, the anthropologist said.

“The men’s reproductive abilities are limited in a polyandrous society,” explained Levine. “The number of children will be reduced as they wouldn’t be in polygamy.

“But in either polyandry or polygamy the woman will have about the same number of children.”

Levine, the first American ever to live among the Nyinba, said most of the women in that culture prefer to be married to at least three husbands, citing security reasons in the event of a serious illness or death of one of her spouses.

Sociobiologists, she said, give many reasons for the emergence of polyandrous societies, which once existed heavily throughout northwestern India in the Himalayas, parts of Tibet, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

“This view is an inconsistent one among sociobiologists, but it seems that polyandry is more common when males make a subsistence contribution to the society,” she said of the small farming and livestock-raising cultures where the practice most often occurred.

Nyinba women primarily oversee agriculture in their village.

Laws enacted by societies that either adopted Western ways or found the practice heathenish gradually put an end to polyandry throughout most of Asia, Levine said.

But she noted that other field studies have found examples of the diminishing practice in a few pockets in Asia and similar practices elsewhere in the world.

“There are (other polyandrous cultures) in Nepal. But there are not very many,” Levine said.

“There’s also a funny kind of marriage in Nigeria that involves a woman being married to several men. But she only lives with one at a time and travels between them.

“That’s a form of plural marriage for women; it’s not true polyandry. Marriages in which husbands have more wives are much more common, of course,” she said.

“On occasion I would ask Nyinba why their society was polyandrous. I always received the same predictable response: that polyandry was an age-old custom their ancestors brought from Tibet.”

Levine also has studied the reactions of Westerners to learning about societies where women are essentially in control in the business of the village and in their households as well.

“Everyone loves to hear about polyandry. People here (in the United States) think it’s very strange and men tend to be very uncomfortable about it.

“Men in this society find it personally intolerable to share their wives; sexual jealousy is very pronounced,” something Levine found to be surprisingly missing among the Nyinba.

“(Western) women find simultaneous sexual relationships with several men uncomfortable too,” she said.

Levine, the author of a new book on the Nyinba and their polyandrous society, challenges a longstanding opinion among anthropologists who contend that polyandry occurs only when people are adapting to such difficult circumstances as harsh environment or poverty.

The population-limiting aspect of a polyandrous society can be beneficial in areas where resources are scarce, some have argued, Levine said.

But she believes the practice has survived the centuries because of the special family unity it affords. “Nyinba legends and genealogies portray ancestors as brothers linked in polyandry, and stories celebrate ancestors for the harmony of their family life,” she said.