What can polygamy on the outskirts of Russia tell us about the effects of the financial crisis in less remote locales? A lot — or so says Cambridge anthropologist Caroline Humphrey: “In the 1990′s, Russia and central Asia experienced huge economic change: what a bank was, how your career was going, what you could expect from life, everything changed overnight. And of course it had a huge impact on people’s lives, from family life to politics, and polygamy is part of that whole scene. So far, we haven’t had such dramatic change in the west, but you never know.” Humphrey, who studies communities on the edges of the former Soviet Union, found that many men and women advocate polygamy for economic reasons. Men are in short supply and life on the rural farms many women live on is difficult. “Women say that the legalization of polygamy would be a godsend: it would give them rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits,” Humphrey told the Guardian. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
Women for Polygamy
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Would you feel the same about polyandry? It should be just as advantageous for a successful career woman to have multiple husbands to take care of things.
It does seem a rational response to a dearth of men. I wonder what China will do about their shortage of women.
2 Ideas about polygamy
1. Polygamy might be useful in societies with more women than men – othewise marriage will be restricted to the more attractive (often rich) men while the others will not find any wife at all…Which tends to makes communities rather instable.
2. Assume equal rights for man and woman. Than you can not restrict polygamy only to “one man – several wifes”. You need to accept “one woman -several husbands” as well. This is the point where it can get a bit messy
. Imagine a woman married to three man, on of them having two other wives….
Where did the men go, the cities looking for labor wages?
Is the result sought in the former Soviet states truly polygamy? What’s the relationship of peer wives going to be on these rural farms with one husband? I wonder to what extent Soviet collectivization ever made it to the areas in question, and how much the experience and/or nostalgia for these is driving this movement. i have a suspicion that the people working as farmers in these areas might be seeking a best-practices hybrid economic relationship somewhere between a Soviet kolkhoz and independent farms, and the story is getting tangled up in polygamy. Maybe it’s the simplest way to achieve such a relationship under the law as it stands now?
I guess it might be supposed, by means of an analogy, that a woman with more than one husband is the norm of science. The trouble is- the comparison is not a real correct one or false.
The trouble begins when one believes or supposes that “anything goes” when it comes to the realm of science. It does not.
And if you think that I don’t know what you are doing, you are `dead’ wrong. That is it for now until the book is published– Robyn Ann Goldstein, prospective date of publication –June, 2010.
Goldstein, 2009
If one man + multiple women makes economic sense, surely a “group marriage” of multiple men and women makes even more sense. Pooling incomes and consolidating living space is always cheaper, as any single person could tell you.
Polygamy, culturally, is generally practiced in societies where gender roles are strongly set with the man as the clear provider, and the female as the caretaker/child rearer. Frequently this is where the resources are scarce. When you operate under the assumption that there are certain things men can do that women can’t and vice verse, the economic benefits of different arrangements seem more natural. In modern Wester though, though, individuals are more likely to think of themselves as independent units capable of providing for themselves, but choosing to pool resources and enter social contracts for the mutual benefits they can enjoy. From this viewpoint, sharing resources with yet another hardly seems beneficial, and often quite distasteful, since the initial union is not “necessary” but “desirable”.
AaronS, you make a silly, but common, mistake. “the husband of one wife” dictum is a maximum, not a minimum. Jesus and Paul still qualify.