Friday 22 February 2013

As a female can you marry your father in-law?


Absolutely! And it’s a question anthropologists love to hear asked. The chances are, you've heard of polygamy, polyandry's better-known cousin: Mormons used to do it; Saudi Muslims can get away with it. Heck, relatively speaking, having a gaggle of wives is downright commonplace. But a woman having five husbands? Well, in Tibet, where a father and his sons could share the same wife, it was the custom for centuries!

Today, anthropologists suggest it was a matter of necessity. Because female infanticide was prevalent, there weren't a lot of women to go around, and because there isn't a lot of arable land in mountainous Tibet, polyandry kept the birth rate — and the starvation rate — low. Of course, when the Chinese invaded in 1950, they put the kebosh on such non-traditional forms of marriage, and Tibetans have led the monogamous life ever since.

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