Re: OT: Mormons (was Re: Survey)

Quoting Sarah Marie Parker-Allen <lloannna@...>:

> Just remember that most polygamist societies require the man involved
> to
> care for the physical and moral needs of ALL the wives and children
> (in
> some, they even require that the current wives accept any new ones, or
> that
> all wives and children be treated equally).  Trying to remember 3
> different
> anniversaries, birthdays, etc., AND paying for the upkeep of three
> households, ought to make almost anyone think twice about the
> practice.
> Even at it's height, only a minority of LDS church members ever dared
> attempt it.  Marriage to one person is hard enough.
>
> This hasn't stopped me from creating a funky plural marriage society of
> my
> own, of course.  There, though, it's the women who have multiple
> husbands
> with multiple households and such.  Each woman is like the head of her
> own
> little fiefdom, answerable only to her mother, grandmothers, etc.,
> straight
> up to the matriarch of the clan (the clans cooperate with one
> another).
> People are always trying to steal husbands and stuff.  Very
> Machiavellian
> and twisted, difficult kind of life to live.  I created the society when
> I
> was in a bad mood, haven't thought about creating a language for them
> yet.
> Of course, the lower ranks of society don't have the energy or resources
> for
> plural marriage, so in their worldview it's the height of decadence
> and
> sinfulness... one advantage for the women in a plural marriage with
> multiple
> men is that the woman can basically award fatherhood to whichever male
> she
> likes best.  Like I said, very twisted and probably a handy illustration
> of
> why it's really polygany (multiple wives) that's been practiced
> everywhere...
I thoght it was spelt "polygyny", with triple "y"s? That's what one'd expect
from the Greek, at any rate.

I've heard about societies practicing polyandry (ie, woman having multiple
husbands) in two areas; New Caledonia and bits of Amazonia. In both cases the
societies were rather matriarchal, hardly surprisingly. Noteworthily, in both
cases gender roles seems to be quite traditionalistic; men as the primary
hunters and warriors, women as the primary child-rearers and food-preparers
(good ammo in discussions with feminists, incidentially). In the Neocaledonian
case, which people were agriculturalists, only women could own land, altho' men
did much of the actual work on the fields.

                                                        Andreas

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