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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the how-do-you-keep-multiple-wives-happy dept.

A study conducted by a team of researchers from the U.K., Tanzania and the U.S. has found an example of polygynous marriage that does not appear to be harmful to women or children. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers outline their study of people living in villages in Tanzania, and why they believe organizations such as the UN need to modify their stance on the practice to better take account of cultural practices.

Polygny is a term used to refer to marriage systems where males can have more than one wife, while polygamy refers to the actual practice of it. In this new study, the researchers looked into the question of whether a polygnynous marriage is in fact harmful to women or children as has been assumed by many in the international community. They looked at 3,500 households in villages in Tanzania, noting the occurrences of polygnynous marriage versus monogamous marriage and the standard of living for those women and children.

In looking at their data, they found that first wives—women who were the first to marry a man with several wives, tended to have better nutrition as did their children, than women in monogamous marriages and their children. Later wives and their children fared on average as well as monogamous wives and their children, but not as well as first wives. This, the team claims, shows that not all instances of polygynous marriage are harmful to women or children—it shows that in some cases, it can actually be a practice that women can use to better their lives and that of their children. It is a matter of wealth and the rules that govern a society—if women cannot own land or other resources, for example, or take a job, as was the case in the Tanzanian villages, they will likely do better in life if they are able to attract and marry a man with some degree of wealth, which in some cases may mean, a man with multiple wives.

How do the husbands fare?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:59PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 28 2015, @12:59PM (#255553)

    Four interesting assumptions

    One is the assumption of cause and effect.

    Another is assumption that its a simple linear model. Perhaps monogamy dominates at extreme poverty and at better than 3rd world wealth, and the alternatives naturally optimize in the middle where you have more than a broken spear and a leaky water gourd but have less than a desalination plant and internet access. Maybe at that scale its just natural under certain geographic criteria. So the village with a well naturally does X while a village with a river naturally does Y at the same moderately low level of development.

    Its assumed the cultural behavior reflects demographics. So birth rates are about 50:50 and the male death rate due to warfare and hunting vs the female death rate due to pitiful civilization levels of medical care and sanitation during childbirth reflect the relationships. You can rationalize all you want but if there's two women for every dude due to warfare related deaths or genocide or hunting related deaths or whatever, well, we'll provide extremely elaborate rationalizations about how culturally correct it is to have two wives, but its all a load of crap because the real reason is there's two chicks for every guy sitting at the nightly campfire so you get one guess how this ethnic pr0n movie turns out, and we'll make up a story about whats right or wrong after fun-time.

    Assumption number 4 is that you can change little bits of a culture you don't like. Well, no, not really. Its almost ecological the way chaotically changing one little thing there changes everything somewhere else. So expect lots of wealthy east coast crybaby teens to get all angsty about our cultural imperialism destroying their mating ritual music by imposing western values on them, along with a dose of "savages gotta savage" so fix our own local criminals or poor or whatever first before going all Crusade on some distant foreigners.

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