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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?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 28 2015, @03:46PM
Right, AC, of course. So there's no distinction in those patterns between, say, America and France? A Japanese village culture is utterly indistinguishable from an Indian one? Or, let's index it across eras rather than cultures. There's no distinction between a feudal England and a democratic one? How about a pre-Enlightenment Europe and a Renaissance Europe? Or, let's take it quite local to America and ask, is there no difference between a Jeffersonian, agrarian America and an industrial America? I suppose those things have made utterly no difference between economic, scientific, and power outcomes?
Nah, you're right. Everything that people do as societies and cultures are bullshit that's not worth studying or being interested in. There are no patterns or instructive lessons to be found there. An Aristotelian polity is indistinguishable from an Objectivist one. The only things worth talking about here, or anywhere, are linux kernel development issues and bewonderment in the land of flash memory.
Except. Except. Except the deep thinking by very smart, very wise people throughout the ages on those very "BS" issues that has resulted in the strata upon which you can sit at a computer in your underwear and discount "fake" sciences.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @11:21PM
Right, AC, of course. So there's no distinction in those patterns between, say, America and France? A Japanese village culture is utterly indistinguishable from an Indian one? Or, let's index it across eras rather than cultures. There's no distinction between a feudal England and a democratic one? How about a pre-Enlightenment Europe and a Renaissance Europe? Or, let's take it quite local to America and ask, is there no difference between a Jeffersonian, agrarian America and an industrial America? I suppose those things have made utterly no difference between economic, scientific, and power outcomes?
Wasn't it precisely his point that studying different cultures will often give different results?
Nah, you're right. Everything that people do as societies and cultures are bullshit that's not worth studying or being interested in.
Oh, it's worth studying, but we shouldn't our standards just because the social sciences often churn out bad science. I'll be interested when they can consistently churn out objective and rigorous studies that don't reach arbitrary conclusions based on flawed data collection methodologies. If you think that studying completely subjective issues (whether these types of marriages are "harmful" to women or children, using some arbitrary definition of "harmful") and stating your results confidently is good science, you're just a sucker. The social sciences are an absolute joke.
It never ceases to amuse me how willing some people are to accept bad science if they like what it says. Like how people who hate porn are seemingly more willing to accept a social science study that concludes that porn makes men callous towards women, even if the study is ridiculously flawed in just about every way imaginable. It also never ceases to amuse me how confident people get when they see one study or a few studies that reach some conclusion, as if science isn't a process and peer review and replication is useless. You're just setting yourself up for failure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 28 2015, @11:23PM
Oh, it's worth studying, but we shouldn't our standards just because the social sciences often churn out bad science.
Oh, it's worth studying, but we shouldn't lower our standards just because the social sciences often churn out bad science.*
Just because doing something well is difficult (figuring out how to do rigorous and objective social science studies isn't easy) doesn't mean we should accept garbage or mediocrity. That isn't the same as saying, "We shouldn't study this at all." That's your straw man.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday October 29 2015, @07:08AM
No, his point was that social science can say nothing definitive about anything, so why even try. It can say nothing about what distinguishes one culture from another, because somewhere in the misty reaches of Hokkaido there might be a village where people don't act very "Japanese," such that we can describe nothing definitive about "Japanese-ness" at all. Or something like that. He was asserting an extreme post-modernist meme, that there is no meaning in anything, and I was responding that, no, there are discernible structures in human activity and that's what social scientists study.
Then sit still, dammit. Stop moving around and interacting with others. That, or sign up to spend a year in a box eating the same food as 100 people in identical boxes so we can see how you react when the little red ball comes out of the hopper.
Yeah, didn't think so. That's the challenge with social sciences--they're trying to understand you. You're the problem, not their methods, because those are identical to those used by "real" scientists. And when somebody does a study and states his results, others challenge those results and try to design better studies. Peer review. Sound familiar?
Social science is not perfect. "Real" science is not perfect--that's just what you read about in your sci-fi stories. And science never proves anything, it fails to disprove. What science is is the method and that endless iteration of experimentation; you should read Thomas Kuhn's, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
As to whether you should find it interesting, go ahead, don't. But setting a standard of not having to care about something until you understand it in a "real" scientific way makes no sense. Should we stop investigating quantum mechanics because we have no fucking grasp on why we see what we see? Should we throw up our hands in the air and say, oh well, the universe does some pretty weird and random things, what can you do? Do you discount how trillions of dollars move around the world every second and effect everything in your life from the price you pay at the pump to how much rent your landlord is going to charge you or what the rate the bank is gonna give you on your mortgage refinancing because there's no "real" scientists studying it, or are you a little glad there are bullshit social scientists called economists who use the best computers and quantitative methods possible to try and understand how it works, how it affects us, and how we can affect it? Because, kimosabe, those guys crunch data sets that would singe your nose hairs off.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 29 2015, @11:00AM
Social science is not perfect.
I do not speak of perfection; it is but a mere pipe dream. However, the social sciences are so far removed from the concept of perfection as to be positively laughable. So you are saying something I already agree with: Science is not perfect. But it's just not relevant to anything I said.
Should we stop investigating quantum mechanics because we have no fucking grasp on why we see what we see?
"Oh, it's worth studying"
My point was not that we should cease studying these things, but that the quality of research produced by the social sciences is, at this current point in time, often extremely low quality and inconclusive. For now, it would be better to be very cautious of it.
or are you a little glad there are bullshit social scientists called economists who use the best computers and quantitative methods possible to try and understand how it works, how it affects us, and how we can affect it?
I don't have a very high opinion of economists in the first place, and nor do I care how intimidating the data sets 'they' crunch are. I certainly don't view them as all-powerful beings who control all or most economic activity. They're just people with a certain type of job who often make incorrect predictions.