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South Africa considers letting women have multiple husbands. Uproar follows

🩸Syllabus Topic

Sociology: paper i: Types and forms of family

  • The government document has said that the legislation that regulates marriages in South Africa is not based on the provisions of the Constitution of the country.
  • A proposal in South Africa to allow women to have multiple husbands has led to uproar among the conservative section of the country’s society.
  • The polyandry proposal is one among the many in the green paper which seeks to make marriage more inclusive. But it has turned out to be the most controversial one.
  • “The purpose of the marriage policy is to establish a policy foundation for regulating the marriages of all persons that reside in SA. The envisaged marriage statute will enable South Africans and residents of all sexual orientations, religious and cultural persuasions to conclude legal marriages that will accord with the principles of equality, non-discrimination, human dignity and unity in diversity, as encapsulated in the Constitution.

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

SYLLABUS:  Systems of Kinship: Family, household, marriage. Types and forms of family.

Definition: Polyandry, marriage of a woman to two or more men at the same time;

  • Rather than treating polyandry as a mystery to be explained away, Starkweather and Hames suggest polyandry constitutes a variation on the common, evolutionarily-adaptive phenomenon of pair-bonding—a variation that sometimes emerges in response to environmental conditions.
  • What kind of environmental conditions? “classical polyandry” in Asia has allowed families in areas of scarce farmable land to hold agricultural estates together.
  • The marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife allows plots of family-owned land to remain intact and undivided.”
  • In other cultures, it appears that a man may arrange a second husband (again, frequently his brother) for his wife because he knows that, when he must be absent, the second husband will protect his wife—and thus his interests.
  • And if she gets impregnated while Husband #1 is gone, it will be by someone of whom he has approved in advance. (the people formerly called Eskimos).

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