Locating power in polyandry: sexuality and property regimes in gender relations in the Nepal Tibet frontier households

Polyandry is a fonll of marriage in which a single woman shares multiple men as husbands at a time. In fraternal polyandry, all the brothers in one generation share a common wife. I The practice of polyandry has been reported in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. Exceptionally, it has also been reported in the Amazon forest of northwest Brazil (Peters and Hunt, 1975). The existing literature on polyandry typically highlights mainly three reasons that account its practice: culture, demography and resources. The first argument claims that polyandry responds to the prolonged absence of males in the family - a phenomenon observed commonly in all polyandrous societies (Gough, 1959; Prince Peter, 1955). So polyandry is perceived as a security measure for the rest of the family members because it keeps many males within a family so that one could stay at home (Berreman, 1962; Kapadia, 1955). Others argue that polyandry is partly a way of getting rid of the pressure of a "heavy bride price" by avoiding many marriages (Majumdar, 1955). Polyandry is also interpreted as a practice that saves households from risks of friction and fission (Leach, 1955), since more marriage means diverse economic interests within a family, which might pose threats to the unity of the household.