Polyandry and population growth in a historical Tibetan society

Abstract

Despite considerable speculation virtually nothing is known about the empirical relationship between traditional Tibetan administrative systems, household processes, and demographic trends in historical Tibetan populations because indigenous data sources have never been systematically analyzed. This article examines a 1958 tax register from Kyirong, formerly a district-level political division in southern Tibet, and demonstrates the significance of such archival sources for population research. Indirect demographic methods are used in conjunction with retrospective interviews to estimate levels of marriage and fertility in Kyirong, a society where polyandry was the normative form of marriage. By linking fertility and the rate of population growth with ethnographic data on household processes, the study provides both a qualitative and quantitative perspective on the practice of polyandry in a traditional Tibetan setting, and thereby critiques previous assumptions about population dynamics within historical Tibetan populations.

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