The Tibetan stem family in historical perspective

ABSTRACT Despite decades of scholarly interest in the Tibetan marital practice of fraternal polyandry, very little is known about how the Tibetan family system operated in historical contexts. This study, based on a 1958 household register from Kyirong, a former district in Tibet, reconstructs nuances of family dynamics through the aid of interviews with people who were listed in the document. Kyirong’s family system is shown to be very flexible. Although patrilocality was preferred, matrilocality was a viable contingency, and although polyandry was favored, monogamy and polygyny were acceptable. Despite the heterogeneity of Kyirong’s family households, case studies demonstrate how people strove to achieve the monomarital stem family through polyandrous marriages in successive generations. Because polyandry created a surplus of marriageable women, joint families often arose, at least in form, when unmarried women remained with their natal families and had children, or when men discontent with their polyandrous unions moved into an adjunct house with a partner of choice. However, the offspring of these people had no rights of inheritance and thus were not integral to family continuity, so joint families in form functioned more like stem families in practice. Therefore, a discrepancy between etic definitions of form and emic understandings of process emerges when family typologies developed to facilitate cross-cultural research are incompatible with the way people actually understand rights and privileges associated with succession. The data and analysis demonstrate that Kyirong represents a unique version of a stem family society with an unambiguous stem family ideology.