"All the girls have their prices, the largest price for the
best-looking girl varying from twenty to thirty pigs, and,
if one man cannot give so many, he has no objection to take
partners to make up the number."
According to Julius Caesar, it was customary among the ancient Britons
for brothers, and sometimes for father and sons, to have their wives
in common, and Tacitus found evidence of a similar custom among the
ancient Germans; while in some parts of Media it was the ambition of
the women to have two or more husbands, and Strabo relates that those
who succeeded looked down with pride on their less fortunate sisters.
When the Spaniards first arrived at Lanzarote, in South America, they
found the women married to several husbands, who lived with their
common spouse in turn each a month. The Tibetans, according to Samuel
Turner, look on marriage as a disagreeable duty which the members of a
family must try to alleviate by sharing its burdens. The Nair woman in
India may have up to ten or twelve husbands, with each of whom she
lives ten days at a time. Among some Himalayan tribes, when the oldest
brother marries, he generally shares his wife with his younger
brothers.
WIVES AND GIRLS IN COMMON
Of the Port Lincoln Tribe in Australia, Schürmann says (223) that the
brothers practically have their wives in common.
"A peculiar nomenclature has arisen from these singular
connections; a woman honors the brothers of the man to
whom she is married by the indiscriminate name of
husbands; but the men make a distinction, calling their
own individual spouses yungaras, and those to whom they
have a secondary claim, by right of brotherhood,
kartetis."
R.H. Codrington, a scientifically educated missionary who had
twenty-four years' experience on the islands of the Pacific, wrote a
valuable book on the Melanesians in which occur the following luminous
remarks:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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