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This is a really interesting topic. I think that there are two ideas that combine to create a requirement for traditional monogamous structures - 1) Land Owner
by ragnarok451 11y ago
This is a really interesting topic.
I think that there are two ideas that combine to create a requirement for traditional monogamous structures - 1) Land Ownership and 2) The family as a power-wielding unit (not just immediate family but extended family)
Land is power, in Asia and everywhere else. It's advantageous for a family to get more land. Also, it needs people to take care of/improve the land. The best way to do this is to have a son who can earn more land, bringing it into the family, and then marry a young girl who can create more members of the family to work and repeat the process.
Now, here's where competition for brides comes into play - it is in the girl's best interests that she picks a mate with lots of land/power, since that means her offspring will be better off, and she will also probably have a better life. So potential suitors will compete to show they have better resources. This is really in the girl's interests - she has the power here.
So why doesn't a girl work herself? Well, in much of Asia, hard labor is still dominant. Men are much better at physical labor than women. With the advent of more IT-related jobs this is starting to change, but men are still in higher demand for jobs than women.
- astral303 11y agoThanks for this perspective!
- astral303 11y agoIt's fascinating to me to contrast this with the dominant American nuclear family paradigm. The family as a power-wielding unit is not the part of the American Dream. And so there's no incentive to build such extended families. A nuclear family strikes me as a much more expensive way to live, however. But really, how many of us would want to live with our extended family? (A significant percentage would not, I reckon)
- baddox 11y agoI would guess, having not studied the topic at all, that the tendency toward monogamy (or at least punctuated monogamy) long predates what you're talking about. It seems to me that people who are careful about insuring who they have children with will be much more successful at passing their genes on than people who are not so careful, and thus there ought to be some selective pressure for at least punctuated monogamy.