Marriage

====Polyandry====
{{Main|Polyandry|Polyandry in Tibet|Polyandry in India}}

[[Polyandry]] is notably more rare than polygyny, though less rare than the figure commonly cited in the ''Ethnographic Atlas'' (1980) which listed only those polyandrous societies found in the Himalayan Mountains. More recent studies have found 53 societies outside the 28 found in the Himalayans which practice polyandry.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Starkweather|first1=Katherine|last2=Hames|first2=Raymond|title=A survey of non-classical polyandry|journal=Human Nature|date=June 2012|volume=23|issue=2|pages=149–72|doi=10.1007/s12110-012-9144-x|pmid=22688804|s2cid=2008559|url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1049%26context%3Danthropologyfacpub|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170923033542/http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=anthropologyfacpub|archive-date=23 September 2017}}</ref> It is most common in egalitarian societies marked by high male mortality or male absenteeism. It is associated with ''partible paternity'', the cultural belief that a child can have more than one father.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Starkweather|first1=Katherine|last2=Hames|first2=Raymond|title=A survey of non-classical polyandry|journal=Human Nature|date=June 2012|volume=23|issue=2|pages=149–72|doi=10.1007/s12110-012-9144-x|pmid=22688804|s2cid=2008559|url=http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=anthropologyfacpub}}</ref>

The explanation for polyandry in the Himalayan Mountains is related to the scarcity of land; the marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife (''fraternal polyandry'') allows family land to remain intact and undivided. If every brother married separately and had children, family land would be split into unsustainable small plots. In Europe, this was prevented through the social practice of impartible inheritance (the dis-inheriting of most siblings, some of whom went on to become celibate monks and priests).<ref>{{cite book|last=Levine|first=Nancy|title=The Dynamics of polyandry: kinship, domesticity, and population on the Tibetan border|year=1998|publisher=University of Chicago Press|location=Chicago}}</ref>