The Return of Polyandry: Kinship and Marriage in Central Tibet

Tibet is known for its broad range of marriage practices, particularly polyandry, where two or more brothers share one wife. With economic development and massive Chinese social and political reforms, including new marriage laws prohibiting plural marriages, polyandry was expected to disappear from Tibetan social lives. This book takes as its starting point the surprising increase in polyandry in Panam valley from the 1980s. It explores married lives in polyandrous houses and develops a theory of a flexible kinship of potentiality through the lens of a farming village in Tibet Autonomous Region.

Heidi E. Fjeld is a Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo. She is currently the Project Lead of ’From Asia to Africa: Antibiotic Trajectories across the Indian Ocean’ (2020-2025) and is the author of Commoners and Nobles: Hereditary Divisions in Tibet (NIAS, 2005).