thread: 2006-08-31 : I think my expectations are screwed
On 2006-09-03, Ian Burton-Oakes wrote:
Just a small thing about polyandry being 'theoretical': back in my undergrad days in anthropology, I read accounts of real life polyandrous societies—i.e. one woman, many husbands, where one man-many woman marriages were neither supported nor encouraged.
Hypothesis offered for what supported this structure: resource management. Resources were few (i.e. only a little land to be had), so centralizing land in the hands of a wife with multiple laborers (i.e. husbands) worked fairly well. I'll make no claims about this, but will note this does seem to touch a little on Emily's talk about commune's using fewer resources.
I will suggest that there is nothing in commune structures that are innately anti-capitalist, that don't contribute to it. It's a strange comparison, but one that bears considering: many immigrants live in arrangements that are structurally related to 'communes' as Emily used the term. Those people, far from not contributing to capitalism, often play a defining role within it.
