Poly familiesFollow

I do wish more people would read the book or watch the documentary series called Guns Germs and Steel. While westerners can pat themselves on the back about an increasingly humane culture spring-boarded from Enlightenment philosophy, There were several processes of sheer extreme luck in geology and microbiology that catapaulted the Europeans (and their colonial inheritors) into the Industrial Revolution first. A lot of serendipity involved in our technological advances catching and spreading rather than withering back into oblivioun under the pressures of lack of resources.

No, I'm not at all denigrating the brilliance and hard work of our past men and women. I'm saying that the brilliance and hard work of past, very past, men and women in other cultures, nations and geographical regions got lost so often through no fault of their own.

It drives me nuts when people think aliens must have helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, because we can't replicate them today. If you've done enough history you know how much smart people could achieve with plumb lines, leverage, good planning, astronomy, mathematical reasoning, and great quantities of practised manual dexterity.

Edited, Jan 22nd 2012 2:11pm by Aripyanfar

If they were slaves, they were extremely well fed and treated slaves. Newer research has dug up pyramid workers' cities close to the pyramids. The buildings and layouts were typical of free ordinary Egyptians, and there was a particularly high level of animal meat being consumed in the workers' cities. No proof one way or the other of payment, but the almost luxurious amount of meat compared to normal Egyptians of the time indicated the pyramid workforce was favoured in at least some regards. This may have been pure self-interest in having an efficiently strong and healthy workforce. Or they may have been favoured as devotional workers to a religious cause. Whatever.

And there's no assumption in assuming they were slaves?

There's a lot of evidence, including written, that they were conscripts.

Oh, and we can build pyramids if we want.

Edited, Jan 23rd 2012 3:52am by Kavekk

Personally, I can't think of much to add that hasn't already been said 2-3 times. Nothing wrong with it morally, but it'd be complicated and hard to pull off, etc, etc. But one thing in this thread sticks out to me, and I feel I need to point it out.



American natives were all nudists until the European invaders arrived? wut?

dunno, I think it depends on how you define "advanced" when you look at a civilization/culture as a whole. Sure, they may not have had the same level of technological development as European/Asian civilizations, but at the same time, they also survived, and in some cases even thrived, with out it, implying that they didn't need those developments in the first place. You also can't really deny that the Mayans, at least, were damn good at astronomy, and math (since the two go hand in hand), given many of the structures they built and their correlation to the stars. There's also the matter of intangible qualities, such as philosophical development, though I'm looking at the North Americans more than the south americans here, given the whole propensity for ritualistic sacrifices by the latter; I mean, consider their belief systems, and how they lived, before you consider their lack of technology a weakness. The general commonality among Northern Native American beliefs is harmony with nature, treating life as sacred, be it the life of a human or the life of a rabbit, and respecting that. Obviously, it wasn't perfect, and they still had many conflicts and wars, but war and conflict are an undeniable part of human nature. The bulk of their societies, though, seemed content to live taking from the land only what they needed to survive, and leaving the rest of nature as it was. They didn't need forging or great, monolithic structures, or what not, they survived and developed numerous, thriving cultures with only the hunter-gatherer or farmer structural basis.

Why would someone go out of their way to find metal ore, forge it into various things, when they didn't need to? Lack of something doesn't necessarily mean lack of advancement, it just as easily means lack of necessity.

As far as I can tell no one used that argument.

What studies are you talking about?

Studies of kids raised in poly families or just 'supportive' families in general?

Or does the study prove that poly families are more supportive of their kids than non-poly families?

You're making a lot of statements of fact about individual behavior. All individuals in poly families will not necessarily make this commitment that you're assuming is made. Again, if your argument is that people who participate in poly families are over-all more committed to child rearing than those in non-poly families, I'd be interested in seeing the data.
le'sigh'. Again, are you comparing and concluding that people in poly families are less apt to argue with the the other adults in their families and/or less likely to 'leave' the union (divorce) and those in two-adult families?

60 years ago was when the Kinsey studies were done

My only real intent was to demonstrate that our assumptions on what constitutes a family structure is entirely dependent on our own cultural context. Communally raising children is better represented over the course of human history than our own system. To criticize one system because of how it deviates from your own doesn't say anything valuable, because you've arbitrarily decided that your own system is the one with value.

Oh, and @gbaji, central America is a section of the continent of North America. The Aztec Empire was our first contact with Native Americans on the continent. And the city of Tenochtitlan put to shame all European cities.

Don't believe me? Quote from that page:


And yeah, it's super amazing that Cortes could conquer them. Never mind the fact that smallpox, brought by the Europeans, had decimated their population (either killing them outright, or destroying their infrastructure enough that others starved to death).

And in this society, unlike the Ottoman and Chinese societies, female sexuality wasn't policed. They weren't necessarily polygamous, but polyamory was definitely common and accepted from both sexes.



It's the main response Raolan and gbaji offered (post 3 and 33, respectively).

Other points I saw raised in this thread:
-What will a child think if he finds his mom in bed with his "uncle"?
-How will the adults negotiate the power hierarchy? How will the children understand it?
-How will you protect the children from outside forces?

My point was that communal child rearing was standard in most human societies until recent centuries. Power hierarchies weren't so problematic because it was taken as a premise that all the adults were in command. You didn't disobey any of the adults, regardless of if they were your parent or your "uncle." Unless your parent's command specifically counteracted it, you did it. And the difference between 2 parents and 4 isn't really that big (especially considering plenty of people now DO have 4 parents without polyamory playing a part).

Regarding the mom and uncle comment, it's just stupid to think that would be an issue, because it takes it as an assumption that a kid is going to be preconditioned to believe in monogamy. The kid is going to understand the polygamous family environment just as well as any of us understand our family's monogamous ones. It also assumes that the family unit is going to be broken into a specific family structure, instead of introducing each as parents.

How adults negotiate the power structure is, again, not any problem unique to polyamory. I can't speak for other families, but this wasn't an issue in mine. My father is technically the step father to my two sisters, marrying our mother after her first marriage. But he always had equal say when it came to the girls. They had 3 parents, not two parents and a step-parent.

So, honestly, I don't see why it would be a problem to have multiple problems. Either you have a clear hierarchy or you have none. But that's something you decide, and that's what the kids learn. As long as the parents don't play fast and loose with the definitions, it shouldn't be an issue.

I'm sorry, but I have to say it. The thought of calling the other parents in the relationship aunts and uncles makes me think of the cliche that every man your mother sleeps with is your "uncle."

Keep going...

The problem as I see it is that the "norm" isn't nearly so defined as we imagine it. I fail to see any significant difference between a Poly family and one that contains two sets of remarried parents. The only additional difficulty I can see is the societal complications (and there are legal issues to deal with, due to polygamy practices being illegal in most of the US).

And, frankly, I don't think that's a justifiable reason. Because that same argument would apply to anything against societal norms. It's choosing stagnation over innovation. And it assumes that the norm is something intrinsically worth pursuing.

There are serious issues in the legal area to consider, though. In most states, common-law marriages are included in the definitions for bigamy. So even if no one in the family ever has a civil marriage to another person, they can still be persecuted under bigamy laws (which can even be felonies, depending on your state).

Wrong. When we speak of "inventing the wheel" it's always in the context of the "driving wheel", or "wheel and axle". Because that's when it becomes a useful tool rather than just a decorative object. You don't invent a shape. You invent a tool.

The reasons why they never invented the wheel are irrelevant. The fact is that they didn't.



And by "charmingly inaccurate", you mean "not the result of revisionist history told by the same folks who think it's great to give everyone a medal for participation".

Apparently it was. Given that they had such massive cities and advanced culture and civilization. You'd think a few hundred foreigners wouldn't topple a great civilization so easily, wouldn't you? And while we can certainly put a large helping of blame on smallpox for the Incas fall (took longer before the Spanish even showed up there and the disease had spread before then), the Aztecs were more or less dismantled before the disease took its tool.

So yeah. Amazing.




Yeah. You've got the order wrong there.



I don't recall ever arguing that the children would be confused because of some kind of hardwiring. I think you're conflating two completely separate points:

1. Humans are hardwired to seek out a single mate. Thus, relationships with multiple wives/husbands are going to be more strained and thus it's less likely to work.

2. Children will also have a harder time dealing with this. And yes, I acknowledge that a big part of that is the whole "we're different than everyone else" issue. I even said a few times that I'd love it if societal norms were different in this regard. But I acknowledge that they aren't, so it's valid to point out that this will create problems.



Communal via extended families though (as in: actual uncles aunts, and in-laws and whatnot). Children raised in families with multiple spouses is not, nor has been "common" at any point in history. Even in historical societies which practiced it, typically only the wealthy did (because only wealthy people could afford multiple spouses).



No. The point was in response to a proposed method to deal with the whole "multiples mommies and daddies" question. If all parents are treated equally from the children's perspective, then you're running into two potential problems:

1. Not everyone in poly relationships treat each other the same way (in terms of direct relationship). Whether you accept my "humans are wired for monogamy", you should accept Pigtails own statement that most poly relationships still involve primary couples, with interconnected secondary (and perhaps tertiary) connections. Trying to treat everyone in that extended poly-group as equal parents of every child is going to be difficult, if not impossible.

2. As I've pointed out, the more adults in the poly-group, the more chances that some will leave the group at some point. This will cause trauma for a child raised to view all of the adults in the group as "parents".

The proposed solution to this problem was to have the biological parents of each child be "mom and dad", while all the others are "aunt and uncle". But once you do that, then the child will make an association that mom and dad are one unit (see how it's hard to get past the hardwiring?), and will have problems with someone else getting in the middle. I could list off several ways in which children might have problems with this, but I'd think most of us can noodle them out.

It's the same reason kids have problem when their parents divorce. And it's not just social construct. They see the parents "togetherness" as an element of their own identity. Take that away, and they become unsure of the rules of the world around them. While I suppose it's possible for children raised in such situations to learn to deal with such things, there's no assurance that would be the case. We really don't have historical documentation for this. As I also pointed out earlier, historically most poly relationships were about money/power and divorce was normally not an option. So children were raised knowing who their father and mother was, and knowing what order their mother was in the order of wives by the husband (and thus their own ranking among the children).

That was a relatively stable environment, but it wouldn't work in modern society where we expect that each partner must be equal legally. Also, we can't limit such things to just wealthy people who can afford it. We get kind of a skewed historical view of polygamy because of this as well. When the overwhelming majority of polygamous relationships we know about in history were people who were wealthy, it's misleading at best to try to speak of how stable they were, or how beneficial they were for the children.




Sure. But a poly arrangement automatically increases the complexity by a pretty significant amount.



Did the biological father of your two sisters have any say with regard to you (obviously irrelevant if it was death instead of divorce that separated them)? My point is that when a parent re-marries, it's not uncommon at all for the step-parent to be more like a parent. That's because he/she has to take on that responsibility to at least some degree due to living in the same house with a guardian of the children from the previous marriage.

The better question is the relationship between the previous spouse and any new children produced by the new married couple. You'll find those are far less likely to be connected because the ex generally doesn't have any custody or guardianship with children produced after the divorce. And that's the sort of relationships you're really increasing in a poly-group with children.