Note 1358 — Chapter XVI · —Influences Of A Mountain Environment

Westermarck lays stress upon the fact that polyandry prevails chiefly in sterile countries. He regards it less as a conscious device to check increase of population than a result of the disproportion of males to females in polyandrous communities. The preponderance of male births he attributes to the excessive endogamy bordering on inbreeding which tends to prevail in all isolated mountain valleys; and also, as a possibility, to the undernourished condition of the parents caused by scanty food supplies, which Düsing found to be productive of a high percentage of male births in proportion to female.1358 The motive of restricting population seems entitled to more weight than Westermarck concedes to it; for he slurs over the fact that in Tibet polyandry gives rise to a large number of superfluous women who fill the nunneries,1359 while in the Nilgiri Hills redundant females were eliminated by infanticide. The fact seems to be that in the institution of polyandry we have a social and psychological effect of environment, reinforced by a physiological effect.