Faqa wrote:Of course some of them include children, why wouldn't they?
Because defining the nuclear family unit in such a way steps outside of human nature, is my thought. It's not like homosexuality, where I understand it's the same urges and instincts, just gender-flipped. We are not coded, if you will, to create families of the sort you're describing.
Actually... the family unit has always been more flexibly defined than the Christians would have it. There have been a number of societies where the basic family unit is a woman +
her brother, with the biological father of children being either less important or even unknown. There have always been step-parents, fostering, and adoption. These options have always been available to human beings, indeed, we're rather unusual among animals in that we
knowingly and willingly adopt children unrelated to the parents, even when the parents have biological children of their own, and more often than not those adoptees are truly part of the family unit.
Yes, there are problems with all those alternative arrangements - there are also problems with the biological parents+biological offspring, too, which often leads to those alternatives. Just because an option is less common does not mean it is inherently less valid or less useful.
How child custody is handled is going to vary, and it complicated by the fact there is no legal group marriage.* If a person who already has children enters a group marriage then she retains custody and, assuming he/she legally marries one of the family, that person becomes the step-parent. If a couple is married and has children and a third person joins the marriage they may draw up legal documents stating that in the absence/incapacity of the legal parents they want this other person to have custody or make decisions. Some of them are sort of clueless and don't think of or consider these things.
So it would appear that, from the POV of how the child is treated, it's more like living with extended family? IE, the mother and father are the child's immediate family, everyone else is more on the level of uncles and aunts or some such?
Correct.
Where extended families exist it's nothing unusual for a child to live for a number of years with an aunt or uncle, either in a formal or informal arrangement. In my mother's family a couple of her siblings wound up living with aunts/uncles for a time due to either parent-child conflicts, or the biological parents having illness or financial hardship. Some of those relationships were reciprocated, with a cousin at one time or another living with her "nuclear family". During the Middle Ages sending kids off to live with some other family for a few years was likewise done, either for the reasons my mother's family did it, or among the nobility for training of the kids and/or fostering political alliances (which ranged from "helping to raising a friend's kids" to frank holding of hostages). All this is
normal for humans.
Does such an arrangement not cause arguments or fighting?
Any parenting arrangement will have arugments.
When the mother feels one way about how the child should be raised, and one of her partners another? If you say the mother has final rights, doesn't this become a source of tension? Anger? Aren't these supposed to be equal partners?
First of all, although the mother is most likely to have biological and legal rights over the kids you shouldn't assume that's always the case - there is no inherent obstacle to a single father entering into such an arrangement. And, since none of these arrangements have a weight of tradition or law behind them this is something that has to be worked out among the people concerned. Even with traditional marriage there are times when a step-parent may have more say over what happens to a kid than a biological parent, just as in an adoptive arrangement the adopting parent is in charge (in fact, there is a mechanism for step-parents to adopt step-children to formalize such an arrangement and make it clear and undisputed).
To some extent, these problems are not unique to group marriage, although in a group marriage they may become worse. I don't really know enough about group marriages to make a definitive statement.
You're having an arrangement that does not slot neatly into an evolutionary instinct of any sort. That's gotta raise problems. At least, it looks that way from this admittedly inexperienced end.
Again, step-parents, extended families, fosterage, adoption, and the rest are all valid human
options. They have always existed. You can explain them in evolutionary terms if you must by such facts as, for species in such numbers as we have, we're actually more closely related to each other than would be expected due to a suspected population bottleneck about 70,000 years ago, so in a sense the two least related human beings on the planet are actually closer relations than two chimpanzees picked at random from neighboring bands in the wild. Or even from within the same band. So if you adopt a child from halfway around the world he or she is still your relative, enough so that evolutionary forces treat the child as such. Humans also have a long childhood - traits that lead to humans being willing to raise either relatives or non-relatives means that if something happens to you there is still a chance the village will finish raising your offspring, which is advantageous to the species (and for most of history, the members of a village or tribe were pretty much all distant cousins or closer). And definitely raising your relatives fits in most evolutionary theories.
A lot of this stuff comes up with serial marriage, "blended" families, and extended families anyway. The issues and various "solutions" are nothing new in human history.
Christian polygamists typically use the term "plural marriage". NeoPagans usually use the term "group marriage". I'm sure there's room for a interesting discussion on the difference in terminology.
It seems that Christians define the term as "more than one marriage". Neo-Pagans seem to define it as a 'group' getting married.
Yep. Pretty much.
Since Christian polygamy seem to focus more on a man taking multiple wives, whilst by your own description NPs are more about multi-way commitments, this is hardly surprising.
True. I'm
guessing even among NeoPagans multiple wives are more common than multiple husbands, but I don't know that for sure. I'm basing it largely on human societies, usually hunter-gatherer, where marriage is not strictly defined. You more commonly see a man with two wives than a woman with two husbands, though both do occur. In H-G societies, though, the norm is pairs, and while a man might have two, perhaps even three, wives large harems just don't exist. That has as much to do with the logistics of feeding a family under such conditions as anything else. The environment imposes limitations on family size. You don't see large harems occurring until after the rise of agriculture, when it became possible for one man to amass enough resources to feed many wives and their many offspring. Women don't usually have such power/resources, and thus almost never have multiple husbands. When they do, it's usually brothers marrying one woman*
With modern women having more resources, such that it is becoming more common for women to be able to raise their children on their own without
needing to have a man around for wealth/power/influence (though those can be nice to have in a partner), plus more control over her fertility, the dynamic of parenting may well undergo a change.
* There is an exception to this rule in the Canadian arctic, where there existed a tribe where polyandry was mandatory, and all women had two husbands. But it was hardly a matriarchal paradise. Female infanticide was rampant, which resulted in women being about half as numerous as men. The environment was such that people largely depended on hunting, and severe enough it took two hunters to support a woman and her children, even after infanticide reduced the numbers of kids to feed. Basically, one man would stay with the wife and kids while the other was out hunting, then when he came back they'd swap roles. Having the husbands present in shifts rather than all the time together probably cut down on jealousy and conflict. The system worked, but there was much suckage for all, between infanticide, chronic hunger, and so forth. It was an extreme environment that resulted in extreme customs. It shows how adaptable human beings are, but can't be construed as a normal or typical society.
Hell, I would argue that part of being human and self-aware is being able to alter your behavior in accordance with logic and mental constructs outside what your instincts dictate. Unfortunately, on reproduction and family living, this tends to fall apart, because it's all about 'feeling'.
