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Polyandry is the practice or institution of one woman having multiple husbands simultaneously. It is one of the oldest documented forms of plural partnership in human history, practiced in various cultures across Tibet, Nepal, parts of India, and historically in several other regions. Polyandry is distinct from polyamory, which does not organize relationships by gender or marriage structure.
Polyandry appears most frequently in anthropological and historical discussion rather than in contemporary polyamorous communities, though the two are related in that both involve plural partnership structures. The most common historical form is fraternal polyandry, in which a woman marries a set of brothers, a practice that served economic and land-conservation functions in agricultural societies with limited resources.
The distinction between polyandry and polyamory is worth naming clearly. Polyandry is a specific institutional form organized around marriage, gender, and often kinship. Polyamory is a broader relational philosophy organized around consent and emotional connection, with no necessary reference to marriage, gender, or institutional structure. Someone can be polyamorous without any relationship to the concept of polyandry, and polyandrous marriages in historical contexts were not always consensual in the modern sense.
The term comes up in contemporary contexts most often in discussions of the anthropology of marriage, the history of human pair bonding, and comparisons between historical and contemporary plural relationship structures. It is useful vocabulary for understanding the full range of ways humans have organized intimate life, without assuming that contemporary polyamory is the only or primary form of plural partnership.
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definition contributed by Tessakin