Influences of Geographic Environment, Ellen Churchill Semple [classic novels for teens .txt] 📗
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The Tibetans seem to be enthusiastic Malthusians, with all the courage of their convictions. Religious celibacy among them is only an adjunct to another equally effective social device for restricting population. This is the institution of polyandry, which crops out in widely distributed mountain regions of limited resources, just as it appears not infrequently in primitive island societies. Its sporadic occurrence in extensive lowlands, as among the Warraus of Guiana and certain tribes of the Orinoco, is extremely rare, as also its occasional appearance among pastoral steppe-dwellers, like the Hottentots and Damaras.1349 It is often associated with polygamy where wealth exists, and is never the exclusive form of marriage, yet its frequency among mountain peoples is striking. Strabo describes fraternal polyandry as it existed in mountainous Yemen. There among a Semitic people, as to-day in Mongolian Tibet and among the aboriginal Todas of the Nilgiri Hills in peninsular India, the staff of one husband left at the door of the house excluded the others.1350 In modern times the institution is found throughout Tibet, and in the Himalayan and sub-Himalayan districts adjoining it, as in Ladak, Kunawar, Kumaon, Garhwal, Spiti, Sirmur, among the Miris, Daphlas, Abors and Bhutias occupying the southern slope of the Himalayans eastward from Sikkim, and the Murmese tribes of the Khasia Hills just to the south. The same practice occurs among the Coorgs of the Western Ghats, among the Nairs at the coastal piedmont of this range, among the Todas of the mountain stronghold known as the Nilgiri Hills (peaks 8000 feet or 2630 meters), and it crops out sporadically among certain mountain Bantu tribes of South Africa.1351
There seems little doubt that polyandry, as Herbert Spencer maintains, has been adopted as an obvious and easy check upon increase of population in rugged countries.1352 It is generally coupled with other preventive checks. In the Nilgiri Hills, as we found also to be the case on many Polynesian islands, it is closely associated with female infanticide.1353 The Todas in 1867 showed a proportion of two men to one woman, but later, with the decline of infanticide under British rule, a proportion of 100 men to 75 women, and a resulting modification of the institution of polyandry.1354 It may well be that the paucity of women suggested this form of marriage, whose expediency as an ally to infanticide in checking population later became apparent. The Todas are a very primitive folk of herdsmen, living on the produce of their buffaloes, averse to agriculture, though not inhibited from it by the nature of their country, therefore prone to seek any escape from that uncongenial employment,1355 and relying on the protected isolation of their habitat to compensate for the weakness inherent in the small number of the tribe.
Throughout Tibet and Ladak polyandry works hand in hand with the lamaseries in limiting population. The conspicuous fact in Tibetan polyandry is its restriction to the agricultural portion of the population. The pastoral nomads of the country, depending on their yaks, sheep and goats, wandering at will over a very wide, if desolate territory, practice monogamy and polygamy.1356 The sedentary population, on the other hand, is restricted to tillable lands so small that each farm produces only enough for one family. Subdivision under a divided inheritance would be disastrous to these dwarf estates, especially owing to possible complications growing out of irrigating rights.1357 Polyandry leaves the estate and the family undivided, and by permitting only one wife to several fraternal husbands restricts the number of children. It does this also in another way by diminishing the fertility of the mothers; for all travelers comment upon the paucity of children in polyandrous families.
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.
A comparison of social conditions in the adjoining provinces of Baltistan and Ladak, which together comprise the Himalayan valley of the Indus, reveals the character of polyandry as a response to geographic environment. Both provinces are inhabited by a Mongolian stock, but the Ladaki living on the uppermost stretch of the basin near Tibet are Buddhists and polyandrists, while the Baltis farther down the valley are Mussulmen and polygamists. The Baltis, with their plurality of wives and numerous children, are wretchedly poor and live in squalor on the verge of starvation; but as the elevation of their valley ranges only from 4000 to 8500 feet, they are inured to heat, and therefore emigrate in large numbers to the neighboring Mohammedan province of the Punjab, where they work as coolies and navvies. The Ladakis, on the other hand, living 9000 to 13,000 feet above the sea, die of bilious fever when they reach the lowlands. Cut off from emigration, they curtail population by means of polyandry and lamaseries. Consequently they show signs of prosperity, are well fed, well clothed and comfortably housed.1360 Baltistan's social condition illustrates in a striking way the power of an idea like an alien creed, assimilated as the result of close vicinal location, to counteract for a time the influences of local geographic conditions.
The less civilized mountain peoples, whose tastes or low economic status unfit them for emigration, solve the problem of a deficient food supply by raiding the fields and stores of their richer neighbors. Predatory expeditions fill the history of primitive mountain peoples, and of the ancient occupants of highland regions which are now devoted to honest industry. The ancient Alpine tribes were one and all, from the Mediterranean to the Danube, "poor and addicted to robbery," as Strabo says. He analyzes their condition with nice discrimination. "The greater part [of the Alps], especially the summits of the mountains inhabited by robbers, are barren and unfruitful, both on account of the frost and the ruggedness of the land. Because of the want of food and other necessaries, the mountaineers have sometimes been obliged to spare the inhabitants of the plains, that they might have some people to supply them."1361 The freebooters usually descended into the lowlands of Italy, Gaul and Helvetia, but the pass peoples lay in wait for their prey on the mountain roads. Strabo described the same marauding habits arising from the same cause among the mountaineers of northern Spain,1362 the Balkan range,1363 and the highlands encircling the Mesopotamian plains.1364
Hunger is usually the spur. The tribesmen who inhabit the Hunza gorge were notorious robbers till their recent conquest by the British. Despite the most careful terrace tillage, their country was much overpopulated. The supply of grain was so inadequate, that during the summer the people subsisted wholly on fruit, reserving the grain for winter use. Therefore, when early summer opened the passes of the Karakorum and Himalayan ranges, and caravans began to move over the trade route between Kashmir and Yarkand, when the Kirghis nomads from the plains sought the pastures of the Pamir, the Hunza tribesmen found raiding caravans and herds, and pillaging the Gilgit Valley of Baltistan the easiest means of supplementing their slender resources. Hardy mountaineers as they were, and born fighters, they always conducted their forays successfully, and returned to the shelter of their fastnesses, laden with plunder and driving their captive flocks before them. The perpetual menace of these Hunza raids caused large districts in the Gilgit Valley to be abandoned by their inhabitants, and cultivated land to lapse into wilderness,1365 while the Chilas to the south pillaged the Astor Valley of Baltistan, carrying away crops and cattle, enslaving women and children.1366
Marauding propensities are marked among all retarded mountain peoples of modern times. The cattle-lifting clans of the Scotch Highlands, who preyed upon the Lowlands, have their counterpart in the Pathans of the Suleiman and Baluch mountain border who, till curbed by the British power in India, systematically pillaged the plains of the Sind.1367 The forest Bhils of the Vindhyan and Satpura ranges are scarcely yet married to agriculture; so when in time of drought their crops fail and the game abandons the hill forests to seek water in the lowland jungles, the Bhils cheerfully revert to their ancestral habit of cattle-lifting.1368
The Caucasus was long a breeding place for robber tribes who made their forays into the pastures and fields of southern Russia. Robbery was part of the education of every Circassian prince, while one group of the Abassines conferred their chieftainship upon the most successful robber or the man of largest family.1369 The Kurdish hillmen of the Armenian ranges descend with their herds of horses in winter to the warmer plains, where they exhaust the pastures and subject the Armenian villages to a regular system of blackmail.1370 The wide grassy plains about Koukou Nor Lake, near the Chinese border of Tibet, attract numerous Mongol nomads with their herds; but these rich pastures are exposed to the depredation of Si Fan brigand tribes, who have their haunts in the deep, impenetrable gorges of the neighboring mountains, and carefully guard all the approaches to the same. They are Buddhists, but worship a special Divinity of Brigandage, to whom their lamas offer prayers for the success of every foray.1371 Hence, among mountain as among desert peoples, robbery tends to become a virtue; environment dictates their ethical code.
These depredations reflect to a great degree the complementary relation of highlands and lowlands. The plains possess what the mountains lack. This is a fundamental fact of economic geography, and inevitably leads to historical results. The marauding expeditions of mountain peoples first acquire historical importance, either when the raids after long continuance end in the conquest of the lowlands, and thus augment the resources and population of the highland state; or, as is often the case, the raiders call down upon themselves the vengeance of the plainsmen, are subdued, and embodied in the lowland state. The conquest of ancient Assyria and the destruction of Nineveh by the mountain Medes seems to have been a process of this kind. Long before their descent upon Mesopotamia, they were known as the "dangerous Medes," were constantly threatening the Assyrian frontiers and occupying isolated tracts.1372 The predatory incursions of the Samnites of the Apennines into the fertile fields of Campania eventuated in the conquest of ancient Capua and other cities, and greatly strengthened the Samnite
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