I think what fascinates me the most here is how you can clearly see the impact that infrastructure improvement has on the ability of people in remote rural areas to rise out of poverty. With a road and internet connection they are now able to sell local produce and generate income to rise above a mere subsistence farming level.

Another interesting thing to note is that, as the first interviewed woman points out, the fact that their income is comparatively quite low is not necessarily indicative of poor living conditions, since they grow virtually all their own food and produce much of what they need locally and only need to buy a few things from the outside.

This shows you that looking at purely economic data, even when adjusting for purchasing power, is not enough to judge how well a population is doing if you don’t know the full social context. For instance, the same income in an urban setting, where you cannot grow your own food and may even have to pay rent and other expenses, would not go nearly as far.

That to me is actually way more interesting than the part about polygamy, even though the polygamy aspect is probably the part of the video that draws in most viewers because it is “unusual”. My main takeaway on that issue is how we can clearly see that the conservative talking point about the “nuclear family” supposedly being the only viable family structure is simply nonsense.

However we also should not idealize this practice, because like everything else it has upsides and downsides. Some problems are addressed in this video, such as the custom they had in the past of arranged marriages which can cause a lot of unhappiness. Also, polyandry is not a guarantee that there is no patriarchy, as it appears that gender roles and norms can still be quite patriarchal, with women performing most of the domestic labor. But that’s a much broader issue that goes way beyond just this one community.

And finally we shouldn’t judge how other cultures do things by viewing them through our own cultural-ideological lens, but try and understand them in their real historical and material context. It is a fact that social practices are shaped by material factors. For instance in this case, the woman who is being interviewed suggests their unique family structure may be related to population control and inheritance.

I find this stuff fascinating, and all the more so since videos like this are a snapshot of one brief moment in time of a community undergoing a rapid social and economic transformation. I wonder how this village will look like 10, 20, 30 years from now…whether it will survive and experience an economic flourishing thanks to the new possibilities brought by technology and infrastructure, or whether it will gradually disappear as young people move to larger cities and become absorbed into the “mainstream” culture…