I’m not sure how to tell this story so I’ll just dig on in and let the telling fall where it may.
I’ve been reading a lot about age of consent and marriage, as anyone reading about politics in the USA has been of late, and I’m telling of a different people and place and a different way of doing things, make of it what you will.
I’m going to call these folks The People, because that’s what most peoples call themselves. I’m hoping I have it all right, I’ve never read about The People in books, and being a widely dispersed culture across SE Asia I’m sure there have been studies.
Pretty much there are no unmarried women above the age of 16 or so. By 16 everyone seems hooked up. Before marriage there is widespread traditional promiscuity. Young teens are divided into “boy groups” and “girl groups”. The groups arrange couplings through who knows what sort of arrangements. Boys give small token gifts to girls to show appreciation. Couplings take place in tiny houses built outside of each boy’s father’s house.
Before a young man or woman can join a boy or girl group they first have sex with either the religious leader of the village if a girl, or a mature woman whose duty it is to couple with all the young boys their first time.
Bear in mind I’ve no idea why any of this happened this way, I’m not interested in the sexual practices of The People. Some things seemed disturbing to me, more on that later, but I never did voice disapproval. Not my place, not my culture. I’m fairly old, amongst the people I was one of the oldest persons around, I hung out with the older men and talked of hunting, distances, other villages, cost of things, all that typical old man stuff. Eventually I pieced together enough of their way of doing things to understand a little, or at least know what it is they were doing.
So the boy and girl groups were extremely promiscuous, sleeping with each other by arrangement of the leaders of their groups. When a young woman became pregnant she was immediately one of the most marriageable people in the village, and was married soon after, I believe to the boy of her choice. I don’t think they did arranged marriages much. After marriage people were monogamous. Rarely a man took a second wife.
When traveling through the mountains I used a guide from the government, who was of the local lowland peoples, I also hired what I called a “local guide” from each village to bring me to the next village and make introductions. These local guides were always very happy to go with us and it took me a while to realize that besides good wages they were also very sought after by the young women.
The villages being connected via language and culture to other villages of the same culture were very terrified of inbreeding, and sought outside genes at every opportunity. The local guides were outside genes. One time I remember three wood cutters had come up from a lowland village to rip cut large logs for a new schoolhouse, I went to sleep exhausted but it was obvious to me that three of the very young teen girls were going to sleep with those middle aged men that evening. We were at the headman's house. The next morning I voiced my disapproval to my government guide. The lowland woodcutters belong to a modern society where sleeping with young girls is frowned upon, not much different than our society.
The government guide dismissed my concern with a gruff “different culture”. In thinking later I considered it from the view of The People, different genes. The people practice infanticide on twins. It’s very difficult for me not to view things from my moral background and culture.
I don’t know what’s become of The People. They live in an area of increased methamphetamine and heroin trafficking. It used to be only an opium cultivating area. No one ever used to leave the village to go live and work elsewhere, many of The People had never gone to the road. Now the road has come to them with chinese copper mines and workers. I’m worried about AIDs and the other ills of modern society.
The people are not much different than you or I, just born in a different place to different parents. I won’t romanticise their lives and say they live a life of happiness, I’d assume they have trials and tribulations themselves. Some villages I began to get to know some of the families, the sons and daughters in law and the kids. They all seemed well enough.