When he finally arrived in the oasis city of Kashgar , China, he was so impressed with its history that he decided to start a new life collecting and selling exotic goods from all over the world. For years the legendary city of Kashgar was a melting pot of ideas and a key trading post on the historic Silk Road. It was this unique combination of philosophy and trade that my father wanted to recreate at home.
Starting in markets in , he opened his first store in the Sydney suburb of Newtown in I gave up my own career as a government scientist to join him in and soon convinced my partner Ian to join us in what was to become the Family Business.
Today our version of Kashgar stocks a hugely diverse range of furniture, rugs, textiles, antiques, handicrafts and jewellery sourced from over twenty different countries including India, Nepal, Tibet, China, Thailand, Burma, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mexico, Peru, Turkey, Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.
Our collection includes contemporary and tribal silver and gold jewellery, a unique range of headhunting curios, antique Buddhist relics and a collection of one-off necklaces, earrings and bracelets that I design and create myself using the beads and jewellery making techniques of ethnic minorities from around the globe. Kashgar is a philosophy as well as a store. We are committed to supporting traditional artisans and small village communities by selling authentic handcrafted goods which are personally collected by us.
By supporting traditional methods of design and production we hope to encourage local cottage industries which have a low impact on the environment and help ethnic minorities maintain their self-sufficiency into the 21st Century.
We are particularly committed to assisting women around the world and to this end have worked with several organisations including the Hua Bin Women's Union of Vietnam, the East Timorese Women's Association and Tikondane in Zambia. Time honoured means of craftsmanship and traditional ways of life are disappearing as people all over the world give up their identity in favour of jeans and T-shirts. We see our trade as a means of staving off the inevitable encroachment of the 21st century, assisting communities to decide for themselves which parts of the western world they wish to incorporate medicine, education and which they wish to reject prostitution, drug production, begging and servitude to warlords.
We encourage our customers to think of the handicrafts and artifacts they buy from us as an investment: a piece of history and a way of life that may soon be gone forever. In the past our pieces appeared in many movies including The Hobbit, Mission Impossible 2, Queen of the Damned, Scooby Doo, Moulin Rouge and Wolverine, and in many televisions series, as well as in plays, commercials and exhibitions. We've found special pieces for individual customers as well as for film sets, event management companies, hotels, businesses, consulates and embassies.
The uniqueness of our stock means that we are also very appealing to interior and fashion designers with a taste for the exotic. There is something for everyone at Kashgar - collectors, the curious, those looking for a special present or for something unique to adorn the home. Most of our items are one-off specialties; other pieces we only stock in small quantities so as to continuously offer a wide and ever-changing range of interesting products.
We are also packed with ideas for decorating home and work premises that will challenge your established concepts of design and storage. Sign up to get the latest on sales, pop up stores, new arrivals and exclusive discounts just for members. The five Pandava princes, heroes of the Indian epic Mahabharata, with their shared wife-in-common Draupadi The custom of taking multiple wives, or polygyny, is well known.
A little northeast of Lhassa, among the mountains that cover that part of the great plateau of Tibet, the explorer Bonvalot found a large population. It is in these valleys that some of the rivers of India have their headquarters. This region, says the New York Sun, is peculiar as the part of Tibet where polyandry is the custom, and this feature of social life has given Tibet some notoriety, because there are very few parts of the world in which polyandry is practised.
Bonvalot thus describes the custom as it exists in Tibet. A family has a daughter. A young man wishes to enter the family, to live under its roof, and become the husband of the daughter. He consults with the parents, and if they arrive at an agreement in regard to the amount of property he is to turn over to them, he takes up his abode in the hut and becomes the husband of the daughter.
It may be that there are other young men desirous of partaking of the same good fortune. They are not at all deterred by the fact that the girl is already provided with a husband. They present themselves at the hut, make offers of certain property, and, unless the first husband has paid what is regarded in Tibet as a very large sum in order to secure the young woman as his exclusive possession, she becomes likewise the wife of these other claimants for her hand, and the whole family live together in the same hut and in the utmost harmony.
It rarely happens that a young man thinks so much of the girl he weds in this peculiar fashion as to be jealous of others who also desire to be her husband. Now and then, however, such a case arises, and then there is likely to be bloodshed. He is a happy young man who is wealthy enough to become the sole lord and master of his wife.
It is a question entirely of money. If the young Tibetan is rich enough he buys a wife and remains the only master of the household. Sometimes, also, the husband acquires sufficient property to buy out the interest? They are generally content if they receive back a little more money than they paid for their interest in the young woman.
Disclosure: I first learned of Starkweather's project while researching a controversy involving Hames and he is now a friend. Indeed, according to Starkweather and Hames, anthropologists have documented social systems for polyandrous unions "among foragers in a wide variety of environments ranging from the Arctic to the tropics, and to the desert.
Rather than treating polyandry as a mystery to be explained away, Starkweather and Hames suggest polyandry constitutes a variation on the common, evolutionarily-adaptive phenomenon of pair-bonding—a variation that sometimes emerges in response to environmental conditions. What kind of environmental conditions? Well, "classical polyandry" in Asia has allowed families in areas of scarce farmable land to hold agricultural estates together.
The marriage of all brothers in a family to the same wife allows plots of family-owned land to remain intact and undivided. In other cultures, it appears that a man may arrange a second husband again, frequently his brother for his wife because he knows that, when he must be absent, the second husband will protect his wife—and thus his interests.
And if she gets impregnated while Husband 1 is gone, it will be by someone of whom he has approved in advance. Anthropologists have recorded this kind of situation among certain cultures among the Inuit the people formerly called Eskimos.
Then there's the "father effect" demonstrated by Penn State's Stephen Beckerman and his colleagues in their study of the Bari people of Venezuela.
The Bari have a system for recognizing two living men as both being fathers of a single child. Becerkman's group found that children understood to have two fathers are significantly more likely to survive to age 15 than children with only one—hence the term "father effect.
Two fathers? As odd as it can sound to those of us who know of human development as the one-egg-meets-one-sperm story, some cultures maintain the idea that fetuses develop in the womb as the result of multiple contributions of semen over the course of a pregnancy. In cultural systems of what Beckerman has named "partible paternity," two men can be socially recognized as legitimate fathers of a single child.
Starkweather and Hames call this a form of "informal polyandry," because while the two fathers may not be both formally married to and living with the mother in all cases, the society around them officially recognizes both men as legitimate mates to the mother, and father to her child.
What all these polyandrous situations—classical and non-classical, formal and informal—have in common is that they are all socially recognized systems in which women may openly have multiple mates simultaneously. Women in such systems are not "cheating" by any stretch of the imagination, nor are the men being cuckolded.
The systems are socially sanctioned. But this does not mean that the women are in control of the arrangements; in many of the cultures Starkweather and Hames reviewed, the first husband functions as the decider when it comes to resource distribution and acceptance of additional male mates. So how is it that, in spite of all this evidence of polyandry accumulating steadily in the literature, anthropologists for so long passed along the "it's virtually non-existent" story?
Starkweather and Hames suggest anthropology has been accidentally playing a scholarly version of the Telephone Game. In , George Murdock defined polyandry in a seminal text as "unions of one woman with two or more husbands where these [types of union] are culturally favored and involve residential as well as sexual cohabitation. Then subsequent scholars mis-repeated Murdock's remark; polyandry went from being understood as "rarely culturally favored " to "rarely permitted. If you write off every exception to a supposed rule, you will never think to challenge the rule.
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