At 8:31 PM +0000 20/1/05, Ian Young wrote:
>Sandy Petersen, by way of Mark Mohrfield, wrote:
>
>> Men-and-a-Half tribes often try to enforce strict sex
>> rules, to keep from diluting their qualities by outbreeding with
>> ordinary Agimori. Because they also don't like incest (Doraddi
>> incest rules are extremely complex, more so than any other major
>> culture in Glorantha), this means that they pretty much have to
>find
>> another Men-and-a-Half tribe to marry.
>
>Which raises the question of the Praxian Men-and-a-Half, of whom I
>understand there is but a single tribe. What's keeping them from
>dying out or inbreeding due to incestuous marriage? Do we assume that
>there are actually multiple Men-and-a-Half tribes wandering the
>chaparral of Prax, and are simply viewed as a single, monolithic
>society by outsiders? Or do we assume that they carefully apply the
>magical adoption and rebirth to the tribe described in Wyrm's
>Footnotes #12 and Borderlands? Even the magical adoption has its
>flaws, because the newly reborn member of the tribe becomes a member
>of the family that sponsored his or her rebirth, which I suppose would
>still impose the limitations of taboo against incest.
The Doraddi idea of incest rules can be quite strange, and
often apparently arbitrary and quite broad. Working out exactly who
is allowed to marry who is notoriously difficult and complex in
Pamaltela.
I don't think the whole baroque complexity of Doraddi kinship
rules has survived the transplantation to Prax and the centuries of
cultural drift - especially as the full details of kinship system are
maintained mostly by members of cults that aren't around in Prax. So
in that respect avoiding 'incest' is probably less onerous for the
Praxian branch - they probably only have something approximating
normal incest rules, not the full Doraddi panoply to deal with.
Regards
David