Navel of the Demoness : Tibetan Buddhism and Civil Religion in ...

clan should give the village one field of its collective property per household of
its clan—six of them, to judge by the number of the signatories. Alternatively,
it may mean that each household of the Cimden clan should give the village
one of the fields from its own private estate. But if it is a question of individual
property, it becomes very difficult to explain why the Cimden clan as a whole
should have been singled out for this treatment, since the document is obviously
aimed at curtailing the disproportionate wealth of the group. It is apparent
that the problem can only be tackled if we know something about the
relationship between clans and the inheritance of landed property.
Categories of Households
fromclanstohouseholdsinte 125
Households in Te are, broadly, of two types, which I shall call estates and
dependencies. The term for estate is drongba (Tib. grong pa), the usual term in
Lo and Baragaon—and in much of Tibet—for this kind of household. An estate
essentially consists of a house and a number of fields scattered through the
agricultural land of the village. In addition, there may be one or more smaller
buildings, not necessarily attached to the main house, a threshing yard or two,
some fruit trees, and a stone corral for penning dzos in the central gorge—not
to mention livestock and other moveable property that a house contains. There
are forty-eight estates in Te, and have been for as long as anyone can remember.
Two of the estates have no owners, and although their fields are apportioned
out for use by other estates, they have nevertheless not been dissolved:
they are village property, and can be ‘‘reactivated’’ as whole entities if the community
so decides. In fact they have both recently been reactivated in a limited
way, but I shall discuss the rather complex circumstances of their operation
later.
A man becomes the head of his household after the withdrawal of his
father from the position. This transition corresponds approximately to the
latter’s retirement ceremony, but is less rigidly enforced than the withdrawal
from public life. A dynamic father whose son is a relatively weak character, or
generally incompetent, may continue to function as the head of the estate well
into old age. Marriages are mainly monogamous, but there are a few examples
of fraternal polyandry. This system of marriage—very typical for much of Tibet
and the Tibetan-speaking Himalaya—was once very common in Baragaon and
Lo but is now increasingly rare. Estates are inherited in the male line, but they
are never subdivided among a group of brothers. The normal pattern in Baragaon
is that the eldest brother inherits and becomes the head of the household.
If his younger brother or brothers wish to join him in a polyandrous