Suchergebnisse

When President Ferdinand E. Marcos of the Philippines proclaimed martial law on 22 September 1972, it looked as though this signified the abandonment of American values and influence. Indeed, his foreign minister, Carlos Romulo, justified the new dictatorship on the grounds that democracy was not viable in a country like the Philippines which lacked a substantial middle-class population, and he hailed the Marcos regime as a step away from American ideals ill-suited to a developing Oriental country. As Romulo indicates, the Marcos government is a major shift from the democratic practices inherited from the American period.

The martial law regime of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos has drastically changed the status of ethnic Chinese living in the Philippines. This has been accomplished by a decree which makes naturalization as a Filipino citizen a simple and inexpensive process. Naturalization enables persons of Chinese ancestry to escape discriminatory legislation directed against aliens and to become full participants in Philippine economic activities. The Chinese in the Philippines are a commercial middle class group who have been targets for discriminatory legislation which constantly increased in severity from the end of American control in 1946 until the naturalization decree by President Marcos in 1975. Anti-Chinese feeling is still high in the general population and such a decree could only have been issued by a dictatorial government; however, there are many factors working toward assimilation and the naturalization decree may mark a change of policy which will survive the end of the Marcos regime.

This paper is based on a study of the practice of polyandry among the Shirishana, a Yanomama tribe in the Amazon forest area of northwest Brazil. Its purpose is to compare the factors related to Shirishana polyandry with those indicated by the general literature on the subject. The literature frequently associates polyandry with a simple horticultural economy, with a heavy importance upon family life identity, and with a population with a low sex ratio. These assumptions were borne out in the Shirishana case study. Other common assumptions, evidenced in reseach, however, were not sustained. These included the hypothesis that plural marriage is a minority practice in any society; that polyandry is used by a wealthy class to maintain its status; that polyandry is associated with extremely adverse economic conditions; that polyandry increases female status;that polyandry is the preferred marriage form by either men or women.