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I took down the genealogies of the Ang of Chi's family which I had first taken down at the very beginning of my stay, in the Ang's presence, but which of course had been quite imprecise at the time. The most remarkable phenomena with these genealogies is that the present Ang and his two brothers and predecessors married one after the other the same two women, that is in every case the widows of the deceased brother. From one of them, Liphei from Mon, all three brothers had children. The other Liphei from Tang lives only as a matter of form as his wife, in Mawang's house, as when she came down to him she was already too old for him to have marital relations with her. The sons of Liphei from Mon from her first two husbands followed the older generations example (214) and three of them married the same woman one after the other. That this levirate is not prescription is clear from the case of the wife of one of Mawang's brothers who refused to marry again after her husband's death. She was his first wife who he married as a young man when he was still living in his own small house before succeeding his brother to the throne. A Great Ang also takes on the Ben wives of his predecessor although in Chi supposedly not those of his own father. In other villages the young Angs occasionally also take over the younger concubines of their father. |
