Chapter 4 Tribal People 133will not be in a position to resist. She may also be willing since a second wife is
expected to do the field work while she can retire to household work. If a
woman is very strong-willed she may be able to prevent her husband from pro-
ceeding with his plans. While all men hope to have two or more wives, both to
increase the workforce of his household and for the prestige of being a man
who can afford several wives, they do not wish this for their daughters.
Another form of marriage is sometimes discussed in the literature on the
Hmong: marriage-by-capture. When it happens in Hmong communities in the
United States it is usually treated as rape. When it happens in Thailand it may
not be much more approved, and occasionally the Thai authorities are called in
to intervene (Tapp 1989). Geddes describes a case in Meto where a girl of one
clan was seized outside the village by men of another clan as a bride for one of
their members. The girl was the pretty daughter of an opium addict who had no
other members of her own clan in the village to protect her. The girl escaped and
ran home and, a few years later, committed suicide by swallowing opium. Mar-
riage-by-capture often appears in the literature as a valid marriage alternative,
but in a society like this where the possibilities of marrying a person of one’s
own choice are fairly good and where elopement is also possible, marriage-by-
capture exists principally as a way of forcing a girl into an unwanted marriage.
In Hmong Means Free (Chan 1994), Xang Mao Xiong reminisces about how
he married his wife:
In the old country, if a man liked a certain girl, and wanted to marry her, he
simply gave her a gift of money, or some small item, such as a scarf, as a
token of his interest. During New Year, when we were tossing balls, I gave
her some money. She kept it, so I figured she must be interested in me and
might be willing to marry me. I did not even know whether she would have
said “yes” had I gone to her house to ask for her hand. Because I was
uncertain how she felt about me, I did not want her to reject me. So, my
friends and I decided to kidnap her, as our custom allowed. One early
morning, my friends and I waited outside her house. When she came out,
we grabbed her by the arms and legs. We called out to her sister-in-law, who
came out to see what the commotion was about. She asked if Vue (my wife-
to-be) had accepted anything from me. I told her “yes.” So all she said was,
“Go and take her with you if she has accepted a gift from you.”
After three days, according to tradition, I bought her some new clothes
and took her to visit her family. At her brother’s house, we set up a date for
the wedding. That night, Vue and I returned to my house. I had to find two
elders and a best man. The two elders would negotiate on behalf of my fam-
ily, while her family would find their own representatives.... We held the
wedding in Long Cheng. I paid four silver bars for her plus another two for
the feast. (Xiong 1994:99–100)Spirits, Domestic and Wild
The fields, forests, and hills beyond the village are filled with creatures liv-
ing their own lives and desiring to be undisturbed by humans. When a man and