So how is it that, in spite of all this evidence of polyandry accumulating steadily in the literature, anthropologists for so long passed along the "it's virtually non-existent" story? Starkweather and Hames suggest anthropology has been accidentally playing a scholarly version of the Telephone Game.
In 1957, George Murdock defined polyandry in a seminal text as "unions of one woman with two or more husbands where these [types of union] are culturally favored and involve residential as well as sexual cohabitation." Using such a strict definition, Murdock could accurately say polyandry was extremely rare; almost no cultures have polyandry as the dominant and most preferred form of family life.
Then subsequent scholars mis-repeated Murdock's remark; polyandry went from being understood as "rarely culturally favored" to "rarely permitted." Thus mating diversity that was known to exist became relatively invisible in the big story told by anthropology about human mating. (If you write off every exception to a supposed rule, you will never think to challenge the rule.)
In an email interview with me, Starkweather remarked, "I don't think that anyone, including Murdock, was operating from an explicitly sexist standpoint. However, I do think that the definitions of polyandry, and thus perceptions about its rarity, may have been due at least in part to the fact that an overwhelming percentage of anthropologists collecting data and shaping theory at the time were men."
Read More | "When Taking Multiple Husbands Makes Sense" | Alice Dreger | ?The Atlantic