Peculiar Institutions

Fire Time, IX.

There are Ishtarian societies which:

alternate voting annually between males and females;

control population by combat to the death even between friends;

change spouses on a fixed schedule;

settle issues by random bone tossing;

do other things equally odd.

I suppose that, if something is possible, then someone somewhere will do it but how many? How viable are these odd societies? On Earth, military religious orders that never turned their backs on an enemy rarely fought another day. I read in a book on world religions by Ninian Smart that an Indian sect more ascetic than the Jains believed in liberating souls from reincarnation by practising celibacy and starving to death. That sect has not survived.