Enduring Polygamy

Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis

By Bruce Whitehouse

SERIES: Politics of Marriage and Gender: Global Issues in Local Contexts

Rutgers University Press

Why hasn’t polygamous marriage died out in African cities, as experts once expected it would? Enduring Polygamy considers this question in one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities: Bamako, the capital of Mali, where one in four wives is in a polygamous marriage. Using polygamy as a lens through which to survey sweeping changes in urban life, it offers ethnographic and demographic insights into the customs, gender norms and hierarchies, kinship structures, and laws affecting marriage, and situates polygamy within structures of inequality that shape marital options, especially for young Malian women. Through an approach of cultural relativism, the book offers an open-minded but unflinching perspective on a contested form of marriage. Without shying away from questions of patriarchy and women’s oppression, it presents polygamy from the everyday vantage points of Bamako residents themselves, allowing readers to make informed judgments about it and to appreciate the full spectrum of human cultural diversity.

In some wide regions, people deem polygamy a normal, natural option. In others, it’s spurned as an archaic, immoral form of oppression. But if monogamy may be human history’s exception, eyes and minds need opening to polygamy’s enduring pros, cons, and complexities. This collaboratively researched, empathic volume does it superbly. Parker Shipton, author of Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa

BRUCE WHITEHOUSE is an associate professor of anthropology at Lehigh University, where he is also affiliated with the Africana and global studies programs. He is the author of Migrants and Strangers in an African City: Exile, Dignity, and Belonging.

List of Illustrations
Series Foreword by Péter Berta

Introduction: It’s Complicated: Polygamy
and the Marriage System in Bamako, Mali

INTERLUDE ONE
The Midnight Callers

1 “Marriage Is an Obligation”: The Marital Life Course

2 Polygamous Marriage Formation

INTERLUDE TWO
Virtual Monogamy in Practice

3 Polygamous Household Dynamics

4 What’s Culture Got to Do with It? Religion, Gender, and Power

5 Marriage Markets and Marriage Squeezes:
The Demographic Underpinnings of Polygamous Marriage

INTERLUDE THREE
Family Law, Identity, and Political Islam

6 Marriage Law, Polygamy, and the Malian State

Conclusion: The Polygamy of the Future