Bruce Whitehouse's "Enduring Polygamy"

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.

Whitehouse applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Enduring Polygamy: Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Enduring Polygamy quotes an interview I conducted with a conservative imam in Bamako, Mali, in which he observed that his society lacked the death penalty for fornication commonly associated with Islamic law. This quotation caps a discussion of sexual double standards encouraging men to have multiple female partners, whether within marriage or without. A section entitled "Bargaining with Polygamy" follows, describing a patriarchal bargain in which women accept reduced autonomy in exchange for attaining full womanhood within marriage. Polygamy can actually expand wives' autonomy in this context: co-wives who reside separately, for example, might enjoy more freedom of movement than wives in monogamous marriages who live with their in-laws.

From this one-page sample, readers might conclude that Enduring Polygamy argues that polygamy is good for women, or more broadly that the book defends plural marriage. But as a whole, it avoids framing polygamy as intrinsically good or bad for women. It argues that polygamy in Bamako (where one in four wives shares her husband with one or more co-wives) is best understood not as the cause of women’s disempowerment but as a product of women’s disempowerment, and specifically of women’s lack of bargaining power in local marriage markets.

Women in Bamako enter polygamous marriages in either of two ways: by marrying already-married men, or by remaining in their existing unions after their husbands take additional wives. In either case, my ethnographic findings show that they do so less because they prefer to have co-wives, and more because they perceive no better options available to them. Enduring Polygamy explores the motivations and constraints of women and men regarding plural marriage in this setting, and examines the cultural norms and legal structures that sustain plural marriage in a modern African city despite women’s considerable opposition to it.

While page 99 does not therefore give an accurate glimpse of the book’s argument, it does convey my approach in researching and writing the book insofar as it contains a quotation from an ethnographic interview (with the imam), a reference to feminist theory (the patriarchal bargain), and an analysis of contemporary socio-political institutions shaping life in Mali’s capital city.

Visit Bruce Whitehouse's website.

--Marshal Zeringue