Enduring polygamy: Plural marriage and social change in an African metropolis By Bruce Whitehouse. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 221 pp.

A few years ago, I taught an undergraduate anthropology class titled “Between Polygamy and Polyamory: Anthropological Perspectives on Intimacy.” Students were very interested in the course. I appreciated their intellectual and personal engagement with the anthropology of partnership. Our lively debates on various forms of “poly,” however, left me puzzled. Most students strongly valued “polyamory.” Some even aspired to live polyamorous lives. In contrast, they took a dim view of “polygamy.” Students saw the institution as patriarchal, heteronormative, and outdated. Unfortunately, my course took place before the publication of Bruce Whitehouse's excellent and very timely ethnography Enduring Polygamy: Plural Marriage and Social Change in an African Metropolis. His long-term ethnographic work on marriage in Mali's capital, Bamako, would have added a more nuanced anthropological perspective on why polygamy is a widespread form of marriage in many regions of the world. Polygyny, defined as a marriage between one man and several women, is especially common in Mali and other West African countries. Whitehouse uses the general term for plural marriage, polygamy, interchangeably with the more specific concept of polygyny. The book does not discuss polyandry, defined as a marriage between one woman and several men, a practice irrelevant in the West African context. According to recent demographic surveys, 20 to 45 percent of marriages in West Africa are polygynous. In rural Mali, the rate is almost 50 percent, while in Mali's capital it is significantly lower (p. 3). Nevertheless, polygyny rates have been declining in West Africa, albeit slowly. General explanations for this transformation focus on increasing rates of urbanization, higher levels of schooling for girls, and changing ideas about intimacy, especially the spread of companionate-partnership ideals. Yet, despite these substantial societal transformations, polygamy endures in Mali. The primary goal of Whitehouse's monograph is to explain why. He brilliantly achieves this by working through multiple factors that shape polygyny in contemporary Bamako. To start, he reviews some of the most common assumptions and stereotypes about polygamy. These resonate with discourses I encountered in discussions with my students. Whitehouse also positions himself against highly problematic evolutionistic approaches to marriage and polygamy, often based on flawed empirical comparisons. Instead, he aims to understand the endurance of polygamy in Bamako through the perceptions and experiences of Bamakois themselves, including the relationship between polygamy and women's agency (p. 24). Cultural relativism consequently frames Whitehouse's argument. It is one of the many strengths of the monograph that Whitehouse points out tensions that arise from this approach, including his own struggles to understand plural marriage without judgment. The book's introduction and six chapters are based on impressive and complex empirical information. Whitehouse combines his decades-long ethnographic engagement in Mali with 107 structured interviews (58 husbands, 49 wives), undertaken in 2012 with the help of Malian research assistants in Bamako; 50 semistructured interviews conducted by Whitehouse himself from 2010 to 2020 with different “experts” (radio hosts, religious leaders, politicians, activists, judges, etc.); 24 focus group interviews that took place from 2010 to 2012; and a sample of 1,020 municipal marriage records on civil marriages established from 1991 to 2016. With this remarkable combination of dense qualitative information and complex quantitative data, Whitehouse offers an exceptionally nuanced analysis of polygyny in Bamako, at different levels (from micro to macro) and in its various dimensions (legal, political, normative, social). Highly readable ethnographic vignettes introduce new aspects of the phenomenon. The first vignette portrays Whitehouse's silent observation of a live broadcast of a popular evening call-in show on family and marriage issues in the studio of a private Bamako radio station in 2012. The questions discussed that evening were diverse, but a common thread was that marriage in Mali is an obligation—to parents and kin, religion, culture, and even the nation. Chapter 1 expands on this insight. The normativity of marriage finds its expression in almost universal marriage. This universality, however, is shaped by power differences based on gender and age. On average, men marry in their late 20s, while women marry 10 years earlier. In this context, women agree to polygamous marriages because they fear getting too old or because kin pressure women into marriage and remarriage after divorce or widowhood. Chapter 2 builds on these insights and asks who becomes polygamous. Some general assumptions are convincingly debunked. Whitehouse shows that it is wrong to assume, as many do, that only wealthy men are polygynous. Polygamous marriage emerges out of specific situations and does not depend on a person's status or other characteristics. Women and men, at their first wedding, might reject polygamy but rethink it later. Whitehouse discusses seven factors that influence why people may opt for polygamy. These include domestic factors, like a strong desire to have (more) children, the duty to elders, and the idea that having a co-wife “disciplines” a woman. Interestingly, female and male perceptions of polygamy are very different. Men articulate various practical advantages of polygamous unions, while women address their burdens. Chapter 3 examines polygamous household dynamics, offering a remarkable discussion of the (im)possibilities of treating all co-wives equally. Recently, the practice of co-wives’ decohabitation (p. 79) has gained momentum. As the ethnographic cases show, wives try to be as physically separate as possible from the lives of their co-wives. This dynamic will further alter kinship, including affinal relations. The normativity of polygamy is addressed in chapter 4. To understand why polygamy remains common in Mali, Whitehouse discusses Islamic perspectives on polygamy. He shows that Islam does provide legitimization for polygamy, but only in connection with other regionally specific practices and beliefs. This includes a particular version of patriarchy, including gender ideologies that often disadvantage women but that also provide them agency, for example, as mothers. With great analytical rigor, the fifth chapter, on the demographic underpinnings of polygamy in Mali, deconstructs several fundamental errors in the perception of polygamy. These myths, as Whitehouse calls them, frame perceptions about polygamy, including scientific ones, not only in “the West” but also in Mali itself. One common example is the belief that polygamy disadvantages “inferior men” (p. 112) by reducing their chances to marry. Whitehouse shows that this notion is wrong because of Mali's specific age distribution (a very young population) and because there is a pronounced difference in the average age at first marriage for men and women, ensuring that marriage is ultimately universal for men, independent of their socioeconomic status. In the final chapter before the conclusion, Whitehouse concentrates on marriage law, showing how it has been shaped and reshaped during different moments in Mali's history. Today, marriage law in Mali is an example of both the uncertainties and the possibilities of legal pluralism, combining colonial legacies like civil marriage with customary wedding rituals and Islamic marriages. In the conclusion, Whitehouse offers some informed guesswork on polygamy's future in Mali. Most prominently, a growing number of professional single women will further delay marriage and thus weaken universal marriage, which will also have an impact on polygamy. This is unlikely to bring Malian polygamy and marriage to an end, but it will reconfigure them, further showing the institution's durability. Despite the often-justified criticism of marriage voiced both within and outside academia, Whitehouse's monograph, along with recent work on marriage by Janet Carsten, Perveez Mody, Dinah Hannaford, Joanna Davidson, and others, shows that throughout the world, marriage remains a central social, economic, legal, and political institution. Whitehouse's accessible, superbly argued, and outstandingly well-researched monograph addresses one of the larger omissions in current anthropological studies of marriage—polygamy. The monograph is thus a must-read for anyone interested in marriage, kinship, and gender. Any course on anthropological perspectives on partnership, marriage, and intimacy, like my own, will greatly profit from including this excellent ethnography.

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