The same laws that stop you from doing it now? I’m not sure why it would be any more or less legal than it is now to commit fraud; why would the laws change?
Sleel, can you point me to some of the books you reference in your post #99? I’m very curious to read the peoples’ stories. The only poly people I’ve met in person were in the Pagan community, and I did not know them very well. But I didn’t get an impression that there was anything unhealthy about it.
Minor nitpick: 85% of the cultures is not necessarily 85% of the population. Some cultures are a lot more numerous than others.
Just as it’s illegal to smoke certain substances and to drive over the speed limit, those activities don’t occur much at all.
My point was that if you already have citizenship-by-marriage fraud, expanding the legal definition of marriage will only increase the fraud. It may be a small thing, but it crossed my mind so I threw it out there.
Good point. On the other hand, societies with a higher rate of polygamy tend to have bigger families than mostly monogamous ones, for obvious reasons. I don’t know if there’s any reference that actually gives a population count cross-referenced by marriage practices.
Something I should have mentioned earlier when I talked about serial monogamy in Europe and the Americas as a form of polygamy, mistresses are relatively common in most of the West, though I’m sure that social and legal repercussions keep long-term arrangements like this from happening as often as more casual affairs, or as often as second marriages in places where polygamy is acceptable. I remember someone (maybe on this board) joking that the French were baffled by the Americans freaking out over Clinton’s indiscretions; if you’re that powerful a man and you don’t have a mistress, it’s odd from their point of view. They did fault Clinton for his taste and lack of discretion though.
It’s not terribly uncommon for some men in both Europe and the US to have children with their mistress, keep up a second home for her, provide part of her income, basically be a husband to her in everything but name. Depending on the situation, the children might even think of him as their father. One thing making polygamy legal would do is to offer a way to legitimize and formalize these arrangements, protect some of the mistress’s legal rights, and give her children a claim in the succession, which would probably put them in a better financial position for the future than they would have otherwise. Men who can actually afford to keep a mistress in this style do tend to be well-off, so a legitimate claim on his estate could made a big difference in his kids’ lives.
I dated a Haitian woman for a while and learned that it’s quite common for men of the Haitian and Jamaican cultural sub-groups in the US to have a second household. At least among the people she knew, there were at least four women (two in her family, two who were friends of the family) who were involved in such relationships, whether as mistress or wife. There may have been more that she wasn’t aware of or didn’t talk to me about.
It’s often an open secret, and the wives rarely leave their husbands unless he’s abusive, doesn’t support them well enough, or doesn’t give her branch of the family enough of his time and attention. Again, not dissimilar to a polygamous marriage in cultures where it’s formally recognized. The Koran actually has rules about how to treat wives, what is acceptable behavior for a husband, and how to arrange household affairs. These less-formal and uncodified practices I was made aware of parallel those rules pretty well.
I last took an anthropology course about 9 years ago, and I don’t have my syllabuses here with me, so I’m not going to be able to give you references to the exact books I read. For most of my classes there were literally thousands of pages of supplementary materials, some of which were copied and collated into excerpt books made especially for the courses. Without those, I have no way to point you to specific materials. I’ll do my best with memory and web searches to point you to some of the books.
If this is the book I remember, it is a multidiscipline anthology that features interviews with individuals, as well as biology essays, and wide-view comparison studies. It should offer a lot of different views of marriage, love, courtship, and child rearing. I really hope this is the right book, because it was great.
In trying to track down that book from things I remembered from the essays, I also found Why We Love: The Nature And Chemistry Of Romantic Love and Love and Sex: Cross-Cultural Perspectives that might be interesting. I haven’t read those personally, though.
The cultures I can remember reading detailed ethnographies on are: the Nuer (probably E.E. Evans-Pritchard, or K.G. Heider), Maasai (can’t find an author that looks familiar, but try this book), Lamas of Nepal (was featured in a collection of brief ethnographies; impossible to find from memory), Yanomamö (Chagnon, all of this and part of this where the information didn’t overlap too much), Balinese (J.S. Lansing, I think, movie too about irrigation, temples, and the Green Revolution), the Tiwi aborigines of northern Australia (the book we read, I remember the cover) and Trobianders, and the !Kung (collected works again; they’re popular subjects also, so lots of authors out there). We also read substantial excerpts from Mead, Boaz, Malinowski, and Lévi-Strauss; some of the big names in the field. There were more, but that’s what I can remember off the top of my head. Nearly all cultural anthropology writing will include interviews and direct quotes from subjects in their texts.
I took a couple of courses that were specifically about Japanese culture and literature. Japan, up until very recently, still practiced a form of concubinage, though it was relatively rare in the 20th century. The seminal text here is of course Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by Ruth Benedict, but from what I recall she doesn’t talk much about this in that book.
Fictionalized, but very much based in reality, Things Fall Apart is an excellent book. It talks about what happened in Nigeria when it was colonized by Europeans, and how the changes wrought by them unbalanced and changed many things there for the worse. It shows the good and bad of village life, how polygamy works practically, and what kind of social controls there are on marriage behavior. For example, one part shows how a wife-beater was discouraged from repeating his behavior through social disapproval.
Really, the best thing to do is to find a group you’re interested in and try to find ethnographies on them. Be warned that anthropological writing can be jargon-rich and dry at times. I find I remember a lot more about the people from their interviews than I do from the ethnographer’s analysis of their culture.
Popular texts like the two I found while looking for Romantic Love and Sexual Behavior are probably a lot more accessible than actual ethnographies, and they probably don’t introduce too many inaccuracies. This page gives some examples of ethnographies that are accessible to general audiences down at the bottom. The page itself is worth reading because it gives an overview of what an ethnography entails and some definition of terms.