Harriet the Spry, you could look in most modern anthropology texts and they would tell you the same thing.
Per Wikipedia’s annotated sources on Incidence of Monogamy (notes 3-5) here are some books:
Murdock, G.P. (1967). Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
White, D.R. & Veit, C. (1999). White-Veit EthnoAtlas.
Murdock, G. P. (1981). Atlas of World Cultures. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
And here are some online sources:
“While modern Western societies believe in the sanctity of monogamy and enshrine it in their legal codes, most social traditions, over 80%, accept at least some degree of polygamy, the union between a person and more than one spouse.” (http://www.umanitoba.ca/anthropology/tutor/marriage/polygamy.html)
“How many spouses an individual is allowed to have varies from culture to culture. The rule that is familiar to North Americans and Europeans is monogamy–that is, one man married to one woman. While this is now by far the most common form of marriage around the world, it is, in a sense, the least preferred. In a sample of 850 societies, less than 20% preferred monogamy over other marriage patterns.”
[later on the same page] “Polygamy, the marriage of more than one spouse at a time, has been popular on all continents except Europe.” (http://anthro.palomar.edu/marriage/marriage_3.htm) This source is a basic anthropology primer. The referenced page and the following one have an overview of marriage patterns.
Strong refutation of Bush’s statements concerning marriage, published in Anthropology News, September 2004. Lots of general information on marriage patterns. No specific claims about how widespread polygamy is, but makes it obvious that monogamous opposite-sex marriage is definitely not the only accepted marriage pattern worldwide.
An unsourced newspaper article with a light but essentially accurate treatment of the subject: "Marriage as Americans know it today didn’t exist 2,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago. Rather than an unbending pillar of society, marriage has been an extraordinarily elastic institution, constantly adapting to religious, political and economic shifts and pliable in the face of sexual revolutions, civil rights movements and changing cultural norms . . .
“In fact, polygamy has been more common than monogamy over the full sweep of human history. The Roman Catholic Church would take up the push for monogamy, and through the centuries it overtook polygamy as the
standard worldwide.”
Anthropology blog: “Now, to anthropologists, the way marriage is discussed and deployed in these debates is laughable. We know that marriage as conceptualized by the American religious right at the dawn of the 21st century is neither the only – or even a particularly common – form of marriage in the world, nor the way marriage has always been in our own society.” His argument is actually that marriage is losing its importance in industrial societies due to economic and technological changes.
GingerOfTheNorth, how, in your opinion, is serial monogamy so drastically different from polygamy? Many people who study anthropology would say that serial monogamy is essentially a form of polygamy. There are some differences between serial monogamy and “straight” polygamy, but there are also many functional similarities. The economic demands, particularly, are almost identical.
In some polygamous cultures, the wives have separate households. How is this much different from supporting a divorced wife? One of the main differences is that she can get remarried if she is divorced. So, in our society the man loses (theoretical) sexual exclusivity. In many societies, her divorce would remove any claim her children could make on her ex-husband’s estate and any claim she could make for continuing support, partly due to that loss of sexual exclusivity.
Depending on where you get divorced in the US, the kids could still make claims on his estate and she could still claim spousal support. That means that, regarding inheritance and upkeep, divorce in the US is the same as continuing marriage in some cultures. There’s a bigger social disincentive for having more than one wife since he doesn’t have a reasonable expectation of having sex with her any more, but economically his situation is almost exactly the same as maintaining two wives.
These are just a couple of parallel issues, there are a lot more similarities depending upon which societies and sub-cultures you compare. I don’t believe you are correct in saying that it, “is not remotely the same thing as polygamy.”