As we now live in the age of political efforts to gain marriage equality for same sex partners, pushing for a redefinition of traditional Western religious patriarchal definitions of marriage equaling a monogamous contract between one man and one woman, I find that the discussion of "marriage" cross-culturally is a subject that students in my introductory classes in cultural anthropology find quite interesting.

Though students are much more willing these days to champion marriage equality in the LGBT community, rarely has that translated into questioning the social contract as it relates to different forms—legal in other parts of the world, like polygyny and polyandry—nor have I found that students have considered alternatives like polyamory, a small but growing sub-culture here in the U.S and Canada, which may or may not include group marriage. Nor have my students questioned why we have marriage at all.

Growing up in a post World War II America, my own thoughts about marriage were simplistic. The only societal mores around marriage that affected me directly were the laws, still on the books in some states, relating to interracial marriage. I knew my grandmother and grandfather had to leave their home in Kansas to be legally married elsewhere, and they still faced stigma and disapproval, as did their son, my father.

I didn't think about marriage for myself much at all—other than having to endure lectures from my mother about not having any children without getting hitched. Her assumption was that I would grow up and get married. Each year we celebrated my parents' wedding anniversary, and as soon as I was of marriageable age, my mother started looking for me to get engaged. I resisted; my budding feminism eschewed shackles. She was not happy with my decision to live with someone without papers. Divorce was also something she disapproved of, ignoring the fact that though "monogamy" seemed to be part of traditional marriage vows, which include lines like "till death do us part," what is practiced here in the U.S. is really serial monogamy—till divorce cuts ties and lets us marry another partner. Even though she had friends who were divorced, she hoped that I would marry, and never divorce, even if my partner "strayed." She warned me not to bring home any grandchildren unless I was wed. I told her that she better not expect any, if that was the case.

She ignored the fact that much of the so-called monogamy practiced here includes sex or progeny outside of marriage (even in her family). Growing up in New York City exposed me to many families composed of spouses who were neither married civilly nor in the church. Every neighborhood I lived in, I saw households headed by cortejas (mistresses) and their children, often living on the same block with the legal wife. I grew up with the term "outside family" heard in the homes of my friends from Jamaica and Barbados.

By the time I grew old enough to contemplate having sex, my generation was throwing off conservatism and espousing free love—make love, not war—and many of us lived in communes. Wedding bells were unnecessary for sharing lust or love. My own socialist groups and feminist compañeras sought to get rid of terms like husband and wife to define patriarchal relationships. We settled on the use of SO (significant other). Singular. We did not throw off marriage, however. We sought to define it as equal partnerships, with no word "obey" in the ceremony. I remember marrying two members of the Young Lords Central committee, quoting Che Guevara's words about love for the people. Years later, as a priestess in my own African Traditional religion of Lukumi, I married two lesbian friends.

It was not until I had a roommate from Senegal that the thought of polygyny entered my head. My roommate was the son of his father's second wife. His dad was a doctor, living in Paris; his mother a nurse who worked for a UN NGO. His parents would not move to the United States, since our nations laws would not accept the fact that his father had three wives, which were allowed under Islamic law. My roommate, and his siblings by wife number two, would also be de-legitimized here.

His father's three spouses were very comfortable with their arrangement. One, the senior wife, lived in Senegal in her home village. She did not want to leave her village and encouraged the young man she married to take an educated city wife in Dakar, who would be comfortable with European ways. Later in life, wife number two, my roommate's mom, arranged for her husband to take a third wife, since she was not interested in bearing more children.

Contact with my roommate's family made me re-assess my assumptions about marriage and monogamy. I hadn't really thought about multiple spouses, Islamic law, or other views on marriage.



When I became a graduate student in anthropology, I was surprised to learn that what I assumed was a normative marriage form, our Western form of monogamy, was not a cross-cultural norm. In class, we explored the impact of the migration of polygamous families to Western Europe and the U.S. We examined global challenges to polygamy, such as those detailed by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.

We held discussions of marriage forms among the Nuer and Sub Saharan groups in Africa (woman to woman marriage ) and polyandry (a female with multiple husbands) in Tibet. We read Mormon church history, but not in detail. This was before the time of avid media interest in Warren Jeffs and the FLDS.

Now that I have the responsibility to teach introductory courses in anthropology exposing students to cross-cultural concepts of kinship, marriage and family, I try to link these subjects to contemporary issues in the news. We've coverred not only popular culture TV shows like Big Love and Sister Wives, but the judicial controversy currently swirling around Canadian polygamy law.

Last week, in Canada, Chief Justice Justice Robert J. Bauman issued a ruling that the polygamy ban is constitutional:

OTTAWA — British Columbia’s highest court ruled Wednesday that Canada’s 121-year-old criminal law banning polygamy is constitutional. The ruling stemmed from a failed prosecution in 2009 of two leaders of a breakaway Mormon sect in British Columbia and might have implications for followers of other religions that allow polygamy. In a 335-page decision that followed 42 days of hearings, Robert J. Bauman, the court’s chief justice, found that women in polygamous relationships faced higher rates of domestic, physical and sexual abuse, died younger and were more prone to mental illnesses. Children from those marriages, he said, were more likely to be abused and neglected, less likely to perform well at school and often suffered from emotional and behavioral problems. “The law seeks to advance the institution of monogamous marriage, a fundamental value in Western society from the earliest of times,” Justice Bauman wrote. “It seeks to protect against the many harms which are reasonably apprehended to arise out of the practice of polygamy.” He also made reference to reports of plural marriages among Muslims in Canada before concluding, “There is no evidence that it is a widespread or mainstream phenomenon.”

However, the emphasis of the ruling on FLDS groups has raised other perspectives on the ruling:

Few court decisions are as exhaustive, decisive and just plain long as a landmark B.C. ruling on the constitutionality of polygamy. However, legal experts say B.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Bauman’s 335-page ruling would be vulnerable on appeal because of key assumptions involving morality and Canadian social values that lie at its heart. They say that, while the judgment is on safe ground in rejecting some polygamous relationships as vile and exploitative, it runs into trouble by tarring all polygamists with the same brush and describing monogamy as a near-sacrosanct aspect of Canadian society. University of Toronto law professor Brenda Cossman speculated that Chief Justice Bauman became so repulsed by a controversial polygamous sect living in Bountiful, B.C., that he lost sight of the fact that the polygamy law also ensnares other benign, unconventional relationships involving more than two individuals. “The decision is built on a house of cards,” Ms. Cossman said. “You can’t just say that marriage is better than non-marriage. What happened to swingers? What happened to people who are adulterous? His continuous assertion about the harm that polygamy does to monogamous marriage is deeply problematic.”

VANCOUVER — November 23, 2011 — The Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association (CPAA) is relieved by BC Chief Justice Robert Bauman’s decision today clarifying the interpretation of Canada’s anti-polygamy law. “Polyamorists are relieved they can be in loving egalitarian conjugal relationships without criminal sanction,” said CPAA legal counsel, John Ince, “Common law relationships are clearly not prohibited. Polyamorists who are dealing with immigration or family custody issues for instance now need no longer worry about being considered to be criminals”. Many polyamorous women, as well as men, have multiple partners, and polyamorists think men and women have equal freedom to define their relationships. The CPAA says the decision will relieve most polyamorists but, alarmingly, will harm those who make certain formal commitments. “The decision still criminalizes a segment of the polyamorous community if they have a marriage ceremony,” said Zoe Duff, a CPAA director and spokesperson. Duff also represents one of the five polyamorous families who provided evidence to the court. The decision clarifies that she is living legally with her two male partners. “Polyamorous Canadians are responsible citizens who work toward sustaining healthy, loving, egalitarian relationships and it is wrong for Canada’s laws to continue to criminalize any of us,” continued Duff, “The number of people in any given relationship is not the issue. The health of the relationship and family is the issue.” The CPAA intervened in the case because the wording of the 120 year old statute — which was aimed at patriarchal relationships — might have caught the modern egalitarian and secular relationships practiced by polyamorists. The judge ruled that the law does not apply to unformalized polyamorous relationships.

One of the interested parties in the suit was the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association . They issued a press release after the ruling:

The rub is in "unformalized." I have friends who are currently living in polyamorous relationships here in the US. Some would like to formalize their partnerships, but we do not recognize more than "one man-one woman" (at a time), or in states that now legally allow gay marriage, one person marrying one other.

I read a lot of speculative science fiction. Some of it includes futures with new marriage forms. I often wonder if we will ever evolve into a world that legalizes and recognizes group marriage:

Interest in, and practice of nonmonogamy is well known in modern science fiction fandom. Group marriage has been a theme in some works of science fiction — especially the later novels of Robert A. Heinlein, such as Stranger in a Strange Land, Friday, Time Enough for Love, and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Stranger in a Strange Land describes a communal group much like the Oneida Society. A domestic partnership consisting of four people who are all married to each other features in Vonda N. McIntyre's Starfarers series. Group marriages of three partners (called triples) are described as commonplace in the 1966 novel Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany... Group marriage is advocated in Robert Rimmer's 1968 novel Proposition 31, the story of two middle-class, suburban California couples who turn to a polyamorous relationship to deal with their multiple infidelities as an alternative to divorce... Line marriage is also commonly practiced in Joe Haldeman's 1981 novel Worlds. Haldeman describes how individual families joined forces to avoid inheritance taxes... Group marriage is a central plot element in Donald Kingsbury's 1982 novel Courtship Rite... Group marriage is briefly addressed in the 1989 Star Trek novel Star Trek: The Lost Years, by J.M. Dillard. A minor character, Lt. Nguyen, enters into a group marriage, and this is portrayed as a relatively normal occurrence. Additionally, in Star Trek: Enterprise, the alien Dr. Phlox comes from a world where such relationships are common... William H. Keith, Jr., under his pseudonym Ian Douglas, describes line marriages as the norm, with large family clans extending through many generations, in his Heritage Trilogy, and its two sequels Legacy Trilogy and Inheritance Trilogy... In the television series Caprica, the character Sister Clarice is a participant in a group marriage. Several short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin take place on the planet O, where a four-person marriage, called a sedoretu, is common... In the Earth's Children series by Jean Auel, the Sharamudoi practice group marriage in the form of "cross-mating" a couple from their land-dwelling clan with a couple from the water-dwelling clan...

Frankly, I think we should get the church and morality out of civil law. Since we need laws to cover inheritance, division of property and child support, they should not be based on religious dogma. What adults decide to do in relationships as long as they are doing no harm should be left up to them. But that's my opinion.

What's yours?

