Polygamy at the Intersection of “Otherness”: Religion, Race, Gender, Class, Sexuality and Immigration (Whew!)

The New York Times reports today that there are a surprising number of polygamous (more specifically, polygnyous – one husband and two or more wives) families in the city. Immigrants from West African nations have brought the tradition to the United States, largely under the radar of authorities and watch groups. This challenges our traditional notions of “otherness,” particularly as the discourse is rooted in the ineffective American ideological binary; thinking about this issue in terms of the liberal-conservative continuum is fruitless. As we consider the elements of otherness that come into play, it becomes obvious that the space within which we examine this phenomenon is unclear and fraught with traps of cognitive dissonance.

Religion: Polygamy is most often conceptualized as a Mormon tradition in the United States, though some Americans may be aware that there are Orthodox Jews who believe in polygamy under certain circumstances. But the practice is also rooted in the Islamic tradition (though many Muslims renounce the practice), which is the basis for the issue making the news this week in New York. Even though the cultural norm in America is Judeo-Christian, Jews and Christians who have advocated or practiced polygamy have been marginalized legally and socially. Until very recently, there has been little attention paid to the number of American Muslims who have adopted (or refused to abandon) the practice.

Race: The racial component is tied closely with religion. Most Jews and Mormons are white; most Muslims are not. Since “white” is the hegemonic center of American racial discourse, law and socio-political arrangement, we would expect that those groups would be privileged over non-white polygamists. But since the practice itself is marginalized, the social order is inherently challenged, thus complicating our ability to structure critical discourse as we have become accustomed.

Gender: It seems clear to most Americans (liberal and conservative alike) that the polygamous arrangement is disadvantageous to women. Certainly the stories reported in today’s piece in the Times suggest that many women married to West African immigrants have been deceived into these arrangements. But other women enter into polygamous marriages voluntarily. Perhaps they are suffering from false consciousness, particularly those who have been raised in polygamous settings. But is it wise to appropriate all women in polygamous marriages to the status of victim? Is that condescending or paternalistic on its face? We wander easily from here into even more issues of cultural relativism and misogyny.

Class: Because polygamous marriages are most often conceptualized in a fundamentalist religious tradition, patriarchal gender arrangements are common. We think of many wives, each with many children, and a single husband who financially provides for the family/ies. Even in rural areas of Utah where the cost of living is relatively low, such an arrangement would be most easily maintained with a higher-than-average income. This clearly would not work in Manhattan. So women in polygamous marriages in urban centers are in the workforce and living in apartments with their shared husband, not in adjacent houses such as those portrayed in the HBO hit drama Big Love. But income and class are not synonymous, of course, and the middle-class norm in America is a nuclear heterosexual family with one man and one woman.

Sexuality: Polygamy does not involve challenges to America’s heterosexist cultural norm, but it does challenge the espoused norm of monogamy. As divorce rates have plateaued at around fifty per cent and reports of extra-marital affairs has become commonplace in our public and private spheres, polygamous arrangements may appear to be little more than formal codifications of increasingly common practices. If monogamy is unrealistic anyway, is it not more stable for children and less hurtful to partners to expect and arrange for it at the outset? Or is the attempt (or guise) of monogamy an important stabilizing force that should be encouraged?

Immigration: While most of our immigration discussions in America today revolve around keeping out terrorists and Mexicans (in fact, the two have curiously become correlated in public discourse), this issue reminds us of timeless questions about immigration. To what extent are those who come to America expected to assimilate to our norms? Must they obey legal doctrine that conflicts with their cultural practices? Legality aside, must we mandate that mainstream cultural norms be adopted? If so, how do we do that? Does such forced assimilation violate the principles of our history of offering freedom and opportunity to those who are oppressed or who otherwise seek it?

While polygamy is not a salient public issue (don’t look for any of the presidential hopefuls to be putting this ahead of the war, the economy or health care on his or her agenda) and is what political scientists refer to as a “vector issue” (there is overwhelming agreement on its unacceptability), it provides an opportunity for us to wrestle with our notion of “otherness” in a way that can be quite uncomfortable (and thus, we would argue, exciting). Far from being able to be placed in the traditional American dichotomous ideological schema, this issue forces us to confront some dissonance that we’d much rather avoid, but for the sake of intellectual growth, should not.