Polygamy, Cross-Culturally Considered

International Law

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has occasionally reaffirmed their General Comment No. 28 (2000), according to which polygamy violates the dignity of women and should be definitely abolished wherever it continues to exist. Polygamy is not prohibited or protected under international human rights law, and legal status varies markedly across national jurisdictions. Polygamy may be illegal (as in most Western countries); recognized under civil or customary law; partially recognized for purposes of welfare benefits if legally obtained abroad (in the United Kingdom and Australia); permitted only to certain denominations and delimited by sex and number of partners (e.g. four wives permitted to Egyptian Muslim men); otherwise rendered conditional (requiring written consent from a first wife and a man's ability to provide for co-wives); and/or regionally exempted from national bans by Sharià (Islamic) Law (e.g., Eritrea). In the West, prosecution is rare. In Canada, for instance, polygamy is practiced by a breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, British Columbia, but prosecution for polygamy has not occurred [Page 1115]for more than 60 years, and statistics are not kept. Today polygamous unions are recognized civilly in approaching 50 (mostly Arab) countries. It is widely practised in Africa; in Burkina Faso and Togo, according to 2002 data, more than half of women would be in polygynous marriages.

Cross-Cultural Practice

Legal globalization has tended to abolitionism, and but also to a rise in de facto forms that hide from the legal gaze under various guises (e.g., “concubinage” in China). De facto polygyny may be interwoven with commuting across borders, thus evading, or pertaining to, multiple jurisdictions—many married Hong Kong men who cross the border regularly on business have taken second wives or mistresses in China. In de facto cases, plural marriage is not legally or ritually codified but depends on informal or customary arrangements related to domestic tasks, sexual access, kinship-based obligations, or other aspects. Many semiformalized social arrangements resist reduction to legal codification. Examples include wife sharing, “sugar daddy-gold digger” liaisons in sub-Saharan Africa, and enjo kosai (“compensated dating”) in Japan. Ultimately, the definition of polygamy depends on that of the family as a demarcated socioeconomic unit and of marriage as codified type of sociality both in terms of spousal union and as alliance between families or kin groups. However, it often remains delivered to an administrative, legalistic, and Western gaze. In contemporary urban African settings, especially, people move in and out of a range of conjugal relationships, with varying degrees of formality, and in which marriage is encountered more as fluid and processual than contractual.

...