Illicit Monogamy

Angel Park is a Mormon fundamentalist polygamous community where plural marriages between one man and multiple women are common. In contrast to mainstream America’s idealization of the nuclear family and romantic love, its residents esteem notions of harmonious familial love, a spiritual bond that unites all family members. In their view, polygyny is not only righteous and sanctified—it is also conducive to communal life and social stability.Based on many years of in-depth ethnographic research in Angel Park, this book explores daily life in a polygamous community. William R. Jankowiak considers the plural family from the points of view of husbands, wives, and children, giving a balanced account of its complications and conflicts. He finds that people in polygynous marriages, especially cowives, experience an ongoing struggle to balance the longing for romantic intimacy with the obligation to support the larger family. They feel tension between deeply held religious convictions and the desire for emotional exclusivity, which can threaten the stability and harmony of the polygamous family. Men and women often form exclusive romantic pairs within plural marriages, which are tolerated if not openly acknowledged, showing the limits of the community’s beliefs. Jankowiak also challenges stereotypes of polygamous families as bastions of patriarchal power, showing the weight that interpersonal and social expectations place on men.Offering an unparalleled look at the complexity of a polygamous religious community, Illicit Monogamy also helps us reconsider relationships, love, and family dynamics across cultures and settings.

Illicit Monogamy focuses on the polygamous community Angel Park, giving readers a real feel for the society. Jankowiak is superb at treating his subjects with fairness, so that we don't care about who is 'best,' but rather what universal factors shape people's responses. This is a wonderful book—I'd be proud to have written it., Jankowiak explores in detail the nature of polygynous relationships from the points of view of husbands, wives, and children. The ethnography is very rich and complex, and he is deeply sympathetic to these families in the almost inevitable clash they experience between religious ideology and human emotion and is able to deeply explore their often-conflicted perspectives. Jankowiak is masterful at this—I feel that I can truly understand from this book what it must be like to live in a plural-family household, in both its happiness and its tensions., This original study of the fundamentalist Mormon polygamous community draws on the background of Jankowiak's cross-cultural and ethnographic research on romantic and companionate love, marriage, and sex in Mongolia, China, and elsewhere. Based on a six-year ethnographic project, the author presents rich details from the individual lives of men, women, and children as they adapt to a patriarchally-based polygamous form of family. Simultaneously the ethnographer discerns general patterns and regularities based on systematic collective norms drawn from religious sources. Jankowiak's brilliant synthesis of ethnography and theory throughout his lucid and engaging presentation will interest anthropologists, sociologists, social workers, and religious studies scholars everywhere.

William R. Jankowiak is professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is the author of Sex, Death, and Hierarchy in a Chinese City: An Anthropological Account (1993) as well as the editor of Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? (1995) and Intimacies: Love and Sex Across Cultures (2008), all from Columbia University Press, among other books.