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William Jankowiak's Illicit Monogamy will be outside the usual library of most readers of this journal. It is an anthropological study of polygamous marriage in a fundamentalist Mormon community in the American West, one pseudonymously called “Angel Park”. I first came across Jankowiak's work through his fine co-authored volume Family Life in China (Jankowiak & Moore, 2017) while researching my book Marriage and Family in Modern China (Scharff, 2021).
His new book should be of interest to psychoanalytic students of marriage and family for the same reason that I believe studying any culture alien to our own is valuable: it enables readers to place themselves outside the cultural assumptions we share with our patients, and in this way to see more clearly what moralities organise them (and us). It is also useful to analytic thinkers because it is not an analytic book. Coming at the examination of life patterns from another lens, it sets the context within which our analytical lens can focus.
What I found so interesting about Illicit Monogamy was this shift in perspective. For the citizens of this fundamentalist world, it is monogamy that is illicit. Their calling, which they term “the Principle”, is that polygamous marriage is sacred. It is the duty of every Mormon true believer to strive to live in this way, even although the way is difficult. (Jankowiak uses the term “polygamous” or “plural marriage” as members of the community do, although the pattern is more accurately “polygynous”, meaning one man and several women.)
The book focuses on the tribulations of this arrangement for the women. While some marriages are relatively harmonious, many women struggle with the rivalries, competitiveness, and status within their marriages. What emerges is a picture of a less-than-perfect social arrangement in which people strive to live their plural ideal only to find that their lives hardly ever live up to it. For those who remain in the structure, there is always hope, for this i