Illicit Monogamy

[Jankowiak’s] work is monumental for its analysis of individuals’ experiences living in polygamous households. He gives outsiders an extensive peek into the world of plural marriage living. His anthropological work also proffers an introspective mirror useful for fundamentalist Mormons—perhaps also for other polygamists around the globe. * Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought *Those wanting to learn about lesser-known aspects of plural marriage, particularly the various actors’ experiences with it, will especially enjoy Jankowiak’s book. * Utah Historical Quarterly *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. – Elaine Hatfield, author of What’s Next in Love and Sex: Psychological and Cultural PerspectivesJankowiak 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. – Gordon Mathews, coauthor of The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in South China’s Global MarketplaceThis 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. – Raymond Scupin, author of Cultural Anthropology: A Global Perspective, Tenth Edition

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), among other books.