Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall

Abstract

Reviewed by: Polygamy: An Early American History by Sarah M. S. Pearsall Mark Rifkin (bio) Polygamy: An Early American History sarah m. s. pearsall Yale University Press, 2019 398 pp. When talking about polygamy in what is now the United States, the conversation usually begins and ends with the Mormons. The nineteenthcentury recognition and celebration of plural marriage in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the church's official renunciation of it in order to end federal prosecutions and the dismantling of the church and [End Page 616] to achieve statehood for Utah, and its continuance among Mormon fundamentalists up through the present (e.g., in the Brown family, chronicled in the show Sister Wives on TLC) tend to be the frame through which polygamy appears in both scholarship and popular culture (albeit with increasing attention to cultures, practices, and principles of polyamory more broadly). Recent work, such as Peter Coveillo's Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism (U of Chicago P, 2019), has done an excellent job in illustrating the significance of Mormon polygamy for understanding the relationships among heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and what gets to constitute "religion" in liberal formulations. While that analysis illustrates the continued value in intellectually mining Mormonism for what it reveals about the ideological networks that structure the relation between belief, intimacy, and forms of institutional authority in the United States, such a focus on Mormonism can implicitly minimize the scope of polygamy as an intellectual and political force in the longue durée of life on these lands in the wake of European contact/conquest. In this vein, Sarah M. S. Pearsall's book offers a magnificent expansion of the historical depth and breadth of polygamy. Polygamy chronicles the prevalence of polygamy as a practice and topic of public debate prior to the emergence of Mormonism while offering a rich and deeply textured account of polygamy's significance in understanding shifting configurations and struggles around family and household structures, distributions of social resources and responsibilities, and the legitimate forms that governance can take. Pearsall offers an immensely compelling, layered, and multidimensional account that illustrates how attending to polygamy in its expansiveness (largely) prior to the emergence of Mormonism opens onto ways of reframing the givenness of liberal, heteronuclear frameworks for conceptualizing and interpreting social life. The book's central argument positions polygamy less as a discrete practice than as a vehicle through which to reenvision what we think we know about intimate life, race, governance, and their coconstitution on the lands that would become the United States. In the introduction, Pearsall observes that polygamy "is a form of marriage and therefore, like monogamy, a matter of public concern structuring societies, cultures, and lineages," adding, "Marriage brings states, religious authorities, communities, and families into the most intimate of realms, legitimizing children and ordering and transmitting property and inheritance. It shapes gender, race, and rank. [End Page 617] It has therefore been critical to the exercise of religious, state, and colonial power" (7). To address histories of polygamy—including its role in Spanish, English, and French imaginings and policy and as a trope within public discourses in the American colonies and the early republic—is to come face to face with the limits of liberalism, the state form, and bourgeois notions of "family" and "household" as ways of characterizing social and political dynamics prior to the mid-nineteenth century. Pearsall ably demonstrates how the dynamics of polygamous relationships/networks and debates over them help illuminate ongoing and varied struggles over the contours, content, and scope of public authority. However, as Pearsall makes clear, questions with regard to intimate life and everyday structures of provision and care are not simply metonymic stand-ins for putatively larger matters of politics and economy. They are themselves vital sites of contestation and worlding: "Differing ideas about households were not the backdrop for the drama; they were the drama. Households were political units, as well as politicized markers of civility and authority, in the period from 1500 to 1800, whether for Native Americans, Africans, or Europeans" (9). Focusing on this "drama" as it pivots around polygamy, Pearsall argues, "allows us to see...