3 - Domestic structures and polyandry in the Marquesas Islands

Summary

Since the importance of feminist theory was recognised by some of those engaged in social and historical analysis a number of questions concerning the connections between social relations based upon gender and those based upon other factors such as rank or economic relations have been discussed extensively in history, anthropology and some other fields. In particular there have been attempts to better understand domestic groups and the ways in which labour within such groups relates to larger socialised labour processes and contributes to whole economies, and how, in a more simple sense, hierarchies which use sex as a means for social differentiation articulate with other hierarchies. This chapter aims to pursue some of these questions in a particular context, in part by focussing on one famous, or notorious, Marquesan institution.

A certain constellation of practices existed in that part of eastern Polynesia which various Western writers have called polyandry. What they were talking about was a situation whereby some women had a primary husband and, in addition, one or more secondary husbands, who were to some extent domestic servants. In some cases, mostly noted after many decades of destructive contact, the polyandrous husbands were brothers (Chaulet 1873: 74; Utley 1938: 232), but this was far from usual; the Marquesan system was thus significantly different from the fraternal polyandry which existed widely in the Himalayas and in other areas in Asia (Majumdar 1962:V).