Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Melanie Heath, "Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Description: In the past thirty years, polygamy has become a flashpoint of conflict as Western governments attempt to regulate certain cultural and religious practices that challenge seemingly central principles of family and justice. In Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (Stanford UP, 2023), Melanie Heath comparatively investigates the regulation of polygamy in the United States, Canada, France, and Mayotte. Drawing on a wealth of ethnographic and archival sources, Heath uncovers the ways in which intimacies framed as "other" and "offensive" serve to define the very limits of Western tolerance.These regulation efforts, counterintuitively, allow the flourishing of...