David Lawson: University of California, Santa Barbara

Recent years have witnessed a widening commitment to achieving gender equality at a global scale, with corresponding, and often controversial, shifts in international and domestic policy. In developing world regions, this includes efforts to abolish long-held cultural institutions that are ostensibly harmful to women. Yet such efforts are largely driven by good intentions and ethnocentric rhetoric, rather than theoretically or empirically driven insights. In this talk I interrogate the claim that polygynous marriage in Sub-Saharan Africa represents a ‘harmful cultural practice’. Using evolutionary anthropology as a guiding theoretical framework, I review the extant literature on polygyny and its consequences and present the results of a recent study of marital status, food security and child health in Tanzania spanning over 50 villages. I conclude that polygynous marriage cannot be considered universally harmful, and that future research and policy must pay greater attention to identifying locally realizable alternatives and context dependency when considering the health implications of cultural practices.