Group Marriage

Group marriage, also called conjoint marriage or polygynandry, is a marital arrangement in which three or more adults enter into sexual, affective, romantic or otherwise intimate long-term partnerships and share some combination of finances, residences, care and kin work, with all members of the union sharing parental responsibility for any children born of it. Anthropologists have traditionally classified group marriage as a form of polygamy, though contemporary usage has broadened to include non-conjugal unions as well, and the term has become loosely associated with polyamory and polyamorous family structures in casual use. Documented historical and ethnographic instances include the Hawaiian custom of punalua, in which two or more brothers shared wives in common or two or more sisters shared husbands in common; arrangements recorded in parts of Melanesia between a husband's brothers and a wife's sisters; polyandrous unions among the Nair community of Kerala and the Toda people of the Nilgiri plateau in India; and voluntary couple-to-couple marriages among the Yup'ik of Alaska before Christian missionary suppression in the early twentieth century. As an institutionalized social practice, group marriage is extremely rare: anthropologist George Murdock's 1949 survey of 250 societies found only the Caingang of Brazil had adopted it as an alternative form of union, and even there at a frequency of about eight percent.