ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on polygamy among Indonesian Muslims living in Java. It extends a modest body of ethnographic literature that has focused on kinship and marriage and has explored Indonesian experiences of polygamy in those contexts. The chapter explains the lived narratives of polygamous marriages by providing background on the relationship between the Indonesian state and polygamy, as well as briefly summarising popular Indonesian Islamic discourses on polygamy. It concludes by considering the ways in which sexuality is fundamental to the dynamics of polygamy, and how the lived realities of Indonesians in polygamous marriages diverge from the requirements stipulated in state legislation. Polygamy was first legally acknowledged by the Indonesian state through the introduction of the 1974 Marriage Law. The chapter summarises three of the key Islamic positions on polygamy in Indonesia. Our categorisation of these Islam perspectives applies the three approaches to Quranic interpretation defined by Abdullah Saeed: Textualist, Semi-textualist and Contextualist.
