Enemies from Within: Love Magic, Sorcery & Intra-female Violence Among Co-Wives in Malay Polygyny

May 7, 2024

Dr. Nurul Huda Mohd. Razif (University of Bergen)

The recent liberalization of legal restrictions on polygyny (one man marrying multiple wives) in Malaysian Islamic family law has enabled Malay men with limited financial wherewithal to take on additional wives, even though many struggle to meet the economic and emotional demands of supporting multiple families. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a decade with two polygynous families in Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, this presentation explores how insufficient, unequal, and inconsistent support from polygynous husbands compel co-wives to resort to supernatural means such as sorcery in an attempt to monopolize access to limited resources in the marriage. In particular, I focus on how the “multilocal” set-up of Malay polygyny, in which each wife and her children effectively constitute an independent household and economic unit, fosters a competitive environment built on manipulation, deception, and secrecy. This not only exacerbates suspicions of sorcery among co-wives and children, but also desecrates two core practices of what the anthropologist Janet Carsten calls “making kin” in Malay society: communal living and commensality. The rampant practice of sorcery among co-wives in Malay polygyny, I thus argue, is a form of intra-female violence that is a direct consequence of the religious, legal, and sociocultural patriarchal structures that leave women in a more vulnerable position in an already precarious institution such as polygyny.