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Traditionally lrigwe tribal cohesion was largely derived from two tiers of consanguineal and affinal ties produced by their marriage system which prescribed primary and secondary marriage and prohibited divorce. The British-imposed centralized Irigwe Administration rendered the political functions of traditional Irigwe marriage redundant. But a marriage reform replacing traditional practices by Hausa-Muslim type marriage has proved unenforceable because of Irigwe beliefs that a sickly child's recovery may depend on its mother's moving quickly to a new husband, or returning to the child's father, to find the best ambience for the child's "soul".

This paper endeavors to do two things. The first section describes how co‐husband relationships enjoyed by the traditional Irigwe system of secondary marriage helped in former days to keep the tribe's twenty‐five ritual units at peace with one another. The second section examines an instance of legislated social change clearly related to the development of an Irigwe tribal administration in recent decades, and to its continuing effectiveness today. In 1968 both the traditionalist "pagan" majority and the change oriented Christian minority on the Irigwe Tribal Council voted to outlaw all future secondary marriages. The paper considers both political and underlying structural factors which may have led to this action.

The Irigwe marriage system in effect demands that men and women be married to several spouses in differing tribal sections during the course of their adult lives and precludes all divorce. It also ascribes patrivirilocal residence and assigns the paternity of each child a woman bears to the husband with whom she is residing at the time of the child's conception. Consequently women shift residence from husband to husband several times during the course of their lives, and unless childless they suffer intermittent separation from one or another of their dependent children. Spirit possession cults, involving nearly all the mature women of the tribe, supply both the emotional catharsis and the avenues for social integration to compensate the women for the repeated separations and social disjunctions the marriage system produces in their lives. [Irigwe; marriage; Nigeria; secondary marriage; spirit possession]

This conclusion summarizes themes central to the papers collected in this volume-the definitional characteristics of polyandry, the relative status of women, as well as the political, economic and psychological concommitants of polyandrous systems of marriage- and attempts to account for biases which have hindered the study of these subjects in the past. As a first step in comparative analysis, a fourfold classification of types of polyandry, in addition to cicisbeism, is developed and examined in light of a larger contrast between Asian and African marital systems. Finally the paper discusses certain features common to polyandrous marriage worldwide.

The time has come for an updated study of polyandry, made possible by the availability of new data and a reawakened interest in the subject. This volume includes previously unpublished data on six polyandrous societies and several papers concerned with more broadly comparative issues and theoretical aims. The papers demonstrate that polyandry is not. a rare cultural oddity and, moreover, that it comprises marital systems which contrast greatly in terms of both cultural and structural features.