<![CDATA[Levirate marriage has long been understood as a customary mechanism for preserving lineage continuity and providing social and economic protection for widows. Yet this interpretation often obscures the ways in which protection, kinship authority, and women’s agency intersect in everyday decision-making. Existing studies have largely examined levirate marriage through a binary lens of either social protection or patriarchal control, while comparatively little attention has been paid to how women themselves negotiate these overlapping conditions, particularly in Eastern Indonesia. This study examines women’s experiences of levirate marriage in Sumba and explores how they navigate customary expectations, material dependencies, family obligations, and personal choice. Using a qualitative interpretive design, data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews, participant observation, and document analysis involving 24 participants, including women with experience of levirate marriage, male relatives, and adat leaders. The findings reveal that levirate marriage simultaneously provides access to housing, family resources, social legitimacy, and child-related support while constraining women’s autonomy through kinship authority, economic dependency, and gendered expectations surrounding remarriage and residence. Women responded through diverse forms of negotiated agency, including strategic acceptance, temporal negotiation, conditional compliance, selective resistance, and collective support. These findings challenge binary interpretations of levirate marriage by showing that protection and control are not mutually exclusive but are relationally intertwined. The study contributes to debates on gender and kinship by demonstrating that women’s agency may emerge not only through overt resistance but also through context-specific negotiation within customary institutions.]]>
