Stanley Kurtz of National Review Online recently offered a fascinating anthropological examination of marriage and kinship ties. It's hard to overestimate the importance of kinship ties for most of the world.

The anthropological study of kinship is famously abstruse, even for many anthropologists. The terminology can be eye-glazing, and as I've been arguing, it's tough for modern Americans to believe that the problem of who-marries-whom can actually make much social difference. Suffice it to say that generations of anthropologists who actually travel to non-Western societies keep coming back impressed by how important the question of kinship is.

It seems that marrying one's close cousin has been a common and expected practice in much of the world, and for good reason, and with great impact.

Kurtz says:

In the late nineteenth century, British anthropologist Sir Edward Tylor developed the founding insight of the modern study of kinship. Tylor cited exogamy, or "marrying out," as the key to human social progress. In Tylor's scenario, early human groups, in danger of killing each other off through inveterate competition, discovered intermarriage as the path to social peace. Women who were related to one clan as sisters and to another clan as wives tended to discourage feuds between otherwise competing groups.

The incest taboo (forbidding marriage between brothers and sisters), it seems, serves the sociological function of forcing families to create alliances by intermarriage with other families.

Kurtz explains that two forms of cousin-marriage are prevalent in pre-modern patriarchal societies:

1. cross-cousin marriage or exogamy (when a man a man marries his mother's brother's daughter) and
2. parallel-cousin marriage or endogamy (when a man marries his father's brother's daughter)

Only cross-cousin marriage tends to extend kinship ties outward in an ever expanding network of relationships. Parallel-cousin marriage creates what Kurtz calls a "self-sealing society." The strength of parallel-cousin marriage's lies in its ability to create social cohesion and preserve cultural identity (although it tends to create conflict with outsiders).

There are, of course, a lot more marriage options for people in urban, mobile societies. Kurtz notes that many U.S. states outlawed marriage even between cousins, giving further impetus to the "melting pot" phenomenon in this country. Immigrant communities that still practice cousin marriage tend not to assimilate into host countries that allow it.

It's not immigration law, however, that most interests Kurtz about the practice of cousin-marriage. Of the two forms of cousin marriage, cross-cousin marriage is by far the most prevalent in the world. There is one area of the world, however, in which parallel-cousin marriage has at least a 1300 year history. And that is the real topic of Kurtz's series of essays.

That area, Kurtz says, is the "one great exception to the anthropological maxim that human advancement and peace require a certain minimal level of exogamy" that proves the rule. That society, he says, "has found a way to turn a uniquely intense form of in-marriage to its advantage (if advantage is defined strictly in terms of cultural survival, rather than adaptive change). Unfortunately, from the perspective of the rest of the world, the cultural stasis and isolation" that have resulted are now significant problems.

Read Marriage and the Terror War. I don't know if Kurtz is right in his major argument, but he got my attention.

(I've also been reading Guns, Germs and Steel, which is - among other things - a "one over the world" overview of history from an anthropological perspective).

h/t to The Scriptorium

Filed under: Observations

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.