Cousin Marriage - Social Aspects

Social Aspects

Robin Bennett, a University of Washington researcher who led a major NSGC study on cousin marriage, has said that much hostility towards married cousins constitutes discrimination. "It's a form of discrimination that nobody talks about. People worry about not getting health insurance — but saying that someone shouldn't marry based on how they're related, when there's no known harm, to me is a form of discrimination." But in a different view, William Saletan of Slate magazine accuses the authors of this study of suffering from the "congenital liberal conceit that science solves all moral questions." While readily conceding that banning cousin marriage cannot be justified on genetic grounds, Saletan asks rhetorically whether it would be acceptable to legalize uncle-niece marriage or "hard-core incest" between siblings and then let genetic screening take care of the resulting problems.

A recent New York Times article by Sarah Kershaw documents fear by many married cousins of being treated with derision and contempt. "While many people have a story about a secret cousin crush or kiss, most Americans find the idea of cousins marrying and having children disturbing or even repulsive," notes the article. It gives the example of one mother, Mrs. Spring, whose daughter Kimberly Spring-Winters, 29, married her cousin Shane Winters, 37. She stated that when she has told people about her daughter's marriage they have been shocked and that consequently she is afraid to mention it. They live in a small Pennsylvania town and she worries that her grandchildren will be treated as outcasts and ridiculed due to their parental status. Another cousin couple stated that their children's maternal grandparents have never met their two grandchildren because the grandparents severed contact out of disapproval for the couple's marriage. This couple withheld their names from publication.

It appears that in most societies cousin marriage is more common among those of low socioeconomic status, among the illiterate and uneducated, and in rural areas. This may be due in part to the token or significantly reduced dowries and bridewealths that exist in such marriages. But some societies also report a high prevalence among land-owning families and the ruling elite: here the relevant consideration is thought to be keeping the family estate intact over generations. There is also a lower average age at marriage for cousin marriages, the difference in one Pakistani study being 1.10 and 0.84 years for first and second cousins respectively. In Pakistan the ages of the spouses were also closer together, the age difference declining from 6.5 years for unrelated couples to 4.5 years for first cousins. A marginal increase in time to first birth, from 1.6 years generally to 1.9 years in first cousins, may occur due to the younger age at marriage of consanguineous mothers and resultant adolescent subfertility or delayed consummation.

Predictions that cousin marriage would decline during the late 20th century in areas where it is preferential appear to have been largely incorrect. One reason for this is that in many regions cousin marriage is not merely a cultural tradition but is also judged to offer significant social and economic benefits. In South Asia, rising demands for dowry payments have caused dire economic hardship and have been linked to "dowry deaths" in a number of North Indian states. Where permissible, marriage to a close relative is hence regarded as a more economically feasible choice. Second, improvements in public health have led to decreased death rates and increased family sizes, making it easier to find a relative to marry if that is the preferred choice. Increases in cousin marriage in the West may also occur as a result of immigration from Asia and Africa. In the short term some observers have concluded that the only new forces that could discourage such unions are government bans like the one China enacted in 1981. In the longer term it is thought that rates may decline due to decreased family sizes, making it more difficult to find cousins to marry.

Cousin marriage is important in several anthropological theories by prominent authors such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sir Edward Tylor, and Henry Lewis Morgan. Lévi-Strauss viewed cross-cousin marriage as a form of exogamy in the context of a unilineal descent group, meaning either matrilineal or patrilineal descent. Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage in societies with matrilineal descent meant that a male married into the family his mother's brother, building an alliance between the two families. However, marriage to a mother's sister daughter (a parallel cousin) would be endogamous, here meaning inside the same descent group, and would therefore fail to build alliances between different groups. Correspondingly, in societies like China with patrilineal descent, marriage to a father's brother's daughter would fail at alliance building. And in societies with both types of descent, where a person belongs to the group of his mother's mother and father's father but not mother's father or father's mother, only cross-cousin marriages would successfully build alliances.

Lévi-Strauss postulated that cross-cousin marriage had the two consequences of setting up classes which automatically delimit the group of possible spouses and of determining a relationship that can decide whether a prospective spouse is to be desired or excluded. Whereas in other kinship systems one or another of these aspects dominates, in cross-cousin marriage they overlap and cumulate their effects. It differs from incest prohibitions in that the latter employs a series of negative relationships, saying whom one cannot marry, while cross-cousin marriage employs positive relationships, saying whom should marry. Most crucially, cross-cousin marriage is the only type of preferential union that can function normally and exclusively and still give every man and woman the chance to marry a cross-cousin. Unlike other systems such as the levirate, the sororate, or uncle-niece marriage, cross-cousin marriage is preferential because for obvious reasons these others cannot constitute the exclusive or even preponderant rule of marriage in any group. Cross-cousin marriage divides members of the same generation into two approximately equal groups, those of cross-cousins and "siblings" that include real siblings and parallel cousins. Consequently cross-cousin marriage can be a normal form of marriage in a society, but the other systems above can only be privileged forms. This makes cross-cousin marriage exceptionally important.

Cross-cousin marriage also establishes a division between prescribed and prohibited relatives who, from the viewpoint of biological proximity, are strictly interchangeable. Lévi-Strauss thought that this proved that the origin of the incest prohibition is purely social and not biological. Cross-cousin marriage in effect allowed the anthropologist to control for biological degree by studying a situation where the degree of prohibited and prescribed spouses were equal. In understanding why two relatives of the same biological degree would be treated so differently, Lévi-Strauss wrote, it would be possible to understand not only the principle of cross-cousin marriage but of the incest prohibition itself. For Lévi-Strauss cross-cousin marriage was not either socially arbitrary or a secondary consequence of other institutions like dual organization or the practice of exogamy. Instead, the raison d'etre of cross-cousin marriage could be found within the institution itself. Of the three types of institution of exogamy rules, dual organization, and cross-cousin marriage, the last was most significant, making the analysis of this form of marriage the crucial test for any theory of marriage prohibitions.

Matrilateral cross-cousin marriage has been found by some anthropological researchers to be correlated with patripotestal jural authority, meaning rights or obligations of the father. According to some theories, in these kinship systems a man marries his matrilateral cross-cousin due to associating her with his nurturant mother. Due to this association, possibly reinforced by personal interaction with a specific cousin, he may become "fond" of her, rendering the relationship "sentimentally appropriate." Interestingly, patrilateral cross-cousin marriage is the rarest of all types of cousin marriage, and there is some question as to whether it even exists.

In contrast to Lévi-Strauss who viewed the exchange of women under matrilateral cross-cousin marriage as fundamentally egalitarian, anthropologist Edmund Leach held that such systems by nature created groups of junior and senior status and were part of the political structure of society. Under Leach's model, in systems where this form of marriage segregates descent groups into wife-givers and wife-takers, the social status of the two categories also cannot be determined by a priori arguments. Groups like the Kachin exhibiting matrilateral cross-cousin marriage do not exchange women in circular structures; where such structures do exist they are unstable. Moreover, the exchanging groups are not major segments of the society, but rather local descent groups from the same or closely neighboring communities. Lévi-Strauss held that women were always exchanged for some "prestation" which could either be other women or labor and material goods. Leach agreed but added that prestations could also take the form of intangible assets like "prestige" or "status" that might belong to either wife-givers or wife-takers.

Anthropologists Robert Murphy and Leonard Kasdan describe preferential parallel cousin marriage as leading to social fission, in the sense that "feud and fission are not at all dysfunctional factors but are necessary to the persistence and viability of Bedoin society." Their thesis is the converse of Fredrik Barth's, who describes the fission as leading to the cousin marriage." Per Murphy and Kasdan, the Arab system of parallel cousin marriage works against the creation of homogenous "bounded" and "corporate" kin groups and instead creates arrangements where every person is related by blood to a wide variety of people, with the degree of relationship falling off gradually as opposed to suddenly. Instead of corporate units, Arab society is described as having "agnatic sections," a kind of repeating fractal structure in which authority is normally weak at all levels but capable of being activated at the required level in times of war. They relate this to an old Arab proverb: "Myself against my brother; my brother and I against my cousin; my cousin, my brother and I against the outsider." In such a society even the presence of a limited amount of cross-cousin marriage will not break the isolation of the kin group, for first cross cousins often end up being second parallel cousins." Instead of organizing horizontally through affinal ties, when large scale organization is necessary it is accomplished vertically, by reckoning distance from shared ancestors. This practice is said to possess advantages such as resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity.

In an essay published for The American Conservative, Steve Sailer has claimed that high rates of cousin marriage play an important role in discouraging political democracy. Sailer believes that because families practicing cousin marriage are more related to one another than otherwise, their feelings of family loyalty tend to be unusually intense, fostering nepotism.