Thursday, February 15, 2007
And not just any cousin, but whether it's your dad's brother's daughter or your mother's brother's daughter...complicated but interesting theory from Stanley Kurtz as to whether a form of "cousin marriage" prevalent in the Muslim World is partly responsible for that culture's insularity and inability to change: Marriage and the Terror War. Tough to excerpt, but here's a short snip:
While the vast majority of societies that practice cousin marriage favor the marriage of cross cousins, the relatively small number of societies that encourage parallel-cousin marriage can be found in the Islamic cultures of North Africa and west and central Asia. Russian anthropologist Andrey Korotayev has shown that, while the region that practices parallel-cousin marriage does not map perfectly onto the Islamic world as a whole, it does (with some exceptions) closely resemble the territory of the eighth-century Islamic Caliphate — the original Islamic empire. So there is one great exception to the claim that human society — and even human nature itself — are built around the principle of extra-familial marriage. Almost every known contemporary case of preferential parallel-cousin marriage is the result of diffusion from a single source: the original Islamic Caliphate...
[h/t: Adam Holland]
What is the difference between "cross-cousin" and "parallel-cousin" marriages?
Anyway, if families in the Arab world have been doing this for centuries, haven't they been suffering from the effects of inbreeding: mental retardation, all sorts of recessive-gene diseases, and so on?
It depends on how close the cousins are, I guess, but yes, in-breeding IS a big issue in places like Saudi Arabia and Iraq. I've linked to stories about that before.
As for cross v. parallel...best to read the article...depends on whether you're encouraged to marry an opposite or same-sex ancestor's relation and implies whether a group relates and cross-fertilizes (physically and socially) with other clans and social groups or they remain insular.
I have another geneaological related idea for the terror war. Start suggesting that a majority of Muslim alive today are descended from the Prophet. It's almost certainly true. And when some of the more impoverished good Muslims start considering this maybe they'll start holding their governments accountable instead of accepting them as descendants of the Prophet.
Naaaahhhhh. Then you'll just get a myriad of "sons of the Prophet" fights a myriad of other "sons of the Prophet" for power. It would end in a free-for-all. :-)
About the author:
"Stanley Kurtz is a quack who got his Harvard PhD by expanding Freudian quackery from the mere individual to entire peoples ("psychoanalytical sociology" it's called. You should read Kurtz on the Oedipus Complex of the Trobriand Islanders). Quackety quack."
http://emmering.blogspot.com/2006/05/stanley-kurtz.html
Another interesting peice on Kurtz:
http://emmering.blogspot.com/2006/03/newsflash-stanley-kurtz-is-still.html
"I could not find a single article by his hand that could in some way be described as scientific. Just loads and loads of OpEds and "essays". The guy wouldn't know a p-value if it bit him in the ass.
To summarize: Kurtz got his PhD in psychoanalytical sociology, as crackpot and unscientific a subject as can be found on campus. Afterwards, he never, ever, published anything in a peer-reviewed journal, or even in some in-house think-tank pseudo-journal. He's no longer with the think tank. Yet his "obscure, and perhaps quite goofy" theories get serious attention because he succeeds in making other people think he is a real, above-board "social scientist" as his NRO bio claims. Well, he's not.
He's just a wingnut who has found a niche peddling utter nonsense."
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But then again, "understanding" people by way of racial psychoanalysis or some such is always easier and self-assuring than taking a serious approach.