Re: NYTimes.com Article: Iraqi Family Ties Complicate American Efforts f

In many cultures, marriages between cross cousins are extremely common, 
i.e. with mother's brother's children or father's sister's children. 
Parallel cousin marriages are rare since father's brother's children 
and mother's sister's children are most commonly classified as one's 
siblings in most of the known systems of kinship terminology.
Marriage with the parallel patrilateral cousin is therefore uncommon in 
a structural sense. Where there are descent groups it may make sense as 
 a pattern of marriage that keeps family loyalties and patrimony almost 
synonymous with a patri-lineage, that is, as a strategy for 
manipulating kin ties and maintaining control over land and some common 
patrimony. This is not a question of statistics for anthropologists 
since an expressed preference or even a prescription of a certain kind 
of marriage does not guarantee that this always happens in practice. 
However, whether or not such marriages are in a statistical majority, 
such preferences are important indicators of the systematic 
organization of cultural categories and cultural associations between 
kinship and the larger world, including all those things necessary for 
the organization of production, such as land, herds and how and by whom 
resources may be accessed.
Those on the list with a copy of Bourdieu's "The Logic of Practice" can 
check out his chapter entitled "the social uses of kinship" for more 
information on what he calls the "strategies of social reproduction" 
common among Arab and Berber peoples.


On Sunday, Sep 28, 2003, at 21:36 US/Eastern, Charles Jannuzi wrote:

> > > Her reaction was typical in a country where nearly
> half of marriages are between first or second cousins,
> a statistic that is one of the more important and
> least understood differences between Iraq and America.
> The extraordinarily strong family bonds complicate
> virtually everything Americans are trying to do here,
> from finding Saddam Hussein to changing women's status
> to creating a liberal democracy.<<
>
> Then someone in the article goes on to describe the
> cousin marriages as 'unusual'--I guess they mean by
> 'world standards'. But I don't see an actual stat
> here. I'd like to know how many of the marriages are
> 'first' cousin and how many are 'second' cousin. You
> could get away with what this writer just did if 99%
> of the cousin marriages are second cousin, so this is
> not even a stat, let alone a useful one.
>
> I'm going to ask a colleague about this.
>
> C. Jannuzi
> Fukui, Japan
>
>
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