Cross-Cousin Marriage

Cross-cousin marriage is marriage between cousins descended through parents of different sexes, a person's mother's brother's children or father's sister's children, as distinct from parallel-cousin marriage (father's brother's children or mother's sister's children). It is documented very widely: rates reach 25 to 30 percent of marriages in Arab countries and 46 percent in Afghanistan, cross-cousin and uncle-niece unions jointly account for roughly 30 percent of marriages in South India outside Kerala, and the practice is recorded historically among Aboriginal Australians and in North America, South America, Polynesia and Melanesia. Claude Levi-Strauss's alliance theory treats the systematic preference for cross-cousin marriage across many historically unrelated cultures as evidence that marriage functions as a structured exchange of spouses between descent groups, in deliberate opposition to the functionalist, descent-centered account associated with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown; the linked open question records that dispute. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/