Does Claude Levi-Strauss's alliance theory, which explains kinship systems as structured networks of marriage exchange between descent groups, better account for practices like cross-cousin marriage than the rival descent-centered, functionalist theory associated with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown?

Descent theorists in the Radcliffe-Brown structural-functionalist tradition held that kinship systems are organized primarily around lines of descent, inheritance and corporate group membership rather than reciprocal marriage exchange, treating a rule like cross-cousin marriage as a local feature explicable from a society's own descent structure rather than evidence for a general exchange mechanism operating across unrelated cultures. Alliance theory was formulated by Claude Levi-Strauss explicitly against this account, so the two remain live, opposed readings of the same ethnographic pattern rather than a settled succession from one theory to the next.