Cousin marriage, hierarchy, and heredity: contestations over domestic and national body politics in 19th-century America

Abstract

How did cousin marriage-an institution that had been not only common, but also emotionally resonant, culturally validated, and economically productive in America-come to be recast as emotionally repugnant, medically dangerous, and politically backward? This paper follows 19th-century opponents of cousin marriage who framed their argument by positing a concordance between marital types (inversus out-marriage) and political types (monarchical versus republican). In the language of humoral medicine, these arguments recalibrated the previously positive associations between cousin marriage and hierarchical systems of hereditary rank by linking it to ideas about ill health and the degeneration and decline of family lines and European monarchies. Simultaneously, the negative evaluation of marital mixing across ranks and between populations was dismantled by correlating out-marriage with the egalitarian ideals of republicanism and connecting it with the positive values of health, vitality, and progress-of individuals, family lines, and the new American republic-a connection that was, however, contradicted by the racial politics of antebellum America.

Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

“…Here we build on the insights of feminist scholarship over several decades, which has illuminated how kinship and gender are mutually constituted (Collier and Yanagisako 1987), and how the domaining of kinship, politics and economics into separate spheres is constructed in part through the naturalisation of gendered hierarchies (Carsten 2004;MacCormack and Strathern 1980;McKinnon and Cannell 2013b;Yanagisako 2002;Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). Marriage, as central to the reproduction of the family, and simultaneously legally constituted by the state, has a critical role in the intersection of these domains and in both the institution and reproduction of these hierarchies (McKinnon 2019a;2019b). In Magee's and Reece's chapters, we see how in both the southern US and in Botswana -as in many other contemporary cultures -proper relations between husband and wife are part of what is taught to couples prior to marriage.…”

“…Certain forms of marriage are thus not only beyond the purview of conservative Christian counselling, they have historically also been outside the law. In the US, the law delineates normative marriage and places non-normative forms outside the law (see McKinnon 2017McKinnon , 2019aMcKinnon , 2019b. In this sense, it forecloses some possibilities even as it expands others.…”

What kinship is and is not in the work of Marshall Sahlins … and beyond

“…It is useful here to consider some of the ways these challenges have manifested themselves. Concerning politics, many anthropologists have considered the conceptual-indeed often cosmological-relation between forms of kinship and marriage and the ways in which a nation, citizenship, and post-colonial sovereignty movements have been imagined and brought into being, for instance, through ideas about paternity (Delaney 1995;Heng and Devan, 1992); through concepts of genealogy, inheritance, marriage, adoption, and other forms of making kin (Bear, 2007;Borneman, 1992;Carsten, 2004;Cott, 2000;Freeman, 2017;Kahn, 2000;Kim, 2010;McKinnon and Cannell, 2013;Monnig, 2008;Nash, 2008Nash, , 2017Pepi, n.d.;Schachter, 2008;Shever, 2012Shever, , 2013Sutton, 1997;Wellman, 2021;Williams, 1995); and through the relation between forms of marriage and forms of political governance (Gordon, 2002;McKinnon, 2019aMcKinnon, , 2019bMcKinnon, , 2022. Others have explored the intricate relations between the centrality of kinship and marriage and the constitution and power of the state (Lambek, 2013;Mody, 2008;Pepi, n.d.;Schatz, 2004;Thelen and Alber, 2018;Thelen et al, 2018;Vaisman, 2019).…”