Author: John Leonard
Position: n/a
Institution: n/a
E-mail: jleonard@jleonard.net
Additional Authors: none
Submitted Date: December 23, 2008
Published Date: December 30, 2008
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

This is an interesting piece, but I think it is incorrect to say that cousin-marriage is stigmatised in the West. I think its stigmatisation is primarily, in western culture, a US phenomenon. (I am, of course, aware that in other cultures the rules for cousin marriage vary widely. Indeed the decade-long revolt on the Pacific island of Bougainville may well have had its origin, inter alia, in tensions between local marriage customs concerning parallel and cross cousins, and differing, and more lax, standards amongst immigrant Papuan mine-workers).

I am a UK citizen by birth, now living in Australia, aged mid 40s, and until recently was completely unaware of concerns about cousin marriage, despite having read widely in sociology and history and being educated to doctoral level in the humanities: I have not come across in the UK, Australia or in any European cultural discourse any substantial concern about cousin-marriage. Where people in non-US English-speaking societies in remote and rural places are stigmatised for inbreeding (in the Fens, in eastern England, or Tasmania, or New Zealand, from an Australia perspective), it is not cousin-marriage they are accused of, but brother-sister incest! The New Zealand advert cited in this piece I would regard as an US-influenced meme.

Indeed I was completely unaware of the US state bans on cousin marriage until I watched episodes of the sit-com Arrested Development, which has this theme as a running joke, and I did a little research on the Web. This also elucidated a few jokes from The Simpsons from the 1990s which I hadn’t appreciated until recently.