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[Deleted]October 30, 2024(Edited October 30, 2024)

Cousin-marriage is often a more complex phenomenon than this would imply. Consider this example: The Sudan, where large extended family networks are highly present in and important to most people's lives and cousin marriage remains very common across all social classes. I have known many Sudanese women who actively choose to marry a cousin (marriages are not arranged in Sudan but rather decided on by the couples themselves). People speak of the protection it can offer a woman as the cousin-husband, as a member of the extended family, whose character the woman is likely to know well, is accountable to his own relatives (who are also her relatives) for his treatment or any mistreatment of his wife (whereas marrying into a stranger's family can isolate the wife from family support). There is also evidence that the normative status of cousin-marriage has enabled large extended family networks to collectively decide to abandon female genital cutting on the premise that if the 'uncut' women fail to find marriage partners in the wider community (due to being uncut) there will always be cousins within the network of relatives who have agreed not to cut their daughters who they can marry (norms of marriagebility are a major reason why many families who would otherwise abandon the practice continue to cut their daughters).

DerpinaOctober 30, 2024

But there is still the inbreeding risk

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