The practice of cousin marriage among Pakistani immigrants has significantly slowed Muslim assimilation in Britain. Muslim cousin marriage has also facilitated a process of “reverse colonization,” in which large, culturally intact sections of Pakistani Muslim society have been effectively transferred to British soil. These conclusions emerge from the work of British South Asianist Roger Ballard — particularly from his path-breaking paper “Migration and kinship: the differential effects of marriage rules on the processes of Punjabi migration to Britain.” In the first part of “Assimilation Studies,” I laid out the background necessary to follow Ballard’s case. Here in Part II, I’ll run through the core of his argument. I’ll also explain why highlighting the significance of Muslim cousin marriage is such a difficult and controversial enterprise.
Numbers
As we’ve seen, Ballard worries that his research might validate the view that there is something illiberal or closed-minded about Islamic religious and social life. Yet statistics that Ballard himself reports show why it has been difficult for him to ignore the impact of cousin marriage on Muslim life in Britain — whatever hesitation he may have had about making such a potentially controversial case.
Ballard (who’s done extensive fieldwork in Pakistan’s Mirpur district) estimates that “over 60% of all Mirpuri marriages are contracted between first cousins.” In 2002, Ballard noted that: “At least half (and possibly as many as two-thirds) of the marriages currently being contracted by young British-based Mirpuris are still arranged with their cousins from back home.”
Rates of cousin marriage vary throughout the Muslim world, and we’ll learn more here (and in a future piece) about why the rates of cousin marriage among British Pakistani migrants are particularly high. Yet statistics alone tell only part of the story. The impact of a cultural ideal like cousin marriage goes well beyond any given statistical report. For example, Ballard notes that, “even when matches are arranged with non-relatives, they are rarely left in isolation. When followed up by further matches, two previously unconnected families can soon find themselves bound together in a single network.” So even marriages between non-kin tend over time to be roped into the larger Muslim system of endogamy.
This only begins to get at the many ways in which the significance of Muslim cousin-marriage goes beyond mere numbers. In “Marriage and the Terror War,” I discussed the difficulty modern Americans have in appreciating the pervasive significance of kinship in the non-Western world. For the greater part of human history, the political, cultural, and economic aspects of a person’s life have been inseparably bound up with customs of marriage and descent. Contemporary Muslim society is very much a part of that history. So when we learn that a high proportion of British Muslims are marrying kin, it’s not only interesting as a statistic about marriage itself, but is also a sign that many aspects of Muslim social life in Britain are being shaped and organized by the obligations of kinship.
Said
Given the frequency, impact, and prestige of cousin marriage among Muslims, it would seem a difficult phenomenon for scholars to ignore. In recent years, however, as Ballard’s own hesitation reveals, Western anthropologists have been decidedly reluctant to approach the topic. As anthropologist Carol Delaney explains in her 1991 book, The Seed and the Soil: “The introverted character of Middle Eastern–Mediterranean marriage, exuding as it does a scent of incest, may partly explain the relative reluctance of anthropologists to stick their noses into it.”
I think Delaney is correct — both in her explanation and in her sense that this explanation is merely partial. To truly understand the significance of Delaney’s pungent observation, we’ve got to learn a little something about the broader crisis into which Middle East studies have been plunged by the blistering criticisms of Edward Said, the founder of “post-colonial theory.” If the topic of Muslim cousin-marriage is now in bad odor amongst anthropologists, Edward Said has much to do with that fact.
Said famously took Bernard Lewis and other “Orientalist” scholars to task for treating Middle Eastern culture and society as somehow different from the West. This focus on cultural difference, according to Said, effectively turns Middle Easterners into exotic and implicitly irrational “Others,” over whom we supposedly-more-rational Westerners have an unspoken right to rule. Ultimately, for Said, even the most scrupulous and respectful study of cultural difference amounts to nothing more than a covert form of racist imperialism.
Said’s deeply influential political critique has had a paralyzing effect on scholars of the Middle East. Without venturing an account of social particularity, how can cross-cultural comparison take place? Western anthropologists stand condemned as neo-imperialists, whether they laud a particular social practice, criticize it, or remain scrupulously neutral. In the wake of Said’s critique, some anthropologists have abandoned cultural description and comparison altogether, producing sensitive accounts of their personal experiences in the field, or novelistic narratives of Middle Eastern lives instead. The point is less to make sense of the distinctive features of Middle Eastern society than to bring across to Westerners the common humanity of the people our foreign policy is supposedly tyrannizing. And of course, Said helped to usher in the scholarly notion that, in so far as the Middle East has distinguishing features or problems worth noting, these are largely a product of colonial oppression and American neo-imperialism, rather than of any distinctive social patterning within Middle Eastern society itself. (For more on Said and his impact, see my “Edward Said, Imperialist” and Charles Lindholm’s “The New Middle Eastern Ethnography.”)
With the field of Middle Eastern studies increasingly falling under the influence of Said and his followers, the long-standing anthropological interest in cousin marriage quickly began to fade. After all, what could be more offensive to a post-colonial theorist than the study of a feature that distinguishes the Muslim Middle East from nearly every other culture in the world — a practice that, in Delaney’s words, “exudes the scent of incest,” to boot? To look to cousin marriage for an explanation of the slow rate of Muslim assimilation in Europe — or for guidance in prosecuting the war on terror — is to bring vivid life to Edward Said’s worst nightmare. So, unfortunately (and not coincidentally), the post-colonial critique has virtually killed off the academic study of Middle Eastern kinship — at precisely the moment when such study is most needed.
It is therefore to Roger Ballard’s credit that, despite his concerns about invoking Muslim cousin-marriage as an explanation, he has moved forward nonetheless. Ballard and his British anthropological colleagues, in comparison to many American scholars, remain relatively resistant (but sadly, only relatively) to the worst excesses of post-colonial theory. All things considered, Britain remains something of a redoubt of the classic anthropological study of kinship. And with large numbers of South Asian immigrants bringing non-Western kinship practices into the heart of Britain itself, anthropologists could hardly help but take notice.
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