btw a link from SSC sent me down a rabbit hole of reading hbd chick and related links lately and the whole intellectual edifice is pretty fascinating
I don’t have a great summary, and epistemic status tentative so you should just read the blog and follow the rabbit hole yourself. But basically:
- most cultures throughout history have had norms of marrying cousins, often pretty specific (eg it is encouraged to marry your father’s sister’s daughter but forbidden to marry your father’s brother’s daughter)
- Western Europe since the Middle Ages has been anomalously anti-cousin marriage
- and more generally unusually focused on nuclear rather than extended family
- this is related to things like late marriage (Hajnal line) and feudalism
- all this makes the culture less “clannish” and more individualistic and prosocial/democratic (basically, because people’s ties to extended family are weak, they will act on behalf of broader society rather than extended family
- all the stuff about kinship structures seems deeply embedded in societies; eg languages can be divided into categories according to the kinship classification systems they use, and this corresponds to social norms about kinship