Endogamy

Kindred Endogamy

Kindred endogamy, also known as lineage endogamy, involves preferential marriages between close relatives, like a man marrying his mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s daughter. Such practices exist in Southeast Asia, the Aborigines of Australia, and the Yarunos of inland Venezuela. As of 2022 in the United States, 24 states prohibit first-cousin marriages, 19 states allow them, and seven states allow them in certain circumstances. This practice helps maintain property within the family line.

Kindred endogamy also includes Levirate marriage, which obligates the oldest surviving brother to marry the widow of his brother if his brother died without having sired children and also to inherit the dead brother’s property. The children born from this marriage are considered to be the dead man’s children, thereby ensuring the continuation of the dead husband’s family. Levirate marriages are common among the Kurds in Turkey.

Another form of kindred endogamy is fraternal polyandry, whereby a woman can simultaneously have more than one husband, provided they are all brothers—which ensures the lineage from which the children originate. This practice is found in certain areas of Tibet, Nepal, and Northern India.

Religious Endogamy

Religious endogamy is a universally practiced form to maintain commonness in faith between spouses. It is based on the principle that marriage should be validated by a religious ritual, which requires the consensus of the spouses to embrace the same religion. Some classic examples of religious endogamy include the Orthodox Jews, Old Order Amish, Portuguese Cape Verdeans, Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims.

A particularly strict form of religious endogamy was followed and is still present (though less [Page 511]frequently) in India’s caste system—a system of rigid stratification that places individuals hereditarily for life—within the Hindu religion. In this system, a person is expected to marry within their caste or subcaste. For example, a Brahmin has to marry a Brahmin, a Kshatriya has to marry a Kshatriya, a Vaishya has to marry a Vaishya, and so on. The ancient Hindu law saw the creation and proliferation of low-ranking castes as a result of violation of rules of endogamous marriage and strongly condemned such relationships.

Racial or Ethnic Endogamy

In the United States, racial segregation laws had forbidden interracial sexual contact or marriage, and legal sanctions on “miscegenation” included annulments and prison sentences for interracial couples. It was only after the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia of 1967 that the antimiscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional. The case involved plaintiffs Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman, whose marriage was considered illegal under the existing Virginia state law. With the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, the plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously (9–0) that it was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit marriage solely based on race (which was often viewed as the starting point of banning Jim Crow race laws).

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