Emmanuel Todd’s new book

“But as T Eliot, top bard, pointed out, humankind cannot bear very much reality. We get protective, especially where our young ones are concerned. And this is where a different kind of family set-up stems from. Emmanuel Todd, who is a demographer as well as anthropologist, hit me with an amazing statistic. In Iraq, 35 per cent of married couples are first-cousins (he reckons that this figure can rise to 50 per cent in Pakistan). He finds that across vast areas of Eurasia, a different kind of kinship system has developed which is patrilineal and communitarian, with fathers transmitting power and property to sons and keen to see close relatives marrying. This leads not just to women being disenfranchised and segregated, but to the subordination of the individual, social stasis and clan wars. The powerful point that he makes, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that the more repressive, controlling, non-nuclear, more centripetal and inward-looking (or “endogamous”) family is not “primitive”, although it may well be medieval. It is the nuclear (and “exogamous”) family that is more primitive, more caveman, more nomad. The cosy-cousins family is a much more recent invention and should, to his way of thinking be deconstructed. We need to go more primitive, not less.” From the review of Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus’ in The Independent. Table of contents here.