The Weekly Standard
Tillion’s Cousins
A classic account of women in the Mediterranean world.
by Ann Marlowe
06/30/2008, Volume 013, Issue 40
In 1966 Germaine Tillion, a 59-year-old French structural anthropologist, published a slim volume entitled Le harem et les cousins (English title: The Republic of Cousins). This book, and Tillion herself, are largely unknown in the United States outside academic circles. Yet 40 years after its publication, The Republic of Cousins offers fresh and even -startling insights into the Muslim world.
The “republic” Tillion depicts is a construction based on the seclusion of women, near-incestuous marriages, honor killings, and the obsessive concern of brothers for their sisters’ honor. It is common to the Christian northern borders of the Mediterranean as well as the Muslim southern and eastern shores. Many of Tillion’s most -startling examples come from southern France–where uncle/niece marriages were still taking place before World War II–and from Christian Lebanon where, she reports, spouses habitually call one another “cousin.”
