far as to consider fi rst-cousin marriage a criminal offence (Ottenheimer, 1996). Today in North America and Western Europe, only 0.6 percent of marriages occur between fi rst cousins (Coleman, 1980; Bundey et al 1990). However this refers to white populations only. The overall prevalence of consanguineous marriage, especially in Western European countries like France, Germany, The Netherlands and the UK is now likely to be of the order of 1-3 percent or more.<sup>4</sup> Although in overall terms the in fl uence of consanguineous marriage in the world is declining over time, it is particularly popular in Islamic societies and among the poor and less educated populations in the Middle East and South Asia (Hussain 1999, and Bittles, 2001).<sup>5</sup> The popularity of consanguineous marriage in some societies may be attributed to religious sanction that is provided to it. In Europe, Protestant denominations permit fi rst-cousin marriage. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church requires permission from a diocese to allow them. The general consanguinity prescriptions in Islam are similar to those of Judaism. Judaism permits consanguineous marriage in certain situations, such as for example, uncle-niece unions, but the general prescriptions are similar to those of Islam. For understanding consanguinity in Bangladesh, Islam and Hinduism are important. According to the institutional requirements of Islam in the Koran and the Sunnah10, “a Muslim man is prohibited from marrying his mother or grandmother, his daughter or granddaughter, his sister whether full, consanguine or uterine, his niece or great niece, and his aunt or great aunt, paternal or maternal”. However, the Sunnah depict that the Prophet Mohammad married his daughter Fatima to Ali, his paternal fi rst cousin; this has led researchers to argue that for Muslims in practice, fi rst-cousin marriage follows the Sunnah (Bittles, 2001, and Hussain, 1999).<sup>6</sup> Consanguineous marriage among Hindus, for example in India, has continued to occur despite the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 which prohibited uncle-niece marriages, subsequently altered by the Hindu Code Bill of 1984 (Appaji Rao et al., 2002). One reason for this is because consanguineous marriage is tolerated by the Hindu scriptures.<sup>7</sup> In South Asia more generally, consanguineous unions were very common in the past and are common even today (Caldwell et al., 1983, and Bittles et al., 1993). Consanguinity in South Asia has been documented in sample surveys of the population (Reddy, 1993). There are also a number of anthropological and biological surveys of consanguinity among selected communities in southern India (Dronamaraju and Khan, 1963, Centerwall and Centerwall, 1966, and Reddy, 1993). More recent evidence of the incidence of consanguineous marriage comes from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 1992-93, which collected data from 25 Indian states and interviewed 89,777 ever-married women aged 13-49. The data show that 16 percent of marriages in India are consanguineous marriages, but that this varies from 6 percent in the north to 36 percent in the south (Banerjee and Roy, 2002). The evidence from NFHS also shows that consanguinity is still widespread in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh (IIPS and ORC

> <u>4</u> We are grateful to Alan Bittles for these estimates.

> 5 Dowry is widely practiced in Turkey, although some studies do highlight that such payments were higher in consanguineous marriages. In reality, this is thought to be purely symbolic as the money or property paid stayed within the natal family.

> 6 The Sunnah are the deeds of the Prophet Mohammad and their application to various situations.

> 7 We are grateful to Srilata Iyer for alerting us to the following examples of consanguineous marriage in Hindu mythology: In the Hindu epic poem the Mahabharata, the Hindu god Krishna’s niece Sasirekha (the daughter of Krishna’s brother Balarama) is given in marriage to Abhimanyu, the son of Krishna’s sister Subhadra. Krishna and Subhadra themselves were offspring of Vasudeva; Subhadra was married to the warrior hero of the Mahabharata, Arjuna, whose mother Kunthi was Vasudeva’a sister. Thus, in this example from Hindu mythology, in two generations of the same family - Arjuna and Subhadra, Abhimanyu and Sasirekha - all married their fi rst cousins. In the epic poem the Ramayana, the Hindu god Rama was married to Sita. Subsequently, Sita’s father’s brother’s daughters Urmila, Sutakirti and Mandavi were given in marriage to Rama’s three brothers, Lakshmana, Shatrugna and Bharata, evidence of more consanguineous marriages contracted in Hindu folklore.

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