Next Step, Exogamy?

Robin Hanson:

Integration seems one of the great political issues of our era. That is, people express great concern about factional favoritism based on race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, age, etc., and push for laws and policies to prevent it, or to encourage mixing and ties across factional boundaries. I've tended to assume that such policies have been sufficient, and perhaps even excessive.

But a student, Randall McElroy, wrote a paper for my grad law & econ class, that got me thinking. He wrote about how the Hopi indians dealt with mass immigration in part by defining newcomers as a new clan, and then forbidding within-clan marriage. Such "exogamy" has apparently been a common strategy in history: force mixing and friendly ties between factions by requiring all marriages to be between factions.

I was reminded of Cleisthenes redesigning the political system of ancient Athens to break up the power of region-based alliances that had caused endemic political conflict. He created ten equal tribes, where a third of each tribe was taken from a different type of region, plain, coast, or hills, and made these tribes the main unit of political organization.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 30, 2013 12:55 AM
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