Of Marriage and Marriageability: Gender and Dravidian Kinship

This article reanalyses the Dravidian kinship terminology, and shows that the distinctions it makes are distinctions of relatedness in which differences of gender in the links between people make the difference between cross and parallel kin. The categories of the terminology do not rest on the marriage system, as Dumont has argued, but rather on prior considerations of marriageability which ultimately rest on considerations of relatedness. The understandings that underlie the Dravidian system are intuitive and practice-based and may be overlaid with any number of more elaborate theoretical discourses. But these understandings are the minimum conditions which create the possibility of cross-cousin marriage.