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Half the married people in Iraq are married to either a first or second cousin (versus less than 1% in the U.S.) and its the same with Lebanese muslims. "Consanguineous" marriage intensifies family loyalty. If you arrange for your daughter to marry your brother's son, your grandson will also be your brother's grandson and heir, so there's no need to fight over who inherits the family land or herd.
On the other hand, cousin marriage undermines loyalty to the state and society, which is one reason why Middle Eastern countries teeter between anarchy and tyranny.
In contrast, crime families, while hardly immune to betrayals, enjoy lower costs of doing business. A chapter in Risky Transactions called "Mafia and Blood Symbolism" by University of Amsterdam anthropologist Anton Blok provides detailed family trees showing the genealogical links uniting Sicilian and American mob families like the Gambinos, Spatolas, and di Maggios. He quotes another expert as saying:
"These ties allowed greater flexibility and safety. In the relationships between Sicilian Mafioso organizers and the Italo-American gangs receiving the merchandise injection, where there is mutual trust over time, it is possible for one courier to arrive from America with the money while the merchandise itself is entrusted to another courier. Since no such privileged bonds existed between Sicilians and Middle Eastern suppliers, importing was a more cumbersome operation."
Salter points out an important concomitant to the risky transaction theory: the dividing lines between ethnic freedom fighters, gangsters, and persons can be awfully blurry. This has repeatedly tripped up American thinking foreign policy.
For example, in 1999 we planted Serbia flat to rescue the heroic Kosovo Liberation Army They then rewarded us by reverting back to the ancient Albanian trades of international smuggling, fencing, and pimping. Soon, KLA gangsters were subverting our ally, the fragile democracy of Macedonia.
