ABSTRACT
Although addressed to the problem of unilateral cross-cousin marriage, this paper is primarily concerned with the methodological issues involved in the explanation of this, or of any structural type, and more particularly with the relative merits of functional and causal explanations. Cross-cousin marriage provides a useful vehicle for the examination of these different explanatory modes because the recent controversy 1 concerning differential cross-cousin marriage raises most of the important issues entailed in anthropological explanation in general, and in causal versus functional explanations in particular.
