Endogamy

And the machinery is marriage.

Endogamy reproduces the boundary more effectively than any law could.

You don't need a statute saying marry within your group if every family enforces it socially.

The group persists because the boundary is reproduced every generation.

I, I think there's a, the multiracial thing, uh, one of the crucial things here is that people don't tend to talk about so much these days is exogamy and endogamy.

Exogamy is marrying outside the group.

Endogamy is marrying inside the group.

People often assume that multiculturalism means people only marry people from their own sort of background, whereas in fact, the reality of Australian life over the last 50 years is that apart from s- particular groups, the rate of exogamy, I think, is, is fairly high.

No country quite like us intermarries as much as we do.

Once written into marriage practices, occupations, and settlement patterns, that superstitious epidemiology became self-reinforcing.

Endogamy created the bounded enclave that prejudice had imagined already existed.

The cool thing is that the question is no longer really a historical one.

It might be a genetic one, and the data to answer it already exists in a Spanish lab in the genomes of a few families from a Navarrese hamlet who never got to marry out.