Cousins are my greatest lens into human interaction. Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people rel

Cousins are my greatest lens into human interaction. Both directly in terms of my cousin network, which is huge, and in terms of how I observe other people relating to their cousins. Let's start with me. My paternal grandfather had nearly 20 kids with two different women. Those kids then got scattered all over the world, and thus the grandchildren as well. My other grandfather had five and adopted another, and the same thing happened to them, war spread them all over. So I have two cousin networks that are massive and spread all over. I'm able to compare things like the French and Danish education systems by getting a first-hand impression. I can ask a Bay Area doctor how his experience is, or a Toronto accountant. I can compare humor across the Atlantic. Growing up, I could see cousins starting to date and get married, having kids. The younger ones are still observing, but are young enough to give an insight into what kids are like nowadays. In terms of studying people, it's hard to get better access. The emotional angle from the article is right, too. Cousins occupy this nice middle between seeing you all the time like your siblings, and not having to care about you, like strangers. When your parents die, the cousins are sad. But they are also not falling apart and are able to help out. They know common stories like what your grandparents did, how your parents met, and so on. But you also don't have to do much to maintain this, like you might with certain friends. With a large enough network you don't even need to talk to any particular cousin to get all the stories about them, whichever cousin is passing through will tell you news from his part of the network and you give them yours. In terms of other people, what is most striking to me is where on the near-far scale different cultures seem to put the cousins. Some societies seem to see cousins as basically friends: a relationship that's nice if it's good but if things so sour, no big deal. Others will think of cousins as basically siblings who live in another house: your aunt and uncle can tell you off just like your parents and nobody bats an eye. It seems to be common that birth/wedding/death news goes to all cousins though, regardless of what distance your society places on the cousin relation, and regardless of whether things have soured.