Reviews in Anthropology, 43:150-175, 2014. ISSN: 0093-8157 print/1556-3014 online DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2014.903151 Incest Taboos and Kinship: A Biological or a Cultural Story?
DWIGHT W. READ1
Turner, Jonathan and Alexandra Maryanski. 2009. Incest: Origins of the Taboo. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Wolf, Arthur (editor) and William Durham (editor). 2005. Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is … And Is Not. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. In most, if not all, societies, incest taboos -- perhaps the most universal of cultural taboos -- include prohibitions on marriage between parent and child or between siblings. This universality suggests a biological origin, yet the considerable variation across societies in the full range of prohibited marriage relations implies a cultural origin. Correspondingly, theories regarding the origin of incest taboos vary from those that focus on the biological consequences were marriage-based procreation allowed to include inbred matings, to those that focus on social consequences such as confounding social roles, especially within the family, or restricting networks of interfamily alliances, were marriages to take place between close relatives. For those focusing on the biological consequences, the sexual aversion hypothesis of the anthropologist Edvard Westermarck has played a central role through seemingly providing an empirically grounded, causal link from the phenomenal level of behavior to the ideational level of culture. Yet the matter is not so simple and requires rethinking of what we mean by kinship and how our ideas about kinship relate to the widespread occurrence of incest taboos and the extensive variability in their content. KEYWORDS culture, Westermarck, incest taboos, kinship, sexual aversion, evolution
Introduction
The three books being reviewed here address two related topics: incest and kinship, but with very different emphases that are mirror-like images of each other. The first two books focus on the alleged causal connection between what is called the Westermarck Effect and the
1 Address correspondence to Dwight W. Read, Department of Anthropology and Department of Statistics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. E-mail: [email protected]