Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Dwight W. Read tackles one of the oldest and most vexatious problems in anthropology, one that always seems on the verge of irrelevancy, but comes charging back with a vengeance: the incest taboo, the supposed problem of inbreeding, and the Westermarck Effect. This latter states that people raised together as children will, upon sexual maturity, have an aversion to one another as potential sexual partners. This has always struck me as suspect: Why then do ‘‘childhood sweethearts’’ ever grow up to marry? Indeed, Read cites evidence that age mates among kibbutzim—one of the classic examples of this—feel no sexual aversion. Other cases, such as the Taiwanese sim-pua marriage analyzed by A. P. Wolf and reanalyzed here, would seem to suggest that it is the perceived violation of cultural taboo, not the Westermarck Effect, that is the main factor. That is, as Read shows that the success or failure of these marriages is strongly correlated with the age of the boy at the time of adoption of the girl—and thus whether the boy was aware that she was not a blood relative—implying that it is not an innate aversion related to being raised together, but a culturally conditioned aversion to incest that drives this phenomenon. And what, may we ask, is incest? There is no universal definition, and it varies widely culturally. Moreover, it is not correlated with genealogical prox­ imity, but with culturally defined features. While the taboo on mother–child sex would appear to be universal, there exist cases of brother–sister marriage in rank societies, such as Roman Egypt. A father–daughter incest taboo depends on social recognition of paternity, which is not the case in many matrifocal societies. Among the Na of southwestern China, for instance, women are free to take multiple lovers; although there may be recognition of the role of pater, that of genitor can rarely be known with any certainty (Hua 2001). And as a human geneticist friend of mine once said, you can never rely on people’s accounts of paternity with any degree of confidence. If the idea of incest were really just a cultural reworking of the impera­ tive to avoid inbreeding, it has done a poor job. In matrilineal societies such as those of northern British Columbia and Southeastern Alaska, first-cousin, cross-cousin marriage was permitted and even encouraged among the nobility. However, distantly related or unrelated persons were warned against ‘‘incest’’ with someone belonging to their clan (of which there were four that crossed ethnic, linguistic, and international boundaries). Thus, to