FOREWORD
Robin Fox
Two casual remarks set me off on the search for the meaning of the incest taboo. When I was an undergraduate (in sociology) at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the early 1950s, we had a weekly class on social anthropology. One week the subject was the incest taboo. I was trotting out all the standard sociological explanations for exogamy and the expansion of social ties and so on when Maurice Freedman, the great expert on Chinese kinship and later professor of anthropology at Oxford, obviously bored with this recitation, interrupted me. “Why can’t we have a sexual free-for-all in the family and then marry out of it?” I was startled out of my sociological rut and launched on a lifelong intellectual adventure.
The second significant encounter was at Harvard (the old Social Relations Department) in the late 1950s. John Whiting, the genial pioneer of culture and personality studies, observed to me that opposite-sex children who played rough-and-tumble games a lot often seemed to get very sexually excited and then dissolve in tears and anger, presumably out of frustration. It immediately hit me that this might be the foundation for Edward Westermarck’s contention that siblings easily developed a “natural aversion” to sex with each other at the onset of puberty.
A few years later (1962) I worked this idea up into an article called “Sibling Incest” for the British Journal of Sociology. The article was much admired and its conclusions generally dismissed. The prevailing wisdom, backed by Freud, Frazer, Malinowski, and Lévi-Strauss—and most everyone else—was that it was “self-evident” that we all want to commit incest, otherwise why are there
all these fierce sanctions against it? I invoked Westermarck’s response: that it could be that we were so against incest precisely because we didn’t want to do it and so were horrified by those who did. No cigar. I think the only reason my article was published is that Westermarck is one of the revered founders of sociology at the LSE; he deserved a hearing, at least.
In contrasting the two views of sibling incest I coined the terms “Freud effect” and “Westermarck effect.” The former got nowhere, but the latter, as this excellent book demonstrates, has passed into the language like “inferiority complex” and “male bonding.” It is hard to convey how improbable this seemed in the early 1960s. Freud dominated; you had to come to terms with him. I suppose I figured that if I couldn’t lick him, I could at least hijack his theory for my own purposes. Much of what followed is spelled out in detail in this book.
Jonathan Turner and Alexandra Maryanski do a wonderful job of first summarizing the classical and modern debates on the incest taboo and then giving the debate a mighty push forward. Their command of the material across a range of social and natural sciences is almost alarmingly thorough, as is their confident weaving together of all the complicated strands. When I started the “Westermack debate” it was impossible to get sociologists to take evolution seriously or evolutionists to have any patience with sociological concerns. No one wanted to learn new disciplines. The authors here show how far we have come. I fumbled about, for example, with what little was known of ape and monkey society. Even in 1980, the year of The Red Lamp of Incest, it was still rudimentary. But the questions were posed, and our authors are able, with greatest sophistication, to advance the debate on the “primate baseline” and show how cladistic analysis forces us to conclude that a loose, individualistic, and low-dominance organization characterized the common ancestor of modern chimps and humans. In following the logic of the move to the savanna, I had obviously overestimated the degree to which early hominid society would have become baboon-like in its structure. I had therefore put too much “kinship” into the original mix—and too much dominance. The picture has to be adjusted. This is one example, but it shows how true science advances. My other great teacher was Karl Popper. He taught us all that our hypotheses should be
vulnerable, and that we should welcome disconfirmation: it means we are indeed doing science!
There are many examples here of such welcome improvements. But I am heartened to see that the broad outlines remain intact. Turner and Maryanski demonstrate that the nuclear family was indeed a late development from the baseline and brought with it the problems that the taboo sought to answer. In one of the most significant additions to the debate, they show that as the family in industrial society becomes more isolated from the community the mechanisms of avoidance become less dependable. Mothers and sons seem to be inoculated by a “bio-program.” I would follow Earl Count in seeing this as a “reverberation” of the breast suckling experience throughout life. Traditionally sons were suckled for up to three years, with, as we know, profound hormonal consequences for both partners. Since the invention of feeding bottles, in industrial societies most sons are not breast-fed at all. The bioprograms are not automatic: all need the appropriate input to be activated. Jocasta never suckled Oedipus.
The Westermarck effect is very variable, and the authors are right to stress this variability. It was there in the original hypothesis, but many since have ignored it. This is not a mechanical effect. As the age of puberty descends to the preteen levels and the years of familial dependency, with greater “privacy” for individual children, increase, so the possibility of sibling incest rises and seems to be rising. Fathers and daughters have very little natural immunity. Without community monitoring they must fall back on those evolved systems (bio-programs) of inhibition and control of emotions so ably described here. In fact most fathers enjoy positive, loving relationships with their daughters (something many feminists seem strangely reluctant to admit), and control is not an issue unless things go wrong, as they do all too often.
It has been suggested that with the advent of reliable contraception (especially the pill) the point of the incest taboo has been lost: with no genetic consequences, why bother? This brilliantly successful account by Turner and Maryanski, with its logic, its accuracy, and its impeccable data, will more than demonstrate why this is wishful thinking. The incest taboo was indispensable to that struggling ape making it into humanity, and like so much of our evolutionary heritage, we are stuck with it.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to thank the Academic Senate of the University of California–Riverside for supporting our research for this book. We are indebted to historian Patricia Turner for her helpful suggestions in chapter 1. We also want to thank the UCR library staff, especially Janet Moores, Maria Mendoza, Kim Noon, and Debbie Snow in Interlibrary Loan, who were somehow able to secure for us hardto-locate texts and journals throughout the globe. We are very grateful for their help. We also extend our thanks to Julie Kirsch at Paradigm Publishers for her editorial assistance, and we want to thank Clara Dean, our friend and typist for many years, who prepared the manuscript for publication.
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1
THE GOLDEN AGE OF PROMISCUITY
Here lies the daughter, here lies the father, here lies the sister, here lies the brother, here lies the wife and the husband, and there are only two bodies here.
—Medieval tombstone epitaph1
INTRODUCTION
Humans have been fascinated by incest for all of recorded history and, no doubt, long before ideas could be written down. When acts are taboo, they are mysterious, frightening, and yet captivating. This combination of responses makes them topics for not just quiet and private talk, but also for folk tales, drama, myths, and literary works. Such has certainly been the case for the incest taboo—the most bewitching taboo of all. Part of this attraction stems from being forbidden, but avoiding incest reaches deep into our humanity. Breaking the incest ban strikes at the core of the family and society, if not the viability of the species, and people’s implicit sense of what is at stake makes this taboo especially formidable.
The word “incest” is derived from the Latin incestum and refers to sexual union with a near relative. The word “taboo” comes from Tonga via Captain James Cook’s famous voyage to Polynesia, where Cook observed that the Tongans employ the word
1.Quoted in Archibald 2001, 123. Similar double incest inscriptions are found in many places. For detailed discussions, see Rank [1912] 1992, 296.
tabu, a variant of the more widespread Polynesian word, tapu. Writing in his journal in 1777, Cook noted that taboo has an “extensive signification” but in general denotes something that is “forbidden” (Cook [1777] 1967). The marriage of these two terms—incest and taboo—provided a label for a social interdiction that has preoccupied humans for millennia. Why should this be so? Émile Durkheim ([1897] 1963, 27) gave expression to part of the answer when he emphasized that “all repression of incest presupposes familial relations recognized and organized by society.”
For contemporary Westerners, the family is typically a mother, father, and children. Yet, since a female can raise her offspring alone, it is equally plausible that the elementary family can be composed of a mother (impregnated by a visiting “father”) and her offspring; and then, as Robin Fox (1967, 54) theoretically put it, “our mother-children group could settle down to a cosy little inbreeding arrangement and be totally self-sufficient for purposes of reproduction.” But nobody is supposed to mate in this bundle of relationships. And among all populations, there are often explicit but always implicit understandings that the mother–son, father–daughter, and brother–sister dyads of the nuclear family are not to mate. Sometimes this understanding is expressed as an explicit ban or taboo; at other times it is simply considered so unthinkable for close relatives to mate that a rule is unnecessary (Murdock 1949). Still, as we will see, there is something worrisome about the nuclear family and we should ask, Why are people in some societies so worried about sexual relations between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and brothers with sisters? Is there something about the nuclear family that makes sexual intercourse more likely, and if so, to what effect?
While the incest taboo applies worldwide to the nuclear family, customs and laws often extend the prohibition to other relationships, well beyond the nuclear unit. But again we can ask, Why would this be so? Why would people make other, often remote, relatives taboo? It is not just contemporary scholars and scientists who have asked these kinds of questions; they are only following on the heels of a long Western tradition, emerging with the Greeks and Romans and running through the Middle Ages, the early modern age, and the growth of the natural and social sciences. In fact, a wide swath of individuals—from early philosophers through the papacy and literary figures to early and late scientists—have all focused on the problem of incest and the taboo. It is useful, then,
to begin our inquiry into the origins of the incest taboo by reviewing, in very broad strokes, the Western tradition of attitudes about incest. For incest is clearly something that humans have talked and thought about for a long time, certainly long before literacy. But with literacy and a written record, we can now see the varied forms such attention takes, whether these interests are recorded in the myths, legends, or narratives of the classical period in Western history, the laws of the Christian church, or the early speculations by the first generation of social scientists on the origins of the family and society.
THE FAMILY AND THE INCEST TABOO IN CLASSICAL TIMES (800 B.C.E.–350 C.E.)2
A family for Greeks (oikos) and Romans (familia) originally meant a household, or a private domestic group composed of parents and children, grandparents, other relatives, and even servants and slaves. While the Greeks banned sexual intimacy between parents and their offspring as well as lineal relatives, enforcement of this prohibition was by public opinion alone because Greek legal codes lacked a punishment or even a formal term for incest. Yet in Greek society, dreams about incest were seemingly a popular pastime and often discussed (Archibald 2001, 17), as is evident in Plato’s Republic, when Socrates is said to have observed of some men that “in sleep when . . . all that belongs to the calculating, tame, and ruling part . . . slumbers . . . the beastly and wild part, gorged with food or drink . . . seeks to go and satisfy its dispositions. . .. And it doesn’t shrink from attempting intercourse, as it supposes, with a mother or with anyone else at all.” (9.571). Yet in The Laws of Plato (7.838b), the Athenian attests to the unwritten law (concerning siblings or parents and child) that “guards in a very effective way . . . against touching . . . by open or secret sleeping together, or by any other sort of embracing. In fact, among the many there isn’t the slightest desire for this sort of intercourse” (7.838b).
It was left to the Romans to coin the word incestrum, a concept that included a variety of offenses from prohibiting incest in the nuclear family through the lineal line of kin and even some collateral
2.This section leans heavily on Elizabeth Archibald’s excellent study, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001).
relations to banning sexual intercourse with a vestal virgin. However, as with the Greeks, Roman marriages (while subject to Roman law) were largely family matters, without religious or government intrusions (Archibald 2001, 12ff.; Beard 1980; Meyrick [1880] 1968, 1725–30).
The incest motif also found popular expression in ancient Greek and Roman myths, legends, narratives, and other literary works. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the coupling of divine siblings gave life to the Olympian gods after “Kronos forced himself upon Rheia, and she gave birth to a splendid brood” (quoted in Johnson and PriceWilliams 1996, 110). Yet a sharp contrast was made between gods and humans, for whom even unwitting incest invited disastrous consequences. The infamous Oedipal tale, which is usually portrayed as a Greek tragedy, is the best-known story of the consequences of even inadvertent incest on human social relations. King Laius and Queen Jocasta abandon their newborn son (after mutilating his feet) on learning that he would someday slay his father and marry his mother. He survives and is adopted by the king of Corinth, who names him Oedipus (“swollen foot”). When told of the curse, Prince Oedipus flees Corinth to avoid his destiny (because he thinks that the king of Corinth is his biological father), but when on the road, he has an altercation with and murders King Laius, thereby committing patricide. Traveling to his native city, Oedipus successfully outwits the terrifying Sphinx (a hybrid monster), winning the hand of Queen Jocasta and fathering four children. When fate intervenes to expose their incestuous marriage, Queen Jocasta kills herself and King Oedipus blinds himself and prays for death.3 What is it that makes this tale so captivating? Is it the inevitability of fate, the parricide, or the incestuous union of mother and son? Whatever the answer, this story and a host of Oedipal-like tales are found in “family-complex folktales” that circle the globe in both literate and preliterate societies. Allen W. Johnson and Douglass Richard Price-Williams titled their fascinating book Oedipus Ubiquitous (1996) because the basic elements of the Oedipus narrative are familiar themes in diverse parts of the
3.There are several versions of this story in antiquity, although all carry the theme of patricide and the marriage of mother and son. This sketch follows Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (King Oedipus), first performed in Athens around 425 B.C.E. Sophocles’ tragedy is the one Freud used as the focal point for his provocative Oedipus complex theory to be discussed later in this chapter.
world. And, of course, the shock of Sigmund Freud’s speculation on the Oedipal triangle in the Victorian family is only an extended Western manifestation of this widespread incest tale.
Given the general attitude in classical times that incest among humans is immoral and vile (Archibald 2001, 17), it is easy to appreciate why both the Greeks and Romans enjoyed disparaging barbarians for their incestuous behaviors, with Strabo in his historical Geography reporting that the Persian magi “consort even with their mothers” while the “inhabitants of Ierne (Ireland) count it an honorable thing, when their fathers die, to devour them, and openly to have intercourse . . . with their mothers and sisters” ([circa 7 B.C.E.] 1930, 2:259, 7:185). Thus in the ancient world charges of incest became a convenient way to debase outsiders and enemies. Rumors connecting individuals or groups to incest also served as a common Roman device for vilifying powerful politicians, minorities, and unpopular religious groups within society. Favorite targets were early Christians, who were charged with group marriage, sibling incest, and “a promiscuous ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’ by which ordinary fornication, under cover of a hallowed name, is converted to incest” (Apologeticus, quoted in Archibald 2001, 20, and see The Ante-Nicene Fathers 1908, 2:112; de Ste. Croix 1963). In turn, early Christian apologists defended Christianity and accused their accusers of scattering their “lusts promiscuously.” For example, Minucius Felix writes that the “plotting of demons has falsely devised an enormous fable against us ... (when in reality) . . . you worship incestuous gods, who have intercourse with mothers, with daughters, with sisters. . . . With reason . . . is incest frequently detected among you, and is continually permitted” (Ante-Nicene Fathers 1908, 4:192).
Despite the seductive entertainment in telling tales of incest, debauching enemies, and bashing outsiders with charges of incestuous acts, few Greeks and Romans ever questioned why incest rules existed or why incest was such a “wicked” thing. But there were exceptions. Well before modern times the Greek writer Plutarch (Honigmann 1976:26ff.) saw the incest taboo as a preventive measure for avoiding potential role conflict within the family (thus anticipating most sociological arguments on the origins of the incest taboo); and Plutarch along with the Roman historian Tacitus saw that the taboo created conflict-reducing alliances by forcing individuals to marry out into other kin groups and communities (thus anticipating many anthropological arguments).
THE FAMILY AND THE INCEST TABOO IN THE MIDDLE AGES (500–1500 C.E.)
When the Roman Empire splintered apart, as Germanic newcomers invaded the classical world, secular authority began to be slowly replaced by the ecclesiastical authority of the Christian church-state. And in post-Roman society, ever more aspects of sovereign family life gradually became dictated by canon law. Over time, when marriage became ordained a sacrament, and indeed as a “remedy for fornication,” the early Christian fathers imposed an increasingly righteous Christian morality on husband and wife that included strict monogamy and conjugal fidelity with few grounds for divorce (or even separation), prohibitions against both polygyny and concubinage, virginity before marriage for both sexes, sexual abstinence during Lent and all religious holidays, and a postpartum sexual taboo between husband and wife until a baby was weaned (Gies and Gies 1987, 45ff.; Goody 1983, 37ff.; Rouche 1987).
In this new land of medieval Christendom, incest laws also operated as a tool for the Church to gain control over the family.4 By reworking the old Roman codes of prohibited degrees of sexual relationships, the Church Fathers kept expanding the circle of forbidden marital connections, until by the twelfth century it included within Christendom all lineal and collateral relatives to the seventh degree or to a person’s sixth cousin. Most in-laws were also disallowed; a man was forbidden to marry his dead brother’s widow, his uncle’s widow, his wife’s sister, or anyone joined by a spiritual affinity to the fourth degree such as a godchild and godparent (Meyrick 1968, 1725–30; Goody 1983; Howard 1904, 287ff.). When taken to the extreme degrees, “near of kin” included all descendants of one’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather, thus making it nearly impossible for anyone in small communities to find eligible marriage partners (Gies and Gies 1987). These restrictive laws naturally ensured rampant violations of such an inclusive incest taboo, resulting in clandestine unions and reported offenses that today would never be considered inces-
4.According to Meyrick, in A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities ([1880] 1968, 1092), which covers the first eight centuries of Christianity, marriage between a man and woman is “limited by a crowd of prohibitive regulations ... having as their general object 1, the prevention of incest; 2, the prevention of evils which might accrue (a) to the state, (b) to religion, (c) to the individuals concerned.”
tuous. This being so, and with a powerful papacy fixated on lust, celibacy, and stamping out “incestuous” marriages, it is not surprising that the incest motif would become a prominent theme not just in medieval religious texts and canon law but also in vernacular folklore, myths, narratives, and legends.
During much of the Middle Ages, discourse on incest was used by clerical writers to warn of the “sins of the flesh” and to bolster canon codes on conjugal duties and on proper family relationships. By using such terms as “fornication,” “lechery,” “sexual sin,” and “unnatural act” to get their message across, the Church dramatized the “evils” of incest, a message that can still be heard today in some Christian churches. Yet, the Church’s energy was directed more toward “saving souls” by doing penance rather than enforcing laws or protecting young incest victims (Archibald 2001, 5, 27); consequently, allegations of incestuous behavior could be used as a wedge to rout out sinners committing “heinous acts” and to impart to them the “gift of grace” once they confessed and did penance for their sins (and thereby accepted the guidance of the Church over their lives). Church writers were also kept busy inventing incest narratives as a means to send explicit messages to the laity. Women were often depicted as weak and as consumed by insatiable desires for sex, much like Eve who committed the first act of incest by eating the forbidden fruit that symbolized her sexual desires. By equating incestuous acts with the doctrine of original sin, the Church reinforced the belief that all humans are sinners (or at least predisposed to be) and need spiritual redemption through ecclesiastical discipline. After the sixth century, the clerics relied on Penitentials (or guidelines for various sins) to police all sexuality, even sexual intercourse between husband and wife, by prescribing light penance for deviations from Churchprescribed sexual positions to heavy penance for oral sex and masturbation. Nuclear family incest was especially horrifying to the Church. But in the Anglo-Saxon Penitential of Theodore, only penalties for mother–son and brother–sister incest were covered. Father–daughter incest is not even mentioned (see Gies and Gies 1987, 62ff.)—a rather surprising omission perhaps reflecting the patriarchy of the church (see Mead [1880] 1968, 1586–1608 for an extended discussion).
Among the laity, fictional stories of incest were extremely popular for their ability to shock audiences, impart moral lessons, and provide a ready source of entertainment. Oedipal-like tales were particularly favored. Although subjects and stories were set in a
religious context, the thrust of each tale was the same, with some close cognates to the original Greek classic. The Mediaeval Legend of Judas Iscariot, for example, tells of a rich father who, after learning that his newborn son will someday kill him, mutilates his son’s feet and pushes him from the household. But Judas is rescued, grows up, and unknowingly enters his real father’s orchard in search of fruit and inadvertently commits patricide. Later when given his mother’s hand, the incestuous marriage is consummated followed by the usual tragic ending (see Edmunds 1985 for a detailed discussion). Although Judas of the Bible met an ugly fate (for this villain also betrayed Christ), many mother–son incest tales had happier spiritual endings, once the sinners confessed and asked for divine forgiveness. In fact, according to Archibald (2001, 106), the Church was pleased to have Oedipus tales told in a Christian context to show how humans were mired in sin and, not coincidentally, how the Christian Fathers were there to confer the gift of grace. Other popular mother–son incest tales report on “near misses,” where identities are discovered in the nick of time. However, outside of Oedipal-like tales, consummated mother–son stories are rare, except in short exempla when used by the clergy to buttress a moral point (Archibald 2001, 106ff.).
Incest stories during the Middle Ages were also spun around medieval kings, queens, knights, saints, and even members of the papacy. One saucy and very popular Oedipus-type story is the legend of Pope Gregory. In this tale, incest is doubled as the story begins with an incestuous relationship between two royal siblings and the birth of their baby boy. The child is put in a small boat and sent out to sea; he is rescued and later returns to the land of his birth, where he unknowingly marries his queen mother and thereby becomes a king. But unlike the Greek tragedy, a shift occurs from secular to religious values: Upon the discovery of double incest, there is remorse and confession by mother and son (husband and wife), with the devil being blamed and, amazingly, the gift of divine grace (after a seventeen-year penancy in isolation) allows Gregory to become pope. (See Edmunds 1985; Archibald 2001; and McCabe 1993 for discussions.) Why the double incest in this apocryphal myth? According to the historian Otto Rank ([1912] 1992, 271), such novelty in the medieval imagination, which approached “the limits of the humanly conceivable,” simply reflects the fact that “the great repression of drives expressed in Christianity could be maintained only at the cost of a fantasy life pouring forth to the most voluptuous degree.”
Father–daughter incest tales commanded the widest attention, especially in the later Middle Ages. One tenth-century poem in the Exeter Book (based on Genesis 19:30–38) is a riddle of jumbled family relationships:
A man sat down to feast with two wives, Drank wine with two daughters, supped with two sons. The daughters were sisters with their own two sons, Each son a favored, first-born prince.
The father of each prince sat with his son, Also the uncle and nephew of each.
In the room’s reach was a family of five. (quoted in Gies and Gies 1987, 104)
Riddles spun around all types of family relationships were popular during the Middle Ages, in part because the complicated and perplexing degrees of sexual avoidance advocated by canon law fostered the invention of a more simplified forum (Taylor 1938).
For the most part, medieval tales of father–daughter incest differ dramatically from those about mother–son incest. In the latter, both individuals are nearly always unaware of their true relationship, and thus the incest is unwitting. In contrast, in tales of father–daughter incest, the father typically tries to seduce his known daughter, who is portrayed as a victim. Yet these tales often become adventure stories, as incest is averted just in time, as would be the case when the daughter runs away from her father (see Archibald 2001, 149). Unlike mother–son and father–daughter incest tales, brother–sister stories were relatively uncommon in medieval literature (although they proliferated during the early modern period). Some popular ones involve major legendary heroes, such as Charlemagne, who sleeps with his sister and thereby begets a son, Roland, who is both son and nephew to Charlemagne who, reciprocally, is both father and uncle to Roland. However, in most medieval narratives, brother–sister incest is usually portrayed as a tantalizing romance story where long separated siblings fall in love, unaware of their family ties. Oddly enough, the active medieval imagination even created an incest riddle for the birth of Christ. The Virgin Mary is the ultimate “Mother of Grace,” but she is also associated with “holy incest” because she is the “mother of her own Creator, and the bride and daughter of her own Son” (Archibald 2001, 230).
In the main, few questioned the biological or sociological reasons behind the incest taboo in the Middle Ages, with notable exceptions. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) emphasized that marriage between near relatives led to fertility problems (Muller 1913, 295); in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) suggested that the incest taboo promoted alliances between groups by building bridges between families whose sons and daughters marry, while at the same time, the taboo worked to reduce potential conflict within the nuclear family. Thomas Aquinas also stressed that the purpose of the incest taboo was to ensure healthy children, with a deformed child being God’s punishment for an incestuous act (Honigmann 1976, 46–48). And in the sixteenth century, as Robert Burton wrote, “the church and common-wealth, humane and divine lawes, have conspired to avoid hereditary diseases, forbidding such marriages as are any whit allied” (quoted from Archibald 2001, 50). Despite explicit documentation, Archibald (2001) suspects that the medieval world had a “widespread awareness” of the link between close inbreeding and deformed children. And, as we will see in this and the next chapter, virtually all of the principal scientific explanations for the origins of the incest taboo were evident, at least in incipient form, during the classical period and Middle Ages.
Thus incest tales told during the Middle Ages make an acrossthe-board distinction between the nuclear family and more remote relatives. Incest stories outside the nuclear family are rare, despite the Church’s wide stretch of the incest rules to include many remote relatives (Archibald 2001, 221). This literary apathy is telling because it goes against the best efforts of the Church to broaden the definition of incest to a protracted array of kin; and indeed, sexual relations among any known relative was often highlighted by the clergy as a grave act of sin. Oddly enough, despite the Church’s worrisome efforts to condemn incestuous acts, court records of nuclear family incest were rare. After the twelfth century, prohibited degrees of propinquity were gradually relaxed, but this relative loosening of forbidden connections ironically placed greater attention on sexual relations within the nuclear family. In addition, by putting marriage on a pious foundation with strict monogamy, the Church succeeded in its efforts at viewing mother, father, and children as the centerpiece of human society. Thus the viability of society was increasingly seen to hinge on the morality of the elementary family—a shift in perspective that was unprecedented in human history and persists to the present day in the
West, where “family values” are seen as the backbone of the “good” society.
THE INCEST TABOO AND THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD (1500–1800 C.E.)
The cultural rebirth in the Renaissance, the discovery of the Americas, and the Protestant Reformation signaled the closing of a period in Western history where the known universe was classified into “the unholy world” and the “holy church” (Howard 1904, 389). In its place a deeper and broader worldview took hold, a view characterized by religious renewal, scientific discovery, new technologies, and nation-states with secular authority. Above all, the invention of the printing press led to an information revolution by encouraging a growing literate population to read not only the Bible and religious literatures but also secular texts. And, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an ethos of secularism had taken hold, breaking down the old systems of belief and opening the door to new ideas, attitudes, and optimism (for discussions, see Chartier 1989b, 111ff.; Stone 1977; and Collins 1998). Discoveries in the physical sciences, coupled with notions of progress and evolution, began to challenge the dominant views of a “static universe,” and increasingly philosophers wrote of a world in continual change. With the Enlightenment, the belief in human reason and progress was established; and so it should not be surprising that conceptions of family, sexuality, and incest would also be viewed in new ways (Bock 1956; Foucault 1986; Collins 1998).
The image of the conjugal family unit carved out during the Middle Ages stood firm, primarily because the medieval Church had relegated most kith and kin to the periphery of “the family.” By focusing on the evils of incest within the nuclear family, the boundary between this unit and other kindred intensified. Moreover, the structure of kinship was undergoing significant change in England toward the nuclearization, as features more typical of the modern nuclear family gradually became apparent, including stronger conjugal ties, decoupling of sexual enjoyment from guilt and sin, and greater family privacy and autonomy (Stone 1977; Chartier 1989a). In addition, once the Church forfeited its strong moral authority, attention moved away from confession and penance for incest offenders to the consequences of incest for society at large. One late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century example of this
coming trend is the Dux Moraud (Duke Vagabond). The play (preserved only in fragments) is a horrific tale of an incestuous father–daughter relationship; the murder of the mother by her daughter after discovering the illicit affair; the exposure of the child born of the incestuous relationship, and the death of the father by his demented daughter (see Davis 1970, 100–11). While the father confesses his incestuous abuses to a priest and is given the normative medieval penance to “save his soul,” this play also buttresses the incest taboo by highlighting the inherent role conflicts and appalling dangers of such forbidden relationships for civilized society (McCabe 1993, 116–17).
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the incest motif was amazingly popular in folk tales, literature, poetry, ballads, plays, and especially English drama (Archibald 2001; Luis-Martinez 2002; Richardson 1985). While themes of an Oedipal nature were frequent, theatergoing tastes also favored brother–sister incest. In John Ford’s widely acclaimed play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore published in 1633, the incest taboo is upheld in a very passionate love story between two siblings, Annabella and Giovanna, who recklessly flaunt society by having an incestuous affair leading to a pregnancy, which ensures a tragic ending. Father–daughter incest also captivated early modern audiences, especially conflicts arising from father–daughter suitor triangles. For example, in Shakespeare’s Pericles (c. 1608), father–daughter incest is revealed by the victim to her suitor in a family riddle:
I am no viper, yet I feed
On mother’s flesh which did me breed. I sought a husband, in which labour I found that kindness in a father. He’s father, son, and husband mild; I, mother, wife,—and yet his child. How they may be, and yet in two, As you will live, resolve it you. (1.1.57)
How does one fold six family relationships in two persons? The answer can only be incest. And as always, the incestuous ways of the nuclear family are key, whether the tale is tragedy, romance, or comedy and whether incest is imagined, consummated, or averted. Thus, despite major alterations in the traditional order of things after the Middle Ages, the incest motif and the centrality of the nuclear family flourished during the early modern period. How-
ever, the role relationships of the conjugal family, along with the belief that the nuclear family was the original cell of society, were seriously challenged by social scientists in the nineteenth century.
THE INCEST TABOO AND THE FAMILY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
In the nineteenth century, the twin doctrines of progress and evolution began to compete with traditional Christian theology. These insurgent forces reflected a growing interest in learning about other societies in an effort to understand the dynamics of social and cultural change. While the study of alien cultures dates back to Greek and Roman times, only in the nineteenth century did scholars of the Enlightenment attempt to organize ethnographic materials with an evolutionary interpretation of history. After concluding that “ruder” societies were at different developmental stages than the societies of Western Europe, social theorists devised a hierarchal scale of progress, assigning native populations to particular stages of evolution in terms of how culturally advanced they were along the road to Western civilization. Aboriginal peoples were also viewed as “living fossils” of earlier stages of societies through which modern European societies had already passed. So-called proof of this evolutionary interpretation of history was heralded by a “doctrine of survivals” postulating that odd relics found in more advanced societies were “leftovers” from prior stages of development along the road to civilization.
Above all, what fired the imagination of early theorists was speculation on the origins of marriage, family, and the incest taboo. Until researchers took to the field, it had been taken for granted that the European family plan was duplicated everywhere. But fieldworkers soon discovered that aboriginal family life differed dramatically from the Western bilateral plan. Rules of marriage, residence, and descent differed from those in the West, as did kinship terminology. Moreover, it became evident that in many preliterate societies, kinship was the structural basis of the entire society (see Trautmann 1987). To describe these kin-based societies (what today are typically termed “horticultural” and “pastoral” societies), social scientists were forced to take up new vocabularies, with the result that terms such as “lineage,” “clan,” “gens,” “sib,” “moiety,” “phratry,” and “tribe” became part of the European lexicon. The discovery of alternative family forms also forced the coining of such new terms as “exogamy” (marrying outside one’s
group) and “endogamy” (marrying inside one’s group) to describe exchange relationships and marriage patterns in many preliterate societies. And once kinship became a subject for scientific investigation, the door was opened for theories on the origins of the family and the incest taboo (for historical background, see Harris 1968; Trautmann 1987; Honigmann 1976; and Stocking 1968).
THE HORDE AS A SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCT
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887)
J. J. Bachofen, a Swiss-German professor of Roman law at Basel University, was one of the first theorists to become fascinated with the origins of the family. In 1861, after studying classic myths, symbols, and literary works, he published Das Mutterrecht (or mother right), a semiscientific work proposing the extraordinary hypothesis that the first human families were organized around females. For Bachofen, the matrifocal family came first and only later did a patrifocal kin structure emerge. For Bachofen (1931, 157), the study of the classics can “lead us from the known ages of antiquity into earlier periods and from the world of ideas that has been so familiar to us . . . into an older milieu, wholly unknown.”
In Bachofen’s evolutionary scheme, human society began with a loosely knit “horde” of unrestricted promiscuity, followed by a “gynaecocratic epoch” where females in a religious zeal created marriage and matrilineal kinship revolving around female dominance. Later, males asserted themselves and, over time, transformed kinship to a pattern of patrilineal descent. Bachofen suggested that descent through females was an “entire cultural stage” universal to all humankind and that during this stage the “maternal element” permeated every facet of life from an overriding emphasis on communal values to binary contrasts revolving around a preference for the left hand over the right, the night over the day, the moon over the sun, the earth over the ocean, the dead over the living, and the experience of sorrow over joy (Bachofen 1931, 160–61). Bachofen’s stage model is more mysticism than science, but his efforts to describe the systematic development of the family as a distinct institution were insightful for their time. He was also the first theorist to explore the idea of a matrifocal and matrilineal stage of evolution in human societies.
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)
Lewis Henry Morgan a lawyer, businessman, and politician who took an interest in American Indian tribes also sought to uncover the origins of the family. Until Morgan entered the field, very little was known about the nomenclature (terms of address) that aboriginal societies used to designate relatives. Except for Western kinship terminology such as mother, father, grandfather, aunt, and cousin, Europeans did not have a vocabulary for expressing extended family ties, and indeed the Western kinship system (with its emphasis on the small domestic unit) is very limited when denoting consanguinity outside the nuclear core, especially for remote connections.5 What surprised Morgan was that the nuclear family terms of mother, father, sister, and brother were applied by Native Americans to a much larger circle of relatives (see Tooker 1997). After sending a questionnaire around the globe asking government agents, missionaries, military personnel, and other interested parties to provide what information they could on the kinship systems of native communities, Morgan discovered that most aboriginal societies shared fundamental kinship features, suggesting a common origin. When completed, the Tables (as they came to be called) were composed of a sample of 139 kinship systems from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. These tables garnered wide attention and composed two hundred pages of Morgan’s voluminous six-hundred-page text, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). In seeking to explain why so many differences existed among societies in their naming and classification of relatives, Morgan isolated what he thought were two basic types of kinship systems—the descriptive and the classificatory. In Western societies, the kinship system is descriptive, he said, because the terms that denote husband, wife, mother, father, brother, sister, son, and daughter are discrete and distinguish the designee from all other relatives. In contrast, among American Indians and most aboriginal peoples around the world, the kinship system is classificatory because the primary kinship terms—mother, father, sister, and brother—are applied in a variety
5.Western kinship is a bilateral or cognatic system, a subtype of Eskimo. Common features associated with this system are a small domestic group, a kindred rather than a single-sided lineage, and an “Ego” who is equally related to particular persons on both sides of the family.
of ways to broader classes of relatives (i.e., both lineal and collateral relatives), with all members of a class called by the same term.6 Morgan then used his study of kinship relationships to develop an evolutionary model of how the family originated and progressed to the modern contemporary form exhibited in Western Europe. Of special significance is Morgan’s dismissal of the family as a natural social unit that had always existed. Instead, he proposed that the human family was purely invented and that even the “idea” of family is the end result of previous stages of evolutionary development, with the Western nuclear family the most recent stage.
In 1877, Morgan published Ancient Society, his most influential work, where he argued that the ancient family had passed through five sequential forms, with distinct marriage rules peculiar to each form. Essentially Morgan asked, How did the idea of the family originate and progress to the modern form? To answer this question, Morgan used the Tables as relational blueprints to reconstruct the stages of the family. During the first stage, humans lived in a disorganized horde where sexual relations were dominated by promiscuity (Morgan [1877] 1985, 500). Although neither Morgan nor anyone else had ever observed such a horde, it was the only way to conceptualize life before the family. In the second stage of development, the family took its institutional roots with marriage among groupings of brothers and sisters (who were not always blood siblings but collateral kin designated by the terms “brother” and “sister”), followed in the third stage by conjugal pairings that lasted only as long as they were pleasurable to the parties involved. In the fourth stage, polygyny (one male and several females) under patriarchal authority emerged, and in the final stage of development, the Western plan of stable, conjugal pairs arose. Thus the evolution of the family was viewed as moving from the promiscuous horde to increasing “civilization,” culminating in the Western nuclear family.
6.Strictly speaking, Morgan’s pioneering effort has a logical problem because all kinship systems merge some relatives under a single term. Western nomenclature singles out the nuclear family with such individual terms as mother, father, etc. but it lumps together other relations such as grandfather, aunt, and the catchall term, cousin. But what caught Morgan’s attention was the extension of nuclear terms to a wider circle of kinfolk (e.g., the term “father” gets extended to all males on the father’s side). Of course, this extended usage does not correspond to the European term (e.g., male parent), but nineteenthcentury kinship theorists inferred the equivalent meaning.
