Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos: Two Aspects of Human Nature

by Arthur P. Wolf

Why do most people never have sex with close relatives? And why do they disapprove of other people doing so? Incest Avoidance and Incest Taboos investigates our human inclination to avoid incest and the powerful taboo against incest found in all societies. Both subjects stir strong feelings and vigorous arguments within and beyond academic circles. With great clarity, Wolf lays out the modern assumptions about both, concluding that all previous approaches lack precision and balance on insecure evidence. Researchers he calls "constitutionalists" explain human incest avoidance by biologically-based natural aversion, but fail to explain incest taboos as cultural universals. By contrast, "conventionalists" ignore the evolutionary roots of avoidance and assume that incest avoidant behavior is guided solely by cultural taboos. Both theories are incomplete. Wolf tests his own theory with three natural bint'amm (cousin) marriage in Morocco, the rarity of marriage within Israeli kibbutz peer groups, and "minor marriages" (in which baby girls were raised by their future mother-in-law to marry an adoptive "brother") in China and Taiwan. These cross-cultural comparisons complete his original and intellectually rich theory of incest, one that marries biology and culture by accounting for both avoidance and taboo.

Genres: Nonfiction

188 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2014

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a complete non-academic, I found this book clear, informative, and well-researched. It's the best defense of Westermarck's hypothesis that I've read, and his explanation of the emergence of the incest taboo is interesting and convincing. In particular, I found his accounts of the punishments for and attitude towards incest in a wide variety of societies fascinating, as well as unsettling. Anyone interested in studying incest should definitely read this.

[×× ri ×× · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh boy... this is very bad. And even worse, it may be intellectually dishonest - I can't find any other explanation for how the author manages to present data directly challenging or contradicting his main idea which boils down to "there is innate biological aversion to incest and that's why so many cultures have incest taboos"


While this idea is very neat on paper, I exist in the real world, and I don't have to go far to see that a significant number of people, in fact, don't find incest that repulsive. You can see it on porn sites where incest fetish is not an obscure fantasy and most importantly, in real life instances when incest is committed. 


Hell, Wolf himself even cites the study which concludes that somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all adult women have experienced some form of incest. Excuse me? If every tenth or fifth woman reports suffering from incest, it's not statistically insignificant discrepancy, and it can't be written off as a one-off chance of somebody overcoming natural aversion. Not to mention that women in the study are victims who may feel justified to call out their abusers. What about the perpetrators? What about female incest offenders? And heaven forbids, what about consensual incest? 


Honestly, I feel like there is a conspicuous lack of testimonies by people experiencing incestuous attraction. Wolf will gladly cite somebody reacting to incest negatively, but when it comes to representing the opposite side... it's crickets, man. Wolf would have you believe that incest hardly ever occurs! Shouldn't you, as a researcher, at least indicate that you tried obtaining reports by incest perpetrators or something? Nope, there's nothing.


With issues as stigmatized as incest, can we really expect people attracted to their family members to come forth and just admit it?.. It's almost as if social repercussions and backlash would outweigh honesty. If my point is still not convincing, think how many pedophiles would vehemently condemn pedophilia publicly. But what would I know :)))) Maybe we could all benefit by taking self-reports on how repugnant incest is with a grain of salt.


Wolf cites people's reaction to hypothetical consensual brother-sister incest scenario as a pivotal point in his studies, as it was then when he started to believe that incest aversion was ingrained in human biology. But can you really separate cultural conditioning by physiological aversion in this case? All I was thinking was, as someone brought up and still living in a homophobic society, homosexuality would warrant a similar knee jerk reaction here. And allow me to use some anecdotal evidence with my baby cousin who was still in elementary school when she expressed strong disapproval of homosexuality when asked, and after thinking for a short while even came up with reasoning that beautiful people should have beautiful children. What I'm trying to say is that social conditioning against a particular phenomenon can happen very early on.


Speaking of social conditioning, Wolf explores what taboo is and inadvertently contradicts himself. He reports that aside from incest, cultures also considered plethora of natural phenomena as ominous and unnatural, for example when a child was born abnormally, i.e., feet first, or when twins were born (with the latter being killed in certain cultures). So, it seems that social taboos (incest, homosexuality, menstruation, twins, etc) are somewhat arbitrary with incest being one of a few instances when a broken clock is right: inbreeding is really not ideal evolutionary.


By the way, this book made me come up with my own theory of incestuous attraction. It stands to reason that what we are attracted to stems from genetic and epigenetic factors. Since inbreeding results in a lot of disorders, individuals inclined to incestuous reproduction simply didn't survive natural selection with the majority of human not having genetic predisposition to be attracted to close relatives. Later cultural aversion was formulated: if the majority can't relate to your lived experiences, then you are the one who's wrong and should be punished.


Ahh,,, this is getting embarrassingly long.... I just wanted to say a couple more things. I find strawmanning the opposite side cringe and unconvincing if you are just A LITTLE BIT familiar with the subject at hand. Honestly, you don't even have to be read on it, just look around and see how unrealistic Wolf's arguments are. W sigmund freud or whatever. 


ANd!!! The chapter on the connection between witchcraft and incest was very interesting and new to me! Not that it helped Wolf's case but!