Table Of ContentINCEST AND IDENTITY: A CRITIQUE AND
THEORY ON THE SUBJECT OF EXOGAMY AND
INCEST PROHIBITION
Roy
WAGNER
Nmthweltnn. Un;WNity
Traditionally the incest taboo has been among the most widely reported (or
assumed) of all ethnographic 'traits'; it is commonly cited as an example of a
'universal' aspect of human culture, or even as a definitive property of human
culture. Consequently, the prohibition of incest has frequently served as an a
priori for relating to human society, its origins, and its con
~tu1ate theor~
stitution, exemplified recently by the writings of Claude Uvi-Suauss (1969).
Whereas Uvi-Strauss derives his notion of incest prohibition (which is really a
theory of exogamy) from Mauss's rules of reciprocity (the obligations to give, to
receive, and to reciprocate), and thus Stresses its association with human symbolic
or cognitive culture, as does Livingstone (I969), others, such as Kortmulder (r968)
and Aberle et (JI. (I963), have suggested that incest prohibition is a behavioural
tendency, that it is natural in origin, however much man may utionalise its
existence. The issue of whether incest prohibition is essentially natural or cultural is
symptomatic of the dilemma facing modem anthropology, with its deep seated
dilferences as to which of our own categorics, natural law or human reason, is
more appropriate for the representation of cultural phenomena. Fascinating as this
issue may be, the possibility remains that proponents of both alternatives ace guilty
of reifying what is merely an artefact of our own didactic constructs, and that the
problem of incest prohibition, as it is commonly conceived, is a pseudo-problem,
whose real centre of gravity lies elsewhere. In this article 1 should like to explore
this possibility, examining the varioU$ facets of the problem, and to state a few
tentative conclusions.
Those who have argued that incest prohibition in human beings is natural in
origin have had to rely upon two uther perilous inferences. The first is that
behavioural regularities, or generalisations, can be inferred from ideal statements
or formulations of human culture, or in other words, that incest is a real 'thing'
rather than a kind of meaning or a way of speaking about things (Wagner 1968).
The second is that behavioural regularities observable among other animals are
in some significant sense analogous to prohibitions in human culture. Both these
assumptions tend toward metaphol"S based on the anthropomorphism of animal
culture or the zoomorphism of human culture, although this by no meam precludes
their value as analogies. It is dear, however, that the major impetus for discovering
'incest' avoidance among other animal societies derives from the ethnographers'
assumption that incest-prohibition is a unitary phenomenon in human societies,
oc that it is in fact definitive of human society. Thus our focus returns to the
plausibility of this assenion, and to the question of what the incest taboo really is.
"" MAN, DECEMBER 1\l72, VOL 7. NO.4
When I speak of 'incest', r mean acts of a sexual (or monlly equivalent) nature
as undentood to be coIllll1itted between persons manifesting kin roles that explicitly
or implicitly exclude them. When I speak of 'exogamy', I mean the moral in
junction to select recognised sexual partners and/or spouses from social units other
than those of which one is a member (or to which one is otherwise closely related).
In all insunces, these injunctions are contingent upon the ideal mon! codes of the
cultures concerned.
The notion of incest presupposes a conception of kin role. and where no
COll
ception of this sort is found to be present, the tenn is inapplicable, except perhaps
as a 'projection' on me part of the observer. The notion of exogamy depends in a
similar way on the conceptualisation of social units. It is important here to dis
tinguish between the descriptive use of these t<:rms to 'glO!Js' behavioural acts, as
one might do in speaking of 'incest' among dogs, or of' exog.tmous' troops of
primates, and the recognition of incdtuous or exogamic behaviour meaningful
<IS
to the acton themsdves. In the former instance the 'kinship' and 'social units'
involved are construCt!) of the observer, and 'incest' and' exogamy' derive their
rdevance solely from his use of snch social comJY.lrisolU. In the second case incest
and exogamy can be treated as operative categories. provided of course that we are
precisely clear as to what we mean by them, and what the subjects of our study
mean by them.
Numerous attempts have been made to define the two concepts more precisely,
by generalising upon the content of particular ideologid and codes, but, as in the
case of' totemism " they are
... like hyueria. in that oncc we au pcnuaded to doubt that it iJ p<>IIIible arbitrarily to
j,ol;l.re certain phenomena and to group them together a. diagnOstiC lign. of an illlle". or of
an objective institution, the Jymptom, themselves vanish or appe.or I"C'fractory to any unifyl"g
interprewion '962: I).
(Uvi~Straus,
The definitional pwblem becomes one of trying to find some univenal, objective
content characteristic of all conceptions of 'incest' or 'exogamy', that its
$0
universal existence as a 'fact' (and hence a universal 'cause' for the fact) can be
adduced. In the case of incest, such efforts have generally addressed themselvd to
the genealogical specifications of the prohibitions, to the importance and distri
bution of certain genealogically specific prohibitions (,mother-son', 'father
daughter', 'sibling'), or to the' extension' of certain 'basic' prohibitions(i.e. those
of the nuclear family). In the instance of exogamy, the issue has become enmeshed
in the problem of distinguishing ideal social units fwm localised residential groups.
Exogamy has been made to appear' factual' and real in many cases by assuming
that the former and the latter coincide-that is, like incest, it has been objectified
by identifying it with an empirical base. Here I ptopose to treat both incest and
exogamy as issues involving the conscious, mOr.:ll meanings in human culture
rather than the subliminal implications of affect or social function. I shall begin by
examining our grounds for' objectifying' the incest taboo, and return presently
to the question of exogamy.
* * * * *
Ifkinship were a pl"C£ise, objective rendering of genealogy in all cases and in all
cultures, and ifits terms and relations invariably represented genealogical orderings,
MAN, DECEMBER 197J, VOL. 7, NO. of
then we would be justified in speaking of 'kinship' in all instance:<; of hi ogene tie
connexion, or in extending other meanings characteristic of kinship usage to
purdy o~rvational data. But kinship is not simply descriptive of genealogy; iu
reference to gene;;logical orderings is selective at best, and this selection is the result
of interpretation. A kinship term brings together a set of rdative:<; and a relationship
(Schneider 1968), or a nonnative code of behaviour, which has a real, symbolic
meaning. Whencomponentialanal}'$is proceeds to' defme' akin term with reference
to iu gene;;logical denotata (Lounsbury 19(4), the character of the kin rei4tionship,
to which the tenn also refen, is taken for gunted or ignored. Problems of this sort
beset all approaches that base themselves on the assumption that class.i£cation and
lexical signification are equivalent to meaning \Wagner 1970), but the point here is
particularly acute, because the issue of ince:<;t regulation involVe:<; precisely the
connexion between kin denotation and kin relationship. The possibility, or p.:rhaps
the likelihood, of marriage and sexual relations is an aspect of the relationship
between persons (including, in some cases, kinsmen), and any particular s}'$tem of
incest prohibition amoun13 to a statement of what kinds of relationships should
characterise what categories ofkirumen. Dut of course if relationship is part of the
defmition of a kin category, as I suggeSt it should be, then a statement of incest
prohibitions vis-J-viscategoriesis the purest and mOSt trivw. of tautologies, because
the very S;J.me rationale, and the very interpretive scheme that defines the content
of the relationships also determines the genealogical correlate:<; of the corres
ponding categories.
Perhap$ an example would help to clarify tbe matter. If we chose to describe a
system of incest prohibition in a purely denotative way, treating only the genea
logical correlates of kin categories as objective' data', we should have to begin by
making two lists, separating out the terms corresponding to 'prohibited' relatives,
and listing them separately from those with whom sex or marriage is 'permitted'.
(I am assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that all terms can be classed unambig
uously in one sc:t or the other; this is certainly not always the case). Our two lists
will rell us, in a crude and rather uncomprehensive fashion, something about tbe
general outlines of a SyJtem ofinccst prohibition. They will tell us very little about
the relationships involved, for these are abstracted to the simplistic scheme: sex
and/or marriage prohibired versus sex and/or marriage permitted, and they will
tell us very little about the rationale for the constitution of the kin categories
themselves, for these will be stated in the barest genealogical terms. But the
relationships that regulate marriage and sex are often quite complex, and have
many nuanccs and qualifications, and there are often culturally defined kindJ of
behaviour (such as prohibitions on speaking, joking, touching, seeing, etc.), which
have a dose bearing on marriage and sexu;;l relations; a description that would
take account of these would have to 'break down' its listings into a commensurate
number of gradations.
This, too, could be done, by composing a separate list of genealogically specified
terms for each particular aspect of prescribed behaviour relevant to marriage and
incest prohibition, and for every qualification of it. Of course each list would have
to be accompanied by a gloss, and the r.et of lists as whole would require a
.1
comprehensive statement regarding their interrelationship. It would be found, in
fact, that the complete set of lists, taken together with their glosses and the state-
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MAN, DECEMBER I\l7;>, VOL. 7, NO. -4-
ment of theif interrelationship, amountto nothing moreor less than a rationale for the
assignment of certain genealogical loci to certain categories on the basis of relation
ship. or more simply, a replication of the kinship system itself In other words, the
system of incest prohibitions is sub'lUmed within the kinship' system', and can
not be separated from it, we have seen, the same rationale both defines the
fOf a!l
categories and specifies the relationships among them. There is no difference
between a kinship system and a system of incest prohibition, hence there can be no
relation between them. A false problem is created. by sepuating relationship from
genealogical denotation and then inquiring about the relation between the two;
only if kin category and kin relationship were distinct phenomena couJd we
prop<:dy speak: of a rdation between them.
If we assume that kin category is a matter of genealogical denotation,
or groupiug, alone, then the whok matter of kin relationship, having boxu
excluded from 'kiruhip' proper, becomes problematic. Herein, I suspect, lies the
origin of the incest taboo, or at least of the anthropologist's perception of it; it
sums up the relational' residuum' remaining after kinship has been reduced to
genealogical denotation, and does so in genclllog;cal temu (' it is forbidden to mate
with one's father, mother, siblings, etc.'). Traditionally, social anthropology has
analysed kiruhip by a process of taking genealogical denotation and relationship
'apart', and then 'putting them back together' by examining the ways in which
members of a given culture treat various genealogically defmed relatives. The
llX1ls dllssicus of this approach is Radcliffe-Brown's paper 'The mother's brother
in South Africa' (I9(lS), although it originated in Rivers's pioneering introduction
and use of the' genealogial method '. Linguistic anthropology, basing itself upon
Kroeber's allegation that kin terms are primarily linguistic and 'psychological'
(19Q9), has contented itself merely with taking genealogical denotation alone, and
ignoring relationship. In both cases, the dissociation of genealogical category from
kin relationship is a premiss of didactic procedure, as is the similar dissociation that
Uvi-Srrauss's discussion of the 'atom of kinship' (1963: 48) requires. In all these
instances, relationship is artificially isolated as a thing in itself, and the so-called
'incest taboo', the archetype of kin relationship in and of itself, becomes plausible
as a distinct and discrete entity.
The relation that traditional anthropology has postulated between kinship
denotation and kin relationship has largely been jundionll/, proposing that the ways
in which certain genealogical relatives are conventionally treated constitute factors
that integrate society and 'hold it together'. This is a key assumption ofRadcWfe
Brown's functionalism, and it continues to give kinship acentru place in the societal
theories of Forces and others. Following the discussion in the preceding paragraph,
it becomes apparent that the incest taboo is a siM qua non, almost a kind of charter,
of this approach. If function is taken as the prime creative and explanatory factor
in the constitution of society, then kin relationship must come before kin denota
tion ('structure'), hence an incest taboo is taken as the origin of kinsbip, and of
society. The proponents of a biological explanation for the incest taboo have
performed what could be called a • Malinowskian tr.msfonnarion' of this society
centred, or Durkheimian, functionalism. 'Function', in this instance, is simply
reinterpreted as a natural, rather than a cultural, necessity; instead of' integrating'
society, the incest taboo becomes a necessary force in ke.:ping the stock healthy
"'s
M"N, DECEMBER 1972, VOL 7, NO, 4
(Aberle rl aI, 1963, disputed by Livingstone 19(9) or in holding down disruptive
aggression (Kortmulder 1968),
Given this theoretical background, it is surprising that mthropologists
~rcdy
have typio.lly represented incest regulation as a law or rule, that is as a ronventional
stricture governing a rebtionship. Whether this ' law' is an artefact of culture or
nature is a matter to be contended among the social and biological determinists,
but it is significant in the light of our discussion of kinship that the primary
meanings of'law' and 'rule' refer to the regulation of human relatioru. Thus, in
terms ofkiruhip, the incest taboo is a rule that tempers man's' bestial' or 'natunl'
tendencies via the rational order of culture, and therefore a kind of equivalent of
Rousseau's contrat social, an arbitrarily adopted rule existing qua rule to provide a
basis for culture. Uvi-Strauss, who is among other things an avowed Rousseauian,
has nude much of this aspect in chapter 3 {'The universe of rules} of his Elementary
stru(tur,s o/kinship (19(9).
The conventional notion of the incest taboo is therefore the resuit of two serial,
linked assumptioru. The first is that kinship can be defined as a structure, or
classificatory set, of genealogical denotatioru, to the exclusion of kin relationships.
The second, which follows from this, is that this residuum of kin relationships,
comprehensible as an arbitrarily imposed' rule' epitomised in the incest taboo,
detumines the kinship system in an a priori, functional sense. I have presented
arguments to the elfect that the first assumption is a didactic and theoretical subter
fuge, and that kin relationship and kin category .1fe inseparable by definition. I
should now like to examine the second assumption, with particular attention to the
notion of mle, or law.
• • • • •
The concept of' bw' or 'rule' (as in 'the rules of a society') is doubdess largely
used as a heuristic device in anthropology, referring to a moral or normative' order'
that goverru relationships in a given society. The concept is heuristic, based on
resemblance and analogy ramer thm literal applio.tion, because many societies
recognise neither codified 'laws' or 'rules' nor' official' means of enforcing them,
and hence their orders of'law' are not directly wmparable to our own. The more
general term 'norm' is therefore often employed so as to neutralise the speci£cilly
'authoritarian' connotations of 'law' or 'rule', and generalising constructs like
'social control' or 'conflict management' are used to counteract the 'loaded' and
rather particularistic associations of 'enforcement'. It is erue, of course, that all
analogies are subject to the dangers ofliteral interpretation and must be buttressed
from time to time with qualifications of this sort, if only because analogy is our
sole way of extending meanings, as interpretive constructs, to encompass' new'
phenomena. If one analogy is rejected, in other words, some other analogy will
have to replace it, so why not refme and work with the ones we have? This
propo$ition makes excellent sense in many cases, and has lent its stabilising in
fluence to much of contemponry anthropology. But the danger implicit in all
such analogies is that of extending naive or unspoken assumptions about our own
usages and institutions to those of the subject culture.
The major failing of a theory of social action based on norm as 'law' is that it
exaggerates and emphasises the socially supportive aspects of human relations at me
MAN, DECEMBER 19'72, VOL 7, NO. .(
expense of their meaningful content, that is, it 'maps' a broad spectrum of quali
tatively different meanings on to the narrow dimensions of conformity and
deviance. The message of the' social contract' is that rules exist in and of themselves
so as to provide a basis for the existence of society, and the Durkheimian corollary
to this is that all the meanings and actions in a society can be understood in terms of
social effect. In this view, which underlies functionalism as well as most sociological
theory, the meaningful aspects of thought and action in a culture are only accessible
via their effective socia1 consequences, and meaning is seen as anci11ary to social
purpose and effect-iekas become 'beliefS' or 'rationalisations', beause social
interests presuppose commitment. An unqualified norm, suted as such, has the
force of an ad 110' or arbitrary ruling, one that is arbitrarily and factitiously assumed
'because there have to be rules'. It is no wonekr that when Durkheimian anthr"
pology explained society in these terms some anthropologists beg;m to suspect a
natural origin for the incest taboo, for, as a 'law' or 'norm', it has no necessary
involvement with the meaning system ofa culture, and might just as well have been
imposed from the' outs.ide'. It is only when norms and laws em be shown to exist
as a function of the meaning system of a culture, and to derive their force from
fiat,
meaning rather than arbitrary that the artifIcial distinction between meaning
and action, and hence between culture and society, is overcome. Laws art: never
imposed without being presupposed, and this holds true for the legislative and
interpretative aspects of our own society as well as for the more informal workings
of tribal societies.
What I would suggest, by way of a modification of our concept of 'norm', is
that the norms or rules of a society derive their moral and social effect from their
meaningful content, that is, from their relationship to other meanings in tIle cul
ture. The norms of a given society, I submit, are not all of the same kind; they admit
of varying degrees of imporuoce or seriousness, and are differentially' obeyed'
or CC;1pected, although the edicts of a centralised state may impart a false semblance
of uniformity by being codiflCd as 'laws', whereby the state insists on token
obedience for symbolic reasons. (This is the 'ruler's view' of norms, in which
obedience to even the most arbitrary edict becomes a symbol of submission to the
state, a view that appears to have been internalised in Rousseau's conception of
society). The varying severity and significance among the norms of a particular
society is a direct result of variation in their meaningful content, the way in which
they make normatively' correct' action meaningful by oPPO$ing and relating to
other meanings in the culture. If incest prohibition in fact constitutes some in
trinsic and meaningful aspect or characteristic of human society, then we should
be abk to account for its normative 'foree' in terms of meaning; if it is tnlt, as I
have argued, that incest tegulation is subsumed within the kinship system, then this
meaning must also involve kinship.
Nonns, including the various kin roles that help to dcfme the meaningful aces
of a 'moral person', can be seen as' controls' for the expression of individuality and
personal motivation. An indlvidual is taught, abjured, encouraged, and con
I
stram.ed to behave 'as a good child, adult, man, woman. etc. mould', and is
expected to try his best. But in the event no one can approximate these modds
completdy, and each p=n inadvertently 'does it his own way' and thus mani
fests his own individuality through the eccentricities ofhis performance. Thus any
MAN, DECEMBER I972, VOL. 7, NO. "
particular human being can only 'be' the idealised 'moral person' in a metaphoric
sense.
But in the same way, the expression of a person's individuality, that which
clistinguishe$ him from othen via special skills, attrihutes, needs, desires, penonality
characteristics, etc., acts as a control on his moral performance. No human being
can spe<:ialise or differentiate himself completely; in the attempt to 'become' a
ghost or god in a religious perfonnance the actor invariably anthropomorphises his
role. The conscious expression of meaning thus precipitates its own dialectical
response: trying to be moral creares our individuality, trying to be individual
creates morality.
The difference between intention and performance 'prodnces' social meaning
understood as the idealised assumption of a moral image of man-and also the
individual meaning manifested in personal naming, craft specialisation, talent,
genius, ete. The differences and similarities perceived cnlturally to exist among
hnman beings are thus interdependent in their definition. Every act of differentia
tion is meaningful only in so far as it retains the moral and normative 'standard'
for humanity as its context; every expression of moral significance is achieved
over and against individual difference. Cultural similarity and difference are there
fore relative to one another ; society provides the standard, the equation or organisa
tion, in temu of which a girl is pretty, a poet is dever, and the hunter can obtain
pots from the potter, or the latter acquire meat for his table. Differentiation, in
tum, serves as the context for moral idealisation.
This interplay provides the dynamic through which meaning is embodied in
social action; in societies such as our own where laws are rendered 'antomatic'
through codification and enforcement, this dynamic re-asserts itself in the legis
lative and judicial interpretation to which laws and their enforcement are subject.
Whether or not codification and enforcement are present, however, conttastive
cultural meaning is the ultimate patent of normative force. The Row.seauian model
of society, based on the notion of rule as such. views nonnative force in an abwiute
sense, that is, as a 'discipline' that is necessary, irrespective of its content, for the
maintenance of social order, and the neo-Rousseauians among contemporary social
scientists, by basing their analyses upon 'confonnity' and 'deviance', make the
same assumption. What I would suggest here is that law and normative force
should be approached in relative terms, in so far as they ultimately derive from the
contrastive, mutable relations that generate cultural meaning.
Kin relations can be understood as a panicular modality of the norms through
which social meaning i~ objectified, and individwl expIe$.';ion is controlled. We
might think. of' kinship' in this way as a symbolisation of how various u tegories
of people should act towards one another, couched in tenns of the metaphors that
define hnmanness. Precisely because they generalise the human condition, drawing
upon 'vital' attributes that all persons share in common (or are thought to), the
content of these metaphors has becnlimited to a few recurrent themes. Character
istica1ly, they involve procreation and the activities and substances associated with
it, food and nurture, and animation ('soul' or 'spirit'). Ideologies phrased in terms
of 'blood', 'blood and bone', 'body and spirit', 'male sperm and mother's milk',
or the giving and receiving offood are ubiquitous in world ethnography. The error
of many traditional kinship studies, as discussed previously, has been that of reifying
<>OS MAN, DECEMBER 197~. VOL. 7. NO.4
these imageries, interpreting 'biological' metaphor as if it were naturalistic fact
(or some form of folk empiricism; see Schneider 1972).
fullowing our discussion of norms, however, we might expect that these
'genenHsing' societal metaphors, as the objective control on the expression of
penonal or group identity, will often be reflected in that expression. Thus if
'blood' is the crucial symbol of humanness, specific bloodlines will be <fucin
guished as 'Smith' blood, 'Jones' blood etc. A marrilge, or exchange of vital
fluids, between two iudividuab manifesting' Smith' blood would in elfect distin
guish the participants as 'Smiths' rather than human bcings; it would make use of
the forms through which humanity is constituted to assert individual identity. In
the objective language of ideology, this would amount to a 'mixing' of one sub-.
stance with itself, which is indeed oue of the ways in which incest is commonly
defined .
.But by so doing, by failing to bt human and converting a general ideological act
into a private 'marriage', the incestuous offender simulbneously violateS the
morality ofp enonal motivation. The ways in which a penon can differ from othen
are all contingent upon his essential humanity; ifhis skills, blents, desires, acrioru,
etc .• fail to 'anthropomorphise' him, the reflection is on his volition. He is then
said to be 'bestial' or 'morutrous', to have 'no shame', no tempering of his desires
towards othen, to be ' inhuman' by default or inclination.
Thus, beC4use of the interdependence of social meaning and penonal morality
resulting from the dialectk of' controls', failure to achieve the ideal metaphor of
'being' human-however this is culturally defmed-has immediate consequences
for the actor's personal identity. The formal expression of cultural meaning can
no more be separated from personal motivation and inclination than kin cate
gorisation can be separated from kin relationship. A person identifies himself
through his social actions, and acquires (or loses) his 'humanity' through his
penonal acts and inclinarioru. Because the controls are interlinked, every act, and
every situation, is simultaneously 'social' and 'individual'; people belong to
cultures, and cultures are made up of people.
But identity, as a form of cultural meaning, does not necessarily pertain to
individua1s alone. Social units, large or small, including territorial complexes,
bloodlines, families, nations and lineages are all differentiated in the process of
identifying them, and this differentiation is as intimately bound up in a dialectk
with the cultural image ofhumanncs:s as is that of kinship. JUSt as the incest taboo
emerges as an artefact of the belief in 'natunl' kinship. so the arguments deriving
exogamy from social needs have proceeded from the reification of idealised social
units as groups' on the ground'. This is the sense ofTylor's famous dictum that;
Again and again in the world', history, lav::tge tribes mUlt have had plainly before lheir
mit.ru the ffinple practical alternative between marrying-out and being killed oul (1889).
It is undentandable that Tylor, as the author of a doctrine of 'survivals', might
have considered a one-to-one correspondence between social unit and local group
to be part of a prior evolutionary state of man, but later authors who have used
this argument, such as White (r948), have had no such excuse. In point of faer,
world ethnography shows many instances (such as the peoples of the northern
Northwest Coast inAmerica, orthe Dani of the Daliem Valley in West Irian) where
MAN, DECEMBER 1972, VOL. 7, NO.4
members of two or more exogamom uniu will inhabit the same community and
intermarry within it. In such cases unit exogamy becomes village endogamy, and
the problem of 'marrying out' versus 'marrying in' is a matter of definition, Dut
so, I would argue, is the issue of exogamy itself: it turns upon the identification of
specific, named wlits as against the social colle<tivity.
An example may help to illustrate the point. Consider a society composed of
exogamous 'totemic' wlits, with names :mch as 'eagle', 'badger', etc. The social
identity of each unit is created through the meuphor of 'being' eagles or badgers
in relation to the other units in the society (as human beings, as a kind of hunun
being. they are badgers), The metaphor may be highly c:laborated, with all sorts of
mythic and ceremonial embellishments, including legends of dcscc:nt from eagles
or badgers, or it may be barely stated, but in either insunce the effect is to differ
entiate the unit from others and implicidy deny its similarity to them (they are
'alike' as eagles are to badgers, rather than as men to men), The meaning of the
societal whole, on the other hand, must be asserted through this very dilferentiation,
lest the metaphor of' separateness' becomes a conceptual reality. The' eagles' and
'badgers' must anthropomorphisc: themselves by intermarrying, something that
'real' eagles and badgers never do, and thus affinn their humanity (as badgers they
are human beings),
Ofc ourse the foregoing is an extreme instance:, valuable largely for its illustrative
elfect, but the interdependence of social meaning (the ideal of humanness) and
unit identity that it depicts is crucial to the understanding of exogamy, The
identity of a social wlit may be constituted through 'totemic' metaphors, as in our
example, or through territorial, historical, or religious symbolisations, and the
units themselves may appear as moieties, households, part-societies, or lineages,
but in any case it is the tension between this identity and the ideal of a common
humanity that exogamy maintains. (The phenomenon of Indian caste endogamy,
as analysed by Levi-StrauiS (1966: ch. 4) ptesents an interesting inversion of this
rdatioruhip, in which the culmral definition of man differentiates, whereas the
moral collectivity is aiSc:ned through the exchange of services. In this system there
arc different kinds of men, all of whom are alike in their needs.) An individual who
marries within his own exogamous wlit compromises a cultural image of man by
default; he particularises his own humanity by asscrting hinuelf;tS one kind of man.
As an infraction of cultural norm, such an act mayor may not be considered
serious; frequently it is dismissed as a trivial matter, The ideological imporunce:
of the social unit- and therefore of the re-affinnation of one's humanity through
its particular symbols-is likewise highly variable over the range of human
societies. The wide variety of attitudes and punishmenu involving the breach of
exogamy- ranging from a strongly professed concern to almost complete in
difference-would seem to refie<t this variatioIL
Although they are generally different in intent and effect, incest prohibition
and exogamy are nevertheless both aspects or consequences of a more general
phenomenon: the interdependence of social meaning and individual (personal or
unit) identity. Society exists, and achievc:s meaning, through the anthropomor
phism of personal and group individnality; the significance of personal or group
identity is atuined through the various ways of 'being hunun'. Incestuous acts
and breaches of exogamy violate this interdependence by inverting it, causing the
MAN, DECEMBER 1972. VOL. 1. NO. "
actor to 'dchumanise' hinuclf through the (onns by which hwnanity is charnctef
istically asserted.
The variations in the prohibition of marriage or sexual relations encompassed
by the various cultures known to ethnography do indeed constitute a fascinating
subje<:t for anthropological speculation and investigation, but I have tried to show
that this subject is virtually identical with that of the respe<:cive kinship systems.
The 'universality' of the incest taboo ultimately reduces to the univcnal tendency
among social anthropologists to separate kin category from kin relationship as
part of their analysis, and to assume that genealogy, because it is useful in under
standing them., corutitutes a 'common denominator' of all kinship systems. The
'remarkable' fact that kinship systems all over the world prohibit mating among
dose relatives becomes less remarkable when we realise that those very kiruhip
systems (and hence the 'incest taboo' itself) determine who is a 'close' relative,
and that the determination and the prohibition are one and the $arne thing. The
illusion of an incest taboo can only be sustained by a belief in 'real' or 'objective'
kinship, for if' siblings' are different things in different cultures, how can 'sibling
incest' be the same thing in all of them? The regularities of human reproduction
provide only the barest outline ofkin differentiation, and are often disregarded or
blurred over in the act of interpretation, but it is this act, and only secondarily the
fact of procreation its.elf, that furnishes the meaning ofkiruhip.
* * * * *
I shall now attempt to summarise the points deduced or postulated here as a set
of conclusions, and add to these some observations relating the discussion to other
areas of anthropology.
The notion of an incest taboo is a consequence of the way in which anthro
T.
pologists have traditionally approached kiruhip, subdividing a set of gt.'Uealogicaily
kinship temu from the corresponding kin relationships. This division
speciflt~d
corresponds to the classical dichotomy of 'structure' and 'function', in which
the latter, as the dynamic, integrative aspect, provides the creative (and hence the
explanacory) impetus for the constitution of society. The static, tenninological
aspect is codi6ed in genealogical terms as a set of categories, which may then be
assigned to a typological niche (I.e. 'Eskimo', 'Iroquois', 'Crow', etc.). Kin
relationships are likewise typed and rei6ed as those of 'joking', 'avoidance', or
'respect', as well as being abstracted and simplified into what is known as the
incest taboo. It is suggested here that kinship cannot be simply equated with
gt.'Uealogy, and that kin relationships cannot be meaningfully separated from kin
catcgom:s.
Explanations of the incest taboo must perforce be conceived in fWlctional
2.
temu, if only because a 'taboo' operates to regulate human action, and is thus
functional ill effeet. 'Culturally' based explanations have stressed the a priori
necessity of the regulation of mating for the existence of human society: 'naturally'
based attempts have substituted genetic or bchaviouristic necessity for social need,
but otherwise the two arguments are very much alike.
3. In either case, the separation of cultural meaning (in the form of'structure'
or 'kin category') from cultural action (,function ') forces the explanation of the
incest taboo as an arbitrarily imposed' rule', with no necessary connexion to the
