Re: Incest taboos
Pamela N. Lindell (lindell@scs.unr.edu)
30 Apr 1995 04:11:58 GMT
Gil Hardwick (gil@landmark.iinet.net.au) wrote:
:
: To that extent all societies are divided between "them" and "us". In
: the anonymous West "the few members of the immediate family" only
: makes sense in terms of the "wider mass society". In other smaller
: societies where everybody knows one another personally, "they" are
: other people only as remote in kinship terms as the grandmother's
: brother's daughter's family.
I think this fits into Levi-Strauss' "self vs. other" explanation of the
incest taboo as, but I think Malinowski's family structure
argument is worth considering also -- that is, sexual relations between
"family" memebers (whoever they might be) are not conducive to family
cohesion.
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