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The
subject of the
portrait on the right panel is an Egyptian boy from the Roman
era (first three centuries CE). Twenty percent of married
couples in Egypt at the time were full siblings. In fact, it
is estimated that 50% of those who had a marriageable sibling of the
opposite sex actually did marry that sibling. It appears that
those marriages were romantic, erotic and reproductive associations, to
the same extent that non-sibling marriages were.
Such
historical anecdotes add to the fascinating body of historical,
sociological and ethnographic research into the practice and avoidance
of sexual relations between closely related humans, as well as the way
such sexual contacts are conceptualised and experienced by participants in
different historical and cultural conjunctions.
Incest
and its avoidance – traditional anthropological concerns –
have become important stakes in the debate
surrounding sociobiology. In my MA research I sought to evaluate
the state of knowledge that has accumulated in this contentious field.
Although
the work was written in the 1990s, not much has changed in the field
and the work continues to be relevant. (You can get some sense of
the current state of the field from Wolf, A.R. and W.H. Durham (eds) Inbreeding, Incest and the Incest Taboo.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.) My MA thesis
has never been published, yet some of the data it reviews and arguments it makes might well prove beneficial to the
academic discourse on sociobiology and incest avoidance. So I thought I would
post
the material on the Web in the hope that somebody finds it useful.
Under the
Roman Egyptian portrait you will find a link to the thesis. It is
scanned in pdf. You will also find there a link to a paper that
was published in the proceedings of the Australasian Society for Human
Biology, and a brief response I wrote to a cultural-reductionist paper
that had been published earlier in the American Anthropologist.
The paper
in the ASHB proceedings summarises the main argument concerning the
Westermarck hypothesis (according to which childhood proximity between
a boy and a girl would result in sexual disinterest between them at
adulthood) and the adaptationist argument that is often predicated upon
it.
The thesis
itself, though, contains the argument in more detail as well as some
of the empirical case studies that are highly relevant, some of which
have not been incorporated into the debate (e.g. the preponderance of
mother-son incest among reported instances of incest in Japan – see section 5.4).
The
critique in the American Anthropologist, or rather, the response of the
original author, would mostly indicate how the ideologically charged
nature of the debate has served to detract from its intellectual
standards. This is an unfortunate state of affairs that has
hampered the development of anthropological understanding of
corporeality, and has left the effective critique of sociobiological
reductionism to biologists (e.g. Maynard-Smith, Gould and Lewontin).
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