Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Incest and its prohibition or avoidance are closely related social phenomena. However, the two topics have very distinct if not contrary intellectual histories in the social sciences. Incest, usually defined as sexual relations between close kin such as members of the same nuclear family, has merely been assumed to be a natural inclination of humanity to be guarded against by explicit social rules.
This essentially psycho-biological explanation for the deed, and its implicit assumptions about human nature, was exemplified by †Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1950). In this influential essay, set against the imagery of primate society and human origins as then conceived, Freud drew a stark contrast between *nature and culture: as the chaotic impulses of the former are denied and controlled by the latter. Indeed, as *Lévi-Strauss later argued in similar fashion, the establishment of a rule prohibiting incest creates the conditions for human culture as ‘nature transcends itself (1969:25).
But the evidence for such a proposition about human sexual impulses was merely assumed, reflecting a deep-seated aspect of Western cosmology rather than detailed knowledge of the evolutionary differences between human and nonhuman primate societies. Eventual studies of these social systems demonstrated the very opposite pattern, since inbreeding is strictly avoided by other primates. Thus, if incest is not a feature of our animal nature as previously supposed, its existence has gone unaccounted for in any theoretical sense.
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