Incest : Frontiers and Syncretism
(Université de Paris 8)
Originally written for the Colloquium 'Frontiers & Syncretism' at the University of Besançon, 1998
" We don't have a frontier; we have an argument. " (28., p.194)
Introduction : Three Ethnographers
Of the men whose work I ask you to consider here, Baldwin Spencer had the most solid social identity, but even he, the Englishman sent to make a career for himself at the other end of the world, the biologist who became an anthropologist, the European who found himself involved in what may have been one of the last great ceremonies of a stone-age tribe (the Arrernte), was something of an outsider, who had crossed a number of frontiers, both political and social.
His friend and co-author, an Australian-Irish rough diamond, living life as half government agent, half small tradesman among those same Arrernte, found himself, through his collaboration with Spencer, hoist into the rarefied universe of academic dispute - and began, fruitlessly, to dream of honours. (15, pp. 101-34, 31, pp. 87-99).
As for the third member of our trio, Bronislaw Malinowski, a science student turned philosopher, whose thesis on Mach earned him an imperial fanfare, a Pole who became an Englishman - seeing himself and often seen as an anthropological Conrad - a man who was to find himself an enemy alien on Australian soil at the outbreak of the First World War, and who was to forge a name for himself by living cheek by jowl with those whom, with an irony of which he was perhaps only partially aware, he referred to throughout his work as "savages", why he was most vociferously a professional pioneer, working in his own estimation at the very frontiers of anthropological knowledge, and out beyond the frontiers of civilisation (14, pp. 13-50, 6, passim).
When Spencer first met Gillen he brought with him in his bags a precious but dangerous gift, for he had arrived in Australia with the blessings of James Frazer; it was with his encouragement and support that the two men would embark upon their monumental investigations into the life of the Australian Aborigines (15, 101-31, 31, 81-100).
Frazer's interest in small-scale societies was fired by his belief that they would offer clues to the evolution of social life; Spencer and Gillen were therefore primed to look for traces of the original social organisation from which later and more complex forms derived. Their depictions of Aboriginal life were later to come under fire for just this reason; blinkered by the theoretical prejudices of English and American armchair anthropologists, the two field-workers are assessed as having found among the Arunta only what they expected to find.
Malinowski was to be instrumental in undermining the reputation of both men; in his first full work as an anthropologist, written before he had actually set foot in the field, he systematically presents them as thorough and admirable journeymen, lead astray by their faith in grand theories and evolutionary design (17, pp. 89-90). There is much truth in this judgement; they often sent reports to Frazer that comforted him in his opinions.
However, Spencer and Gillen's volumes are not purely dedicated to shoring up the shadowy fantasies of European intellectuals, but attempt to give a vivid and truthful picture of a culture which both they and their mentor believed to be condemned to disappear. That picture still makes compelling reading today.
Malinowski himself did not write his work upon the Australian family in full theoretical innocence. Although, by his own account, it was his reading of Frazer that lead him to Anthropology, the thinker that marked him most deeply was Westermarck (14, p. 25). And beyond Westermarck, beyond Mach, who Ernest Gellner has argued gave him his primary scientific orientation (10, passim), there may have been something else; on reading Freud, Malinowski declared that he had himself an Oedipal attitude to his mother, and dreamed of incest.
But is perhaps the figure of the father that has the more tenacious hold upon his vision of the world, as we shall see. Westermarck's insistence upon the primacy of the restricted family fed into Malinowski's desire to place the warmth of love between parent and child - and in particular to stress the bond between father and son.
The Incest Taboo
If I may offer here a rather humdrum image, we may conceive of our three anthropologists as producing a kind of ethnographic soup, within which float, more or less submerged, a number of theoretical dumplings1. Perhaps the soggiest and heaviest of those dumplings is the theory of the incest taboo.
The term is itself syncretic; incest is, of course, Latin in origin, while taboo is Tongan - the classical meets the exotic. They are similar in meaning, referring to interdiction, danger and uncleanliness; with time, as we know, the word incest has come to refer exclusively to that form of interdiction which governs sexual relations between those who are considered kin. The bringing together of the two in anthropological discourse has been the source of much fruitful confusion.
Today, there has been a tendency to see the incest taboo as a last relic of the Nineteenth Century programme2. Interestingly, its validity has come under attack from two separate, and seemingly irreconcilable theoretical camps.
1. On the one hand, it is held that any such taboo can only be a minor matter because, quite simply, we are, in one way or another, genetically programmed to avoid sexual intercourse with close relatives.
Westermarck himself held an early version of this thesis, believing that brothers and sisters would not be attracted to each other, because, having been brought up together, they have too familiar a relationship to feel any sexual attraction3. With the development of ethology, observers have discovered that the avoidance of copulation between brothers and sisters, or between mother and son, is a regular feature of animal life: from this point of view, then, any taboo in human society against sexual congress between close kin does no more than codify what is already a strong innate tendency (27, pp. 49-53, 8, pp. 9-13, pp. 19-51)
2. On the other hand, some ethnologists point to the great degree of variation in rules governing sexual and marital behaviour; the central fact about sexuality is that there are rules which govern its expression in all societies, and in any one society, one particular interdiction can only be understood in terms of its structural relations to the others - and in its relationship to what is permitted (8, op. cit.)
Inefficient Magic?
For Spencer and Gillen, however, the concept of the incest taboo still has its full force; Frazer's understanding of taboo was that it involved an irrational and extreme degree of fear, a belief on the part of the savage that any contravention would lead to the most extreme punishment, meted out either by some magical power or by the outraged witnesses to desecration. In "The Arunta", the two ethnologists appear to take this conception for granted.
However, their own material already goes some way to undermining it. I want to look at a couple of examples with you: The first is taken from a discussion of the Dream Time in the first volume of "The Arunta". The authors discuss the Arrernte's mythological explanation of the formation of a particular feature of the landscape:
Tradition says that in the Alchera (The Dream-Time), a powerful Oknirrabata (magical being) came from the East. He had been circumcised, but not subincised, had run away after the operation of Lartna, and, being very strong, had been not only able to defend himself, but also to force a number of women to go away with him. Amongst these women were included those who were Allira, Umba, Mura, Uwinna and Unkulla (all forbidden relationships).
He settled down amongst the sand-hills, and, when he died, the column (Iturkaworra) arose to mark the spot; the turret hills representing the women. The pillar (worrapaira or male organ) is associated with a remarkable form of magic connected with the evil (Iturka) nature of the man whom it represents. When a native desires to secure a woman who is ekeirinja or forbidden to him, such as an Allira, who is a brother's daughter, he goes to the pillar and rubs it with one of the stones, saying, Iturka worra, Allira, landa, Anua nukwa, mitchikka, words that mean Iturka, young man, daughter, pretend (you) 'sit down' my Anua; in other words, he is to pretend that the Allira is for the time being his lawful Anua or wife. The Allira must not be his actual daughter.
It would appear as if , when this takes place, the lubra knew what the man was doing and was, at least, prepared to be a consenting party. The man goes back, and when he finds the lubra alone, says to her, Allira interjiggaa, sleep ; yinga, I; ingwangna, with you ; erinja, wish ; from which she understands that he has performed the necessary magic. (30, vol. 1., 350-1)
The kind of magic that they have here described crops up fairly often in the anthropological literature. Malinowski found that his Trobrianders might take similar precautions when embarking upon a forbidden sexual adventure; these spells are clearly believed to protect the lovers from any evil consequences that might accrue. One could expect the Arrernte's magic to be as efficient. However, this is not the case:
It is a very dangerous proceeding, because it means that a Purula man, for example, will have relations with a Kumara woman. Both man and woman are called Iturka Iturka: to the woman the still further opprobrious name of Iturka Iturka nama kanja, which means the Iturka on top of the grass. Sooner or later the Umba, or son of the man's sister, finds out what has happened, and says to the woman, Arragutja, unta knitchikka atna ingwanginga, woman, you will cry for your man. It is his business to see that certainly the man is killed and most likely the woman also. If not killed she will be handed over to all the men of the camp as their common property for a time. (ibid., 351).
Whose voice is this? We expect it to be that of a member of the Arrernte people, however distant, however filtered, and this expectation is met by the direct quote of what the Umba tells his cross-cousin; however in its message, it conforms so closely to Frazer's conception of the absolute nature of the taboo that it may just as well be the voice of the armchair theorist.
This restatement of the incest taboo in its fullest form leaves the question of why a man would embark upon such a perilous adventure, and why a woman, even if convinced that her partner had carried out the ritual, should be 'prepared to be a consenting party' niggling at the reader's mind.
The Sullied Encampment
The reader will become even more perplexed after having looked at the second example. Spencer and Gillen describe an Atninga expedition; the goal of such an undertaking is to extract revenge for deaths inflicted by enemies. In the present case, a number of deaths have been attributed to black magic on the part of members of a neighbouring people, the Iliaura.
A group of men set out, and, after travelling several days, come upon an encampment belonging to the enemy. Spencer and Gillen describe what happens:
In the Iliaura community were two old men, and with them matters were discussed by the elder men amongst the Arunta at a spot some little distance from the camp of the latter. After a long talk extending over two days, during which the strangers set forth their grievances and gave the Iliaura men very clearly to understand that they were determined to exact vengeance, the two old men said, in effect, "Go no further, Our people do not wish to quarrel with your people; there are three bad men in our camp whom we Iliaura do not like, they must be killed. Two are Iturka (that is, men who have married within the forbidden degrees of relationship); the other is very quarrelsome and strong in magic and has boasted of killing your people by means of Kurdaitcha and other magic. Kill these men, but do not injure any others in our camp, and we will help you. " (30, vol. 2, 444).
As the camp consisted of some dozen families, the fact that the old men found that they had two incestuous males available to offer in appeasement to their enemies is quite striking, although Spencer and Gillen make no immediate comment. However, once they have completed their account of the revenge mission, they do return to the question of how incest is dealt with:
This killing of Iturka men by strange blacks belonging to other tribes has been a common practice among them. When a case of this kind arises, the old men of the group to which the offender belongs hold a meeting to discuss the matter, and if all of them are in favour of the death of a man or woman, a neighbouring group is asked to come and carry out the sentence. Sometimes it is agreed that the offending parties are to be punished in some less severe way, perhaps by cutting the man's legs or by burning the woman with a fire-stick, and then, if after this the two still continue to live together, the death penalty will be carried out. (ibid., 446).
This appears to shed some light upon our problem; however, it does so only to reveal yet other areas of obscurity. Why is it that the death penalty is to be administered by strangers? What criteria do the old men use in their deliberations, and why should the neighbours respond to their summons? Of this, nothing is said. Spencer and Gillen then continue:
Sometimes, but only rarely, a man is strong enough to resist, but even if he be successful his life is at best a miserable one, as he dare not come anywhere near the camps, but is forced to live in inaccessible parts in constant fear of being surprised and put to death.
At Charlotte Waters, for example, there has been in recent years a case of this kind. One of the finest men of the group carried off a woman who was not his lawful Anua, both the man and the woman belonging to the Purula section. For two or three years the two led a wandering life away from the usual haunts and several attempts were made to kill them, the woman being very severely wounded on one occasion.
The man, however, was a formidable antagonist of well-known prowess, and after having killed two of the men who attempted to punish him, and nearly killing the proper husband of the woman, it was thought best to leave him alone, though up to the present day when quarrels occur in which he is concerned he is often taunted with being Iturka.(ibid., 446-7).
But this makes the Atninga story in some ways even more puzzling. For we are told that even an exceptionally strong man, if he has taken to wife a woman who is forbidden to him, will avoid the encampments until he has demonstrated that he is strong and clever enough to keep his enemies at bay. And yet when the Arrernte vengeance party came upon the Iliaura camp, as we have seen, two men were said to be Iturka.
Old Men vs. Young
It is to Malinowski that we will turn to clear the matter up. First, to run slightly ahead of our story, I would remind you of Malinowski's discovery of the fact that among the Trobriand Islanders, incest - if between partners of a suitably distant degree of kinship - was regarded as adding a little piquancy to a love affair. Moreover, neighbours and friends would often be fully aware of what was going on, but, so long as the couple involved observed a certain discretion, and so long as they put no-one else's nose out of joint, the affair would be allowed to continue.
Incest rules are usually only invoked, suggests Malinowski, when someone has an interest in their being applied(4) This mode of thought is already in evidence in his early work, "The Family Among the Australian Aborigines", published in 1913. In this, while arguing that marriage is an individual, rather than a group affair, he writes:
The following point may also be adduced here, viz. that generally the old men and other men of influence and power secured the young females of the tribes. It was easier for influential and important men to maintain their right over their wives before as well as after actual possession. Besides, we are informed by all ... that the rules of exogamy were very strong, excluding in the majority of tribes a good number of females from all attempts by the males of forbidden classes. This undoubtedly contributed also to increase the security and validity of the marital union, by reducing to very few the number of the men who were in a position to interfere with the rights of the husband. (17, p. 59)
The rules of exogamy, and the taboos surrounding sexual activity with partners of forbidden degree, are here presented in the light of a proto-functionalist theory, a harbinger of the way in which Malinowski's thinking about social structure and sociological explanation was to develop.
However, in the specific case which we are considering here, there are problems that go to the root of Anthropological discourse: primitive society is consistently projected as one in which rules are absolute and in which the group comes before the individual. Malinowski is already kicking against the traces: later he will go on to show the extent to which individuals will, whenever they can, look to their own self-interest and disregard the rules when they think they can get away with it. But he ever retains some idea of an essential unity running through the social system. In this particular case, he comes close to revealing a deep cleavage between fathers and sons, and, as I hope to indicate, this is of some personal consequence to him.
Malinowski's aside suggests that the rules of marriage and the sexual interdictions in Aborigine society are skewed in such a way that they favourise the grip which the old men maintain over the supply of women - in particular over the supply of young women. It is of interest here that one of the most remarked taboos among the Aborigines in general is that which forbids a man from having a close relationship with his mother-in-law.
Freud, as we recall, regarded this prohibition with some approval, while remarking that the wife's mother was in all probability seen as a stand-in mother. However, marriage customs among Aborigines, strongly favouring the old men, are such as to give a greater urgency to this particular rule: the male is not expected to marry a woman of his own generation, but instead contracts with a man of his father's generation to marry his daughter's daughter. This pushes the near universal custom of cross-cousin marriage, (where a man marries his father's sister's daughter), one generation down - the male expects to receive the daughter of his cousin in marriage, while his cousin marries an older man.
So, although the mythological accounts of son-in-law/mother-in-law incest foreground a relationship between an older woman and a younger man - usually recounted as a demand on the part of the old woman that the young man rejects - the reality of the relationship is very different. The utility of such a rule, from the point of view of the old men, is fairly obvious (13, 142-52, 8, 156-7).
By this account, the rules of marriage, and with them the sexual mores in general, represent an open and negotiable state of play. The application of a rule in any one case is not the result of an implacable release of social forces rooted in the sacred, but an indication of the ongoing relationships within the group. That the old men should call upon allies from outside to enforce the rules upon their own young becomes comprehensible when one recognises that this solution avoids an open conflict between the old men as a group, and their own sons and sons-in-law.
The Loving Father and ...
However, Malinowski does not pursue this hare. Instead, he falls back on Westermarck, and sees the incest taboo as being essentially rooted in the functional needs of the primary family - father, mother, son and daughter. Like Freud, he situates the central drama of social life within this restricted group, and his work on the Aborigine family foreshadows this concern. But in doing so, and before having read Freud, he stands the Freudian scenario upon its head, for at the centre of his picture of the constitution of the nuclear family is the idea of 'father-love'.
This factor comes to occupy a central place in his later analyses, but it is already clearly present before he has encountered 'the Savage' in the flesh, and even before he has begun to consider his reformulation, in sociological terms, of the Oedipus Complex:
... the relation between two individuals may be considered legal only when we imply that it is wholly and exclusively determined by the outward regulating control of the society and by a potential direct action of it. And in the case we are speaking of - that is, the relation between parent and child in low societies - there can be hardly any question of this. As will appear in the Australian case, this relation is left quite to itself, and it is regulated by the spontaneous emotional attitude of the father towards his child. No factor of any outer pressure or constraint enters into it, as least we are not informed of any such the ethnographical evidence extant ... Neither social pressure nor economic interest bind the parents to their children, nor does any motive of this kind enter into this relation. (17, 186).
This is quite breath-taking: in less than 20 lines of text, Malinowski cuts the nuclear family free of any economic, juridical or sociological links with society. It becomes the basic building block upon which sociality is founded - kinship terms and rules of marriage are but an extension of feelings and names which arise and have their full meaning within the family5. And for Malinowski, the key relationship is not that between mother and child, but the one that he indicates by the term 'father-love'.
This stressing of the affective - rather than social - quality of the father/child relationship is, in part at least, forced upon him by the nature of the ethnographic material: Spencer and Gillen report that, among many of the tribes of Australia, the relationship between copulation and conception is unknown. Malinowski was, of course, to discover the same phenomena in the Trobriand Islands. If the father's insemination of the mother is denied any role in procreation, it seems reasonable to believe - from a European perspective - that paternity is regarded as secondary, as of no importance.
This appears to be exemplified in the form of matrilineal descent: in such systems there would seem to be, at first glance, no place for the father other than through his temporary relationship to the mother, so that he becomes, as Frazer puts it, 'the consort, and in a sense the owner of the mother, and, therefore, as the owner of her progeny, just as a man who owns a cow owns also the calf she brings forth.' (cited in 17, p. 189)
Malinowski, quite reasonably, rejects this account of the relationship. However, he does so because he is at pains to deny recourse to any description of the basic relationship in legalistic terms. So powerful is his denial of the possibility that parenthood, and in particular fatherhood, should be juridically founded, that he appends a footnote in which he addresses the situation in the modern family:
In our society, if parents wish to abandon their progeny while still dependent, they would be prevented by the law from doing it, and compelled to perform a series of duties and services, which usually spring from the natural parental love. Thus we see that in our society the relation between parents and children has much more of a legal character than in Australia. Nevertheless it would seem quite absurd to style this relation in our society as essentially a legal one. It has only its legal sides, which, comparatively, are seldom put into action, especially while the children are not yet grown up, i.e. just during the period when the relationship in question is the most important. (17, 190).
The light step with which the anthropologist here steps over such matters as child neglect, abandonment (1, passim), infanticide (3, pp. 61-93), and abuse (26, passim) is, one must believe, occasioned by his desire to arrive at the finishing line by the shortest route. At that line, the prize is a nativist conception of the relationship between father and child:
... nothing of that sort (a legal aspect) determines or forms the substance of the relation between father and child in Australia. If a father should kill or abandon his child, he would, for all we know, be left quite undisturbed. Nobody compels him to provide for its subsistence, to protect it and care for it. There are spontaneous elements that bind him to it. And these spontaneous elements (to discover them will be our task) determine his relation to his child. (17, 190).
This 'spontaneous element' is rapidly identified with feeling or affection (ibid, 190-3). Although Malinowski was to reject the evolutionary project as the basis for field-work, it lies behind his work as an understated assumption. Matrilineal systems stand as a distant Utopia, in which father-love, the underlying psychological reality of the family, protected by the denial of the authority of the genitor, was allowed full rein, leaving to the maternal uncle the odious task of correction and restraint. A glimpse of this Utopia is already afforded us in his picture of the Australian family:
... consider the facts of daily life - the behaviour of parents towards children in all the cases where the latter want help or merit punishment. We read that on all such occasions both parents exhibit great kindness and extreme leniency. The children are as carefully looked after by the father as well as by the mother; and they are very seldom punished. In one place it is even stated that the father is more lenient than the mother. (ibid, 194).
...The Wicked Uncle
However, in this book, the maternal uncle has not made his appearance in a key role. It will be during his sojourn in the Trobriand Islands, and particularly after reading Freud on his return, that the anthropologist designs the full configuration of the family in which father-love is allowed its most perfect expression. This is founded upon the 'sociological irrelevance of the father' (19, 1156), who, Malinowski claims, has no legal position within Melanesian society.
The Trobriand father does everything in his power to wriggle out of his obligations to his nephew, and to hand what should by law come to his sister's son to his own, for, even though Trobriand accounts of reproduction recognise no blood link between the two, so strong is the instinctual bond between them that they will fly in the face of the strongest disapproval, courting the greatest social dangers in order to realise and give flesh to their emotion. We learn of the:
'deep personal attachment which a father feels for his children, the tendency which he has to use all his personal influence to give them a strong position in the village, the opposition which this always evokes among his maternal kinsmen, and the tension and rifts thus brought about ... a good deal of discontent and friction and many roundabout methods of settlement are involved in this dual play of paternal affection and matrilineal authority; the chief's son and his maternal nephew can be described as predestined enemies'. ( 21, 13).
But these tensions are the price to be paid for the father's freedom to allow his natural sentiments to flow forth:
We have already seen that the husband fully shares in the care of the children. He will fondle and carry a baby, clean and wash it, and give it the mashed vegetable food which it receives in addition to the mother's milk almost from birth. In fact, nursing the baby if the arms or holding it on the knees ... is the special role and duty of the father ... The father performs his duties with genuine natural fondness: he will carry an infant about for hours, looking at it with eyes full of such love and pride as are seldom seen in those of a European father. Any praise of the baby goes directly to his heart, and he will never tire of talking about and exhibiting the virtues and achievements of his wife's offspring ... Thus, in the intimacy of domestic life, we discover another aspect of the interesting and complicated struggle between social and emotional paternity, on the one hand, and the explicitly acknowledged legal mother-right on the other. (ibid., 21-18).
It is against this background that Malinowski developed his theory of incest. As had done so many anthropologists before him, he steps directly from incest to exogamy: He has not the slightest doubt that exogamy is correlated with the prohibition of incest, that it is merely an extension of this taboo exactly as the institution of the clan with its classificatory terms of relationship is simply an extension of the family and its mode of kinship nomenclature. (20, 211).
To allow incest between mother and son - for the daughter, as so often, appears to have been forgotten in these pages - would endanger the family in several ways: first, for a relationship of dependence and submission, it would substitute one of courtship and equality between mother and son. But it would also perturb the relationship with the older male - not so much between husband and wife, as between father and son:
Now into such a situation the inclination towards incest would enter as a destructive element. Any approach of the mother with sensual or erotic temptations would involve the disruption of the relationship so laboriously constructed. Mating with her would have to be, as all mating must be, preceded by courtship and a type of behaviour completely incompatible with submission, independence and reverence.
The mother, moreover, is not alone. She is married to another male. Any sensual temptation would not only upset completely the relation between son and mother but also, indirectly, that between son and father. Active hostile rivalry would replace the harmonious relationship which is the type of complete dependence and thorough submission to leadership. If, therefore, we agree with the psycho-analysts that incest must be a universal temptation, we see that its dangers are not merely psychological nor can they be explained by any such hypotheses as that of Freud's primeval crime. Incest must be forbidden because, if our analysis of the family and its role in the formation of culture be correct, incest is incompatible with the establishment of the first foundations of culture. (ibid, 216-7)
Conclusion
We have seen that Spencer and Gillen and Malinowski brought with them into the field a set of preconceptions, both theoretical and emotional, which lead them to see and interpret the lives of the peoples they studied in particular ways. In the case of Spencer and Gillen, their need of a metropolitan mentor, without whose blessings their work would probably never have been published, may have locked them into a vision of the structure and functioning of the Australian family, and in particular may have wedded them to an absolutist understanding of the force of the incest taboo which prevented them from confronting their own material, so that the general statements often sit uneasily with their specific observations. Their work still stands as a monument to their observational acumen, and a source of knowledge on the customs and practices of a people who have since had to change rapidly and drastically in order to come to terms with the realities of Contact and Conquest.
But their reports from the frontier remain an ethnographic soup from which the dumplings may be separated. Malinowski, for his part, brings to the field not only the conceptual apparatus which he had welded together from his studies of Mach, his studies under Wundt and Westermarck, but also a more personal quest: could it be that the father he lost when fourteen years old, whose footsteps he followed to Leipzig University, and whose sub-speciality - Malinowski père was a linguist, who, as Adam Kuper notes (14, 23-47 was also something of an ethnographer and folklorist - Malinowski made his own, haunted his son's intellectual life much as his Mother haunted his emotional one (23, passim)?
The anthropologist's inability to think beyond the immediate nuclear family, and his insistence on the explanation of social structure in terms of psychological need - characteristics which made Freud's thinking congenial to him - may have their roots in some lost family drama. It seems clear, in any case, that the records that Malinowski sent back from that far frontier where civilised man came face to face with the savage were a syncresis, a workable, but unsynthesized mélange of personal desire, theoretical design and the lived-through, daily rubbing together of the white scientist and the people whom he found so full of life, and so exasperating, so different but so ultimately the same as ourselves.
But we today need to be on our guard in reading Malinowski; perhaps the Trobrianders were stranger than he allowed himself to believe, and in order to perceive them clearly, we need to be conscious that we are peering around the shoulders of an anthropological Conrad.
(If you wish to comment, please write to tmason@timothyjpmason.com)
Bibliography
1. Boswell, John, The Kindness of Strangers; The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, Penguin, London, 1991.
2. Burgière, André, Ch. Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen, Françoise Zonabend, Histoire de la famille, t.1, Mondes lointains, Armand Colin, Paris, 1986.
3. Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson, Homicide, Aldine de Gruyter, New York, 1988.
4. Ellen, Roy, Ernest Gellner, Gra`zyna Kubica, and Janusz Mucha (eds) Malinowski Between Two Worlds: The Polish Roots of an Anthropological Tradition, CUP, Cambridge, 1988.
5. Firth, R., (ed.), Man and Culture; An evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, RKP, London, 1957
6. Firth, R., Malinowski in the History of Social Anthropology, in 4., pp. 164-94.
7. Fortes, M., Malinowski and the study of kinship, in 5, pp. 157-88..
8. Fox, Robin, The Red Lamp of Incest; An Enquiry into the Origins of Mind and Society, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1980.
9. Freud, Sigmund, (tr. S Jankélévitch), Totem et Tabou; Interprétation par la psychanalyse de la vie sociale des peuples primitifs, Payot, Paris, 1968 (1913).
10. Gellner, Ernest, 'Zeno of Cracow' or 'Revolution at Nemi' or 'The Polish Revenge: A Drama in Three Acts', in 4., pp. 164-94.
11. Hammond, Peter B. (ed), Cultural and Social Anthropology; Selected Readings, Macmillan, New York, 1970.
12. Héritier, Françoise, Les Deux Soeurs et Leur Mère; Anthropologie de l'Inceste, Opus, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997.
13. Hiatt, L.R., Arguments about Aborigines; Australia and the Evolution of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1996.
14. Kuper, Adam, Anthropologists and Anthropology; The British School 1922-72, Peregrine, London, 1975 (1973).
15. Kuper, Adam, The Invention of Primitive Society; Transformation of an Illusion, Routledge, London and New York, 1988.
16. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, in 2, pp. 9-16.
17. Malinowski, Bronislaw, The Family Among Australian Aborigines; A Sociological Study, London University Press, London, 1913.
18. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagos of Melanesian New Guinea, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1950 (1922).
19. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Crime and Custom in Savage Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1966, (1926).
20. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Meridian Books, Cleveland & New York, 1955 (1927)
21. Malinowski, Bronislaw, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia; An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea, 3rd edition, Beacon Press, Boston, 1987 (1932).
22. Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Souvenir Press, London, 1974 (1948).
23. Malinowski, Bronislaw, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1967.
24. Hammond, Peter, B., (ed.), Cultural and Social Anthropology; Selected Readings, Macmillan, London, 1970.
25. Piddington, Ralph, Irregular Marriages in Australia, Oceania, v. XL, 4, June 1970, 329-43.
26. Renvoize, Jean, Innocence Destroyed; a study of child sexual abuse, Routledge, London, 1993.
27. Roscoe, Paul, B., Amity and Aggression: A Symbolic Theory of Incest, Man (N.S.) 29, 1994, 49-76.
28. Sahlins, Marshall, D., " The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization for Predatory Expansion ", American Anthropologist, vol. 63 (1961), pp. 322-45, reprinted in 11, pp. 181 - 200.
29. Shaw, Brent, D., Explaining Incest: Brother-Sister Marriage in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Man, 27, 1992 (267-99)
30. Spencer, Baldwin, and Frank Gillen, The Arunta, A Study of Stone Age People, Two Vols., Macmillan and Co, London, 1927.
31. Stocking George W, Jr., After Tylor; British Social Anthropology 1888-1951, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
32. Zonabend, Françoise, Mondes exotiques; De la Famille, Regard Ethnologique sur la Parenté et la Famille, in 2, pp. 19-100.