Although it argues that art results from an adaptive “human proclivity” for “making special,” which involves “apprehending [and creating] an order different from the everyday,” a very recent book, What Is Art For?, also argues that art results from the intertwining of a collection of traits of human nature (Dissanayake 1988:126–128). The collection includes symbolization, classification, ordering, tool making, emotionality, and sociality. Each of these traits, which are closely allied to traits that underlie ritual and play (Dissanayake 1988:127), provides a partial explanation of art or aesthetics.
Now to put some order into these explanatory modes. First note that some are essentially formal or methodological, i.e., derivative of the logic or method of explanation alone. This is particularly true of the eleventh (partial explanations) but also of the first (explaining a universal with a universal), ninth (interspecific comparison), and tenth (ontogeny). Because of their formality, they are compatible with or complementary to most if not all the other modes of explanation. But also note that if the eleventh is correct, it prevents the first from being a necessary mode of explanation: universals would, then, only sometimes require explanation in terms of other universals.
Three of the explanatory modes—the second (cultural reflection), fourth (diffusion), and fifth (archoses)—have substantial culturological components. And yet none is devoid of biological considerations. The fifth may be the most culturological, but it is not clear that there are any universals that really do find their explanation in its terms. Accordingly, it must be concluded that probably all explanations of particular universals must be biological or interactionist.
The third (logical extension) and sixth through ninth (conservation of energy, nature of the organism, evolutionary theory, and interspecific comparison) all give substantial recognition to biological causation. In the case of the third, this is only a matter of practice, since the “givens” are only normally biological. To the extent that they are not necessarily biological, then the third mode would be strictly formal like the first and eleventh. Since the third mode does not involve tracing the causal chain between the given starting point and the universal to be explained, it is an inherently weak or limited mode of explanation.
Explanatory modes six through ten are closely interrelated: the conservation of energy is a universal feature of the evolutionary process; the nature of the human organism is a result of evolution; interspecific comparisons derive their rationale from evolution and are conducted to illuminate that process; while ontogenetic studies are not inherently biological, they are normally employed to determine the proximate means by which evolutionarily shaped traits emerge in individual organisms. It follows that number eight, evolutionary theory, is the superordinate explanatory mode among them: only it gives order to the others, only it offers ultimate explanations for universals characteristic of the human organism.
From the viewpoint of theory, there are only two or three distinct alternatives to evolutionary theory. Diffusion is one alternative, and if archoses exist and are to be distinguished from diffusion, they comprise another. Cultural reflection or recognition of biological fact is the only remaining alternative that is not simply logical or methodological. Given the importance that explanation has in the development of any sort of anthropological theory, the matters explored in this chapter deserve more attention than they have so far received.
Footnotes
1. Among at least one people a ritual official stands in contrast to the societywide norm; it is his left hand that is preeminent (Needham 1973).
2. With reference to the cerebral hemispheres, “dominance” is somewhat misleading. The two halves are specialized and complementary, so that while the left side may normally be dominant for speech the right side dominates in other functions.
3. The universality of male dominance has been challenged on two grounds. One is that dominance is not a global or unitary phenomenon, so that even in societies seemingly dominated by men there may still be spheres—say in domestic arrangements—in which women dominate (Quinn 1977). This is surely correct, but it does not preclude the possibility that in some sort of summation men always dominate in more spheres or more of the important spheres than women do. The second challenge is that in terms of cultural ideals some peoples may see men and women as just different, perhaps complementary, but not with men ranking above women. This does not, however, preclude an etic conclusion to the contrary. Neither of these objections eliminates the universal dominance of men in the public-political arena.
4. In the long run, the sequence of appropriateness of design, reproductive success, appropriateness of design, reproductive success (and so on in alteration) forms links in a chain of causation that results in adaptations.
5. Nothing I have just said should be taken to indicate that evolution has ceased. Some features of human nature that were present in the Palaeolithic might conceivably have deteriorated or become less than universal. Adaptation to specific environments has gone on apace but can only account for racial or population differences, not new features of human nature.
6. The existence of phylogenetic facultative adaptations in humans renders obsolete the notion that if something varies it must be cultural. If it varies in a regular pattern, it may well not be cultural. This is a complication for anthropological analysis that has scarcely even been recognized (Tooby and Cosmides 1989a).
7. On the other hand, “stranger recognition” mechanisms, which are probably triggered not only by personal unfamiliarity but by such cultural differences as language, accent, and body adornment, do seem to be very much involved in ethnocentrism (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Reynolds, Falger, and Vine 1987). In the environments in which humans evolved, a dichotomous distinction between the familiar and friendly on the one hand and the stranger on the other would, on average, correlate with degree of kinship.
8. There may of course be a shortage of “good” males.
9. Eberhard (1985) argues that the typically protruding genitals of males rather than females is yet another consequence of the initial sexual difference in parental investment, for protruding genitals allow a more aggressive strategy of mating and are found on females only in species with substantial male parental investment. In these atypical species—the seahorses and pipefish—females possess an intromittent organ with which they insert their eggs in males who then fertilize and brood them; in those species of seahorses and pipefish for which courtship information is available, it is females who are promiscuous and aggressive, males who are choosy. See also Williams (1966).
10. Female reproductive potential is more delimited by the ability to produce children, which is maximal shortly after puberty and declines until it reaches zero at menopause. The male ability to produce children shows no such precipitous decline with age and may persist until death. Consequently, male reproductive potential is more delimited by the ability to support children, and their mother(s). It is this male ability to support children that typically peaks later than the female ability to produce children—and that accounts for males typically remaining attractive to women later in life than women to men. On the other hand, it is the stringent and predictable delimitation by age of a female’s reproductive potential that accounts for the universal or near-universal sexual attractiveness of women who are postpubescent but still youthful.
11. Universals that seem to lack a unitary explanation are apparently what Geertz (1965:102), citing Kroeber, has in mind when he speaks of “fake” universals. Whether some unifying factors will be found still to underlie such universals, and thus to validate their broad rubrics after their various parts are separately explained, remains to be determined.
5
Incest Avoidance
The apparent universality, or near-universality, of the incest taboo perennially fascinates anthropologists and has given rise to numerous speculations about its origin and function. The principal point of agreement is probably that incest is in some way harmful, so that avoiding
it confers some benefit. What the harm, what the benefit, and how the taboo or avoidance comes about are points of contention.
Progress in understanding the whole issue has been retarded by several false starts and misconceptions (summarized in Fox 1980, Arens 1986). For example, there has been a tendency to conflate marriage rules with sexual regulations. While these concerns may impinge on one another—and might very well be equated in the folk categories of a given people1—there is no necessary connection between them: incest fundamentally concerns sex, only coincidentally may it concern marriage.
There was also an assumption that animals—unlike humans—do mate incestuously, so that the human prohibition of incest was a distinctively cultural marker of humanity’s separation from the animal world. It is now known that incest is rare among animals in the wild (domestic animals, whose breeding patterns have been altered by human interference, are another matter). Between human incest avoidance and the patterns of behavior among other animals there may thus be a continuity that was previously denied.
As a corollary of the assumption that the incest taboo was a distinctively cultural invention—that would leave no obvious material remains in the archeological record—the actual origins of the taboo, being lost in antiquity, were not subject to empirical research. Indeed, most discussion of the incest taboo was little more than a sideline to other issues.
Another assumption now known to be wrong was that the incest taboo was universal. But in a number of societies royalty were enjoined to commit incest (or, at any rate, to marry very close kin).2 And in some societies there are no obvious incest taboos in the sense of rules (and sanctioned rules especially) against it, only a notion that no one would commit incest anyway.
Finally, the various relationships in which incest might occur—e.g., between brother and sister, or between father and daughter—tended to be all run together.
The present chapter is primarily about brother-sister incest, and a recent line of research conducted primarily by anthropologists to test an idea formulated in the last century—but long ignored—that it is human nature for brothers and sisters to avoid incest. This line of research moved an old anthropological subject out of the realm of speculation into the realm of concrete and comparative studies.
One of the leading controversies has turned fundamentally around an issue of human psychology: is incest tabooed because we naturally tend to commit it but shouldn’t, or is it tabooed, somewhat paradoxically, because most humans don’t want to do it? The former position was championed by Freud and others, who could see no reason why a taboo should exist for something we didn’t want to do anyway. The latter position was expounded late in the nineteenth century by a Finnish anthropologist, Edward Westermarck, who argued that there is “a remarkable lack of erotic feeling between persons who have been living closely together from childhood” (1922:192). Such persons, he noted, would typically be relatives. Incest avoidance, thus, was a natural tendency that resulted from childhood association. Westermarck’s reply to the objection Freud raised was that incest was tabooed for the same reason bestiality and parricide are tabooed: not because we have a general tendency to commit them but because some individuals go awry in ways that shock general sentiments. The rules are for them.
Unlike most (if not all other) anthropologists, Westermarck was centrally concerned with the incest taboo and its implications, and he wrote voluminously on the matter over decades. He took a straightforward Darwinian view, that inbreeding was directly harmful. The avoidance that resulted from childhood association was an evolved human instinct. In spite of the extraordinary effort Westermarck put into understanding the incest taboo, his views were largely eclipsed by anthropology’s opposition to biological reductionism in the period through World War II, because they “violat[ed]…every canon” of anthropology (Murdock 1932:209). But in the 1950s J. R. [Robin] Fox (1962) realized that social experiments conducted in Israel provided remarkable evidence bearing on the matter of incest avoidance between siblings. The ensuing revival of Westermarck’s ideas led to most of the studies summarized below.
In Israeli kibbutzim, communal villages first founded early in this century, there was a deliberate attempt to break down the nuclear family. Boys and girls who were close in age to one another were raised together in peer groups (kvutza) of six to eight children; they shared common living quarters from a time shortly after they were born through adolescence. Under the tutelage of nurses and teachers rather than parents, the children shared an intimate association and underwent a socialization and education common to all. As small children they showed a typical sexual interest in each other, but as they matured this disappeared. Although they were free to marry one another, provided they were not in fact siblings, Spiro (1958) found not a single case of this happening nor even of sexual intercourse between children who had been raised together from childhood in the same peer group.
Fox (1962) saw that the kibbutz data supported Westermarck, but he thought that Freud was at least partly right too. In Fox’s reformulation, the close and literally physical intimacy of children who are socialized together renders them sexually uninterested in each other after puberty. Among Freud’s patients, however, most siblings were not raised with the physical intimacy that was common in the kibbutz, and so they grew up harboring sexual desires for each other.
According to Fox, societies that are kibbutz-like in their child-rearing patterns are likely to be relatively indifferent to incest; they disapprove but generally do not stringently punish it, and do not need to, because for most of the members it has no great interest. Societies with child-rearing patterns more similar to those of Freud’s patients are more likely to have the taboo, and it is more likely to be stringent, because their members need the taboo to overcome real desires to commit incest. Fox’s summary of the pattern is that “the intensity of heterosexual attraction between cosocialized children after puberty is inversely proportionate to the intensity of heterosexual activity between them before puberty” (1962:147). As illustrations, he shows that the Tallensi of Ghana, the Pondo of Southeast Africa, the Mountain Arapesh of New Guinea, the Tikopia, and a Chinese situation described below fit the kibbutz pattern, while the Chiracahua Apache and the Trobriand Islanders fit the pattern described by Freud.
A study based on three further Israeli communes indicated that the Westermarck effect, as Fox called it, was not confined to the commune Spiro had studied (Talmon 1964). Whether on the basis of Israeli or other data, most studies of incest avoidance from the mid-1960s onward have focused specifically on Westermarck’s position, and Fox’s defense of a modified Freudian position has received little attention (but see Willner 1983 and Spain 1987).
A Chinese practice, described by Arthur Wolf (1966, 1968, 1970) and Wolf and Huang (1980), provided yet another natural experiment that supports Westermarck. In many areas of China there were until recently two forms of marriage, called “major” and “minor.” In the minor form a young girl was adopted into the family of her future husband. The motivation for this kind of marriage came of course from parents. In Wolf’s analysis, the strain between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law was so serious among Chinese that it made viable the strategy of bringing the future daughter-in-law in as a very young child so that long before she became a bride she could adjust, and more readily subordinate herself, to her mother-in-law. The future husband and wife were unrelated—so there was no breaking of the incest taboo. But the boy and his future bride were raised under the conditions typical of brothers and sisters—in the intimacy of the family.
Wolf found, contrary to Freud and others who argue that familial intimacy is the breeding ground of sexual interests that must be thwarted by the incest taboo, and in support of Westermarck, that minor marriages were about 30 percent less fertile and were unhappier. Men in such marriages resorted to prostitutes, took mistresses, or sought extramarital affairs more frequently; their wives engaged in extramarital affairs more frequently; and such marriages more
frequently resulted in separation or divorce. These objective indices buttressed Chinese statements to the effect that husband and wife in minor marriages found each other less romantically or erotically attractive. When various economic developments eroded parental ability to enforce minor-marriage arrangements, the couples who were to marry in this manner made other arrangements, spontaneously avoiding the minor marriages.
Wolf also drew attention to a study of sibling incest in Chicago (Weinberg 1963). It found that the only offenders who had contemplated marriage with each other were those who had been raised apart.
Wolf’s conclusions have been criticized, generally by offering alternative interpretations of the same data. For example, it has been suggested that because the minor marriage is less prestigious, the bride in such a marriage will be treated poorly and hence make a poor wife, or the couple in such a marriage will be chagrined by the stigma of it and thus make a poor marriage. But Wolf and Huang (1980:173–175) point out that regular (major-marriage) brides are more mistreated when they move into their in-laws’ household, and they show that couples brought together in a marriage that is clearly less prestigious than minor marriage—one in which the groom goes to live with the bride’s family—have more fertile and more stable marriages than the minor marriages (1980:169, 185). Interestingly, Wolf and Huang (1980:285) report that their Chinese informants seemed unaware of the lesser fertility of minor marriages.
Further support for the Westermarck hypothesis comes from the Near East. Students of Arab societies have long been aware of a preference often found among those peoples for a man to marry his father’s brother’s daughter who, given the patrilineal nature of their kinship system, is a rather close relative by any sense of the term. Marriages that conform to this ideal are not in fact very common, though more common than in other parts of the world. Since brothers typically live in close social and spatial contact with each other in Arab societies, it follows that their children are likely to be close too and, hence, that the preference for them to marry appears to run counter to the Westermarck hypothesis. However, Justine McCabe (1983), who studied an Arab village in Lebanon, found that the evidence supports Westermarck.
Human Universals Page 18
