[1656] Schallmeyer, Vererbung und Auslese, 231.
[1657] Rudeck, Gesch. der Oeffentl. Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, 422.
CHAPTER XII
INCEST
Definition.—Incest notion was produced from the folkways.—The notion that inbreeding is harmful.—Status-wife, work-wife, love-wife.—The abomination of incest.—The incest taboo is strongest in the strongest groups.—Incest in ethnography.—Incest in civilized states.—Where the line is drawn, and why.—Human self-selection.—Restriction by biological doctrine not sufficiently warranted.—Summary of the matter now.
508. Definition of incest. Incest is the marital union of a man and a woman who are akin within the limits of a prohibition current at the time in the laws or mores of the group. The primitive notion of kinship did not divide kinship into grades of remoteness as we do. Very often it was counted by classes or age strata. In the totem system all the women of his mother's totem were tabooed to a man, although their cousinship to himself might be very remote. At the same time, he could marry his father's sister's daughter, or his mother's brother's daughter, unless his father and his uncle had married women of the same totem. Inasmuch as a man and his wife must have different totems and the children took the totem of their mother, a man might marry his own daughter. Generally this was forbidden by supplementary rules, but in Buka and North Bougainville it occurs not infrequently.[1658] The varieties of the consanguinity taboo are very numerous. They are entirely different in theory under the mother family and the father family. They are now very different in different states of our Union.[1659] If the taboo on marriage is not defined in terms of "blood" or assumed kinship, violation of it is not incest. For instance, in the mediæval church, two persons who had been sponsors in baptism to the same child might not marry. Also, if two persons are debarred by affinity, violation is not incest. In England a man may not marry his deceased wife's sister. If he does it, his marriage is unlawful, but it is not incest. The definition of incest must include the notion of a blood connection as blood connection is understood in that group at the time. Other prohibitions may be expedient, or may seem required by propriety (e.g. the marriage of a man with his father's widow), but they do not come under incest.
Restrictions on marriage by kinship, as the people in question construed kinship, go back to the most primitive society. Some very primitive people have intricate restrictions, and they maintain them by the severest social sanctions.
509. Incest notion produced from the folkways. It is evident that primitive people must have received a suggestion or impression of some important interest at stake in this matter. They adopted taboos and established folkways to protect interests. In time these taboos and folkways won very great force and high religious sanction; also a sense of abomination was produced which seemed to be a "natural" feeling. There certainly is no natural feeling. The abomination is conventional and traditional. The Pharaohs, Ptolemies, and Incas, also the Zoroastrians, are sufficient to show that there is no reason for the abomination in any absolute or universal facts. The sanctions by which savage people sustained the taboo were the strongest possible,—exile and death. Here we have, therefore, a social limitation of the greatest force, sanctioned by religion and group consent and growing into an abomination which has come down to us and which we all feel, but which is a product of the most primitive folkways; and yet we do not know the motive for it in the minds of primitive men. In the matter of cannibalism we saw (Chapter VIII) that with advancing civilization a taboo has been set up against a food custom which appears to have been universal amongst primitive men; that is, we have reversed and hold in abomination what they did. In regard to incest we have accepted and fully ratified their taboo.