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| | TIME.com: Attacking the Last Taboo -- Apr. 14, 1980 -- Page 2 |
 | | The phrase "child abuse" is distinguished from "consensual incest" involving a parent, and "abusive incest" is different from "positive incest." Some try to give the argument a bit of serious academic coloration, ransacking anthropological literature for a tribe or two that allows incest, or arguing that the incest taboo is dying of its own irrelevance. |
 | | Rutgers Anthropologist Yehudi Cohen offers a simplified pseudohistorical argument: the taboo is a holdover of a primitive need to form personal alliances and trade agreements beyond the family. |
 | | Since that is no longer necessary, he says, "human history suggests that the incest taboo may indeed be obsolete." Joan Nelson, a Californian who holds an M.A. in psychology from Antioch, has a special interest in the subject. |
| www.time.com /time/magazine/article/0,9171,923966-2,00.html (747 words) |
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