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Incest taboo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The 'Incest Taboo' refers to the prohibition, both formal and unstated, against incest, the practice of sexual relations between close blood relatives, in many societies. Incest is sexual intercourse between individuals related in certain prohibited degrees of kinship. Although anthropologists have observed and studied violations of incest taboos (in other words, cases of incest), all anthropological theories of the incest taboo are concerned with the formal proscription against incest (as defined locally), not with actual cases of incest (however defined). en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Incest_taboo   (1186 words)

incest - HighBeam Encyclopedia   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) incest sexual relations between persons to whom marriage is prohibited by custom or law because of their close kinship. Even modern prohibitions of incest are based only in part on the observed fact that inherited defects tend to be transmitted in intensified form when both parents possess the same genes. Incest is a recurrent theme in mythology and literature across the world, and it has played an important role in psychoanalytical speculation and theory (see Oedipus complex). www.encyclopedia.com /doc/1E1-incest.html   (437 words)

Ethical Relativism and Absolute Taboos Incest with minors is a private - and particularly egregious - case of pedophilia or statutory rape. Incest is the ethical and legal prohibition to have sex with a related person or to marry him or her - even if the people involved are consenting and fully informed adults. Incest interferes with rigid algorithms of inheritance in conditions of extreme scarcity (for instance, of land and water) and consequently leads to survival-threatening internecine disputes. samvak.tripod.com /taboo.html   (2451 words)

PlanetPapers - On the Incest Taboo The members of the family involved in the incest surrender power and assume it out of the regular flow patterns that have made the family the formidable apparatus that it is. This weakens the family, both internally and externally. To prevent recurrent and costly bloodshed was one of the intentions of the incest taboo. The incest taboo is, therefore, a cultural trait. www.planetpapers.com /Assets/2332.php   (1491 words)

Incest is a Narcissistic Act: On the Incest Taboo Incest is not such a clear-cut matter as it has been made out to be over millennia of taboos. Incest, in itself, isolated from its social context and judgement, should not have affected this function in particular. The incest taboo teaches children how to control their erotic drive by abstaining from ingratiating themselves with members of the opposite sex within the same family. www.suite101.com /discussion.cfm/npd/59862/446514   (1511 words)

Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo (Wolf, Durham) The ten contributors to Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo explore this history, describe the current state of biological, anthropological, and psychological research in the area, and explore some of the continuing questions and debates. One commonly claimed counter-example to a universal incest taboo is sibling marriages in Roman Egypt. Incest disrupts familial affiliation and bonding, contributing to the trauma of incest and helping to explain why victims of incest are more likely to commit incest themselves. dannyreviews.com /h/Incest.html   (805 words)

Timothy Mason - Incest : Frontiers & Syncretism 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. 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. 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. www.timothyjpmason.com /WebPages/Publications/Incest_Frontiers.htm   (5113 words)

The Incest Taboo - The Offspring of Aeolus The Incest Taboo - The Offspring of Aeolus It seems, therefore, that the incest taboo was and is aimed at one thing in particular: to preserve the family unit and its proper functioning. Incest is more than a mere manifestation of a given personality disorder or a paraphilia (incest is considered by many to be a subtype of pedophilia). samvak.tripod.com /incest.html   (1922 words)

The Nuclear Taboo by Verna Gehring While dress or dietary taboos may be local and mutable, other taboos--those against incest, public elimination of bodily waste, and disrespect or neglect of a human corpse, for example--seem more universal and less likely to be abandoned. Culturally specific taboos contribute to the identity of an individual as a member of a group, but the generalized taboo unites the individual to the entire human family and helps define humanity. But it is not a taboo that prohibits use of nuclear means because atomic weapons are evil, because the possibility of nuclear warfare is inconceivable, or because the authority that decides on their deployment surely must be mad. www.puaf.umd.edu /IPPP/Summer00/nuclear_taboo.htm   (3018 words)

References ‘Incest’, in the sense of proscribed and abhorred sexual behaviour, is a cultural construct; its boundaries vary according to definitions that are specific to individual cultures (e.g., Willner 1983). The incidence of incest in the city of Arsinoe in the Fayum was higher still, indicating that virtually every man with a living younger sister married her instead of someone from outside the family. Incest and its avoidance occupy prominent positions in competing approaches to the understanding of human social behaviour, for instance in nature/nurture debates. www.stanford.edu /~scheidel/incest.htm   (1740 words)

Exogamy and Incest Prohibitions   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) Exogamy or outmarriage and associated incest taboos are a basic feature of all marriage systems. The incest prohibitions listed in Leviticus 18 suggest a very narrow range of prohibitions within the extended biological family and an elaboration of restrictions on certain categories of affines. Above and beyond the drastic penalties for adultery, condemnations of incest were applied to sex or marriage between a man and his son's wife, brother's wife, stepmother, father's brother's wife, wife's mother, or wife's sister. www.umanitoba.ca /anthropology/tutor/marriage/incest.html   (1037 words)

[No title] Incest may be a form of inbreeding, and some have suggested that the incest taboo is meant to reduce the chances of congenital birth-defects that can result from inbreeding. To prevent such recurrent and costly bloodshed was one of the intentions of the incest taboo. The Incest Taboo - The Offspring of Aeolus')" href="http://click.hotbot.com/director.asp?site=search.lycos.com&partner=&start_group=retriever_topic&id=1&keys=Incest&target=http%3A%2F%2Fsamvak.tripod.com%2Fincest.html">samvak.tripod.com www.lycos.com /info/incest--societies.html   (499 words)

Evolutionary Psychology, Behaviorism, and the Incest Taboo The aversion to incest is one of the most pervasive and remarkable regularities of human behavior, yet to this date has defied explanation. A behavioristic explanation of incest is hypothetical, yet testable, and it is the ability to be subject to experimental falsification that distinguishes it from evolutionary explanations that are untestable, and hence cannot meet the strictures of science. Indeed, it may be persuasively argued that fitness issues have nothing whatsoever to do with incest, and that incest avoidance is, like a spandrel, a by-product of unremarkable learning processes that are traceable in human behavior and in the activity of the human brain. www.homestead.com /flowstate/incest.html   (2638 words)

Discovery Health :: Taboo Taboo refers to practices that are generally prohibited because of religious or social pressures. Incest is a behavior that is considered taboo and illegal in nearly all societies. The incest taboo is thought to protect families and society from the negative effects of inbreeding, once common among European royalty and in some other societies. health.discovery.com /centers/sex/sexpedia/taboo.html   (391 words)

Stanley Kurtz on Gay Marriage on National Review Online The reason we need an incest taboo is because there is no effective way for the state to protect children from sexual abuse by family members. Just as the taboo on incest reduces the temptation to child abuse, the taboo on non-marital and non-reproductive sexuality helps to cement marital unions, and helps prevent acts of adultery that would tear those unions apart. As with the taboos on incest and sodomy, society can't enforce the taboo on adultery with laws. www.nationalreview.com /kurtz/kurtz043003.asp   (2322 words)

incest Sexual intercourse between persons thought to be too closely related to marry; the exact relationships that fall under the incest taboo vary widely from society to society. A biological explanation for the incest taboo is based on the necessity to avoid inbreeding. Within groups in which ritual homosexuality is practised, for example in New Guinea, an incest taboo applies also to these relations, suggesting that the taboo is as much social as biological in origin. www.tiscali.co.uk /reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0018975.html   (255 words)

Coming too close, going too far: theoretical and cross-cultural approaches to incest and its prohibitions Australian ...   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) The theorisation and study of incest prohibitions, as opposed to the study of incest as practice, have a long and varied history in anthropology. Nevertheless, in a recent paper Anna Meigs and Kathleen Barlow (2002) suggest, in a variant of Robin Fox's aphorism that kinship is to anthropology as the nude is to art (Fox 1967: 1), that the incest taboo is to anthropology as Shakespeare is to English literature--'fundamental and classic'. As the vast literature on incest prohibition shows, incest is a culturally-defined category that commonly encompasses the biological definition of 'in-breeding' where infractions invoke and produce a wide variety of individual and social reactions that do not necessarily correspond closely to the closeness of relationship between the parties involved. www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m2472/is_1_16/ai_n13774391   (804 words)

The Enigma of the Incest Taboo In particular, this kind of incest only occurs after the brother and sister have spent their childhoods separated from each other (in the case of sibling incest), or the child has spent its childhood away from the parent (in the case of parent/child incest). Such incest is usually initiated by a family member who was himself abandoned and mistreated and physically abused in childhood (in the majority of cases the father or older brother), and often causes later serious psychological problems in the victim. The incest taboo is universal without having been genetically inherited, a mystery which would be conveniently solved if we could only say for sure that genetically inherited aversion has caused it. serendip.brynmawr.edu /sci_cult/evolit/s05/web3/avaidya.html   (1845 words)

Incest - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Adults previously involved in incest are often called "secret survivors", by therapists, as there is no one to listen to their shame, confusion, or self-loathing due to the topic's taboo, since the topic is regarded as the cruelest and most baffling action. Given the taboo nature of parent-child incest and the fact that it is engaged with dependent children, it is likely to be under-reported in official government statistics where information is given voluntarily. Adult incest occurs between individuals who are close blood relations and who have exceeded their society's legal or cultural age of consent. en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Incest   (6439 words)

Incest is a Narcissistic Act Having personally experienced incest at the age 9 by my brother, I would have to agree with you, Sam, regarding the correlation between incest and narcissism. Both parents had N traits, and as the family geneology record keeper, I have researched both sides and Narcissism is pervasive in varying degrees on both sides of the extended family. My twin sister dealt with the incest (happened to her at the same time by the same brother) differently. www.suite101.com /discussion.cfm/npd/59862/latest/4   (2165 words)

Incest Taboo We now suspect that the three traits, tools, language, and the incest taboo, are all related and related to the origin of humanity. The incest taboo requires that we must exchange mates between groups, and that exchange was necessary for us to communicate and develop our tools. While the taboo appears to be the closest thing we have to a universal social institution, another argument for its early appearance in human society, there are a few cases where it is not only allowed, but prescribed. www.scn.org /cmp/modules/soc-inc.htm   (590 words)

A RESOURCE LIST ON INCEST   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) The origins of the incest taboo are discussed as well a psychotherapeutic approaches. This article stresses the importance of child sexual abuse awareness and since incest is a form of sexual abuse that is particularly difficult to discover, it follows that professional need to be aware of how to identify it. The origins of the incest taboo are also traces as well as historical Greek and Roman contributions to this topic. www.umm.maine.edu /resources/beharchive/beh450/ShannonLane/slanbib.html   (1993 words)

Dethpundit: Incest is good The interesting thing about the incest taboo is that it lies in that area between nature and culture. The idea that the incest taboo was created for the purpose of trading women was popularized by Levi-Strauss in the sixties. It was the mere suggestion of incest that caused such a scandal. blog.lib.umn.edu /leekx006/corngod/001115.html   (417 words)

Heywood writing sample - expository Ever since the topic of incest came up in my first cultural anthropology class in college, I've wondered whether its almost universal prohibition wasn't just a cultural expression of a natural disinclination towards mating with members of an individual's immediate family. My feeling was that there must be some aspect of incest and its taboo that might account for this discrepancy in attitude. Through withholding the most universally common constraints of an incest taboo from a ruler (hero, god, etc.), the recipient moves from the ordinary to the extraordinary and liminal. home.earthlink.net /~dtpchick/homepage/heysample2.html   (980 words)

Incest in T&C   (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-03) Thus the incest taboo itself is ambiguous, even contradictory; not a universal prohibition, but a contingent construct of power that justifies inequities by creating a myth of "otherness" both banishing and inviting incestuous desire. I would like to suggest that this contradiction inscribes itself into the incest taboo, but also into Pandarus--that the protean, ambiguous, contradictory qualities that critics have seen as being Pandarus's pre-eminent characteristics are also the pre- eminent characteristics of the incest taboo and the desires it conjures in late medieval patriarchal society. As the legitimating narrative of Troy is undermined by Thebes, the legitimating narrative of the incest taboo is undone by its contradictions and inefficacy. web.english.ufl.edu /exemplaria/fehrenba.htm   (5405 words)

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)

Senator Olympia J. Snowe According to a study by the Iowa Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 30 percent of female U.S. military veterans report having been raped or suffered a rape attempt during their military service. Current law permits the Defense Department to perform abortions in its own facilities in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. However, in cases of rape or incest, the woman must bear the cost of the procedure. snowe.senate.gov /articles/art030804_1.htm   (163 words)

Jiskha Homework Help - Social Studies: Psychology: Incest Taboo Why is the incest taboo in the immediate family essentially universal? Since role conflict is typical of any incestual relationship, this is why it is seen as a reason for the universal incest taboo. Each culture or subculture probably has its own explanation for its incest taboo. www.jiskha.com /social_studies/psychology/incest.html   (748 words)

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