How we experience rules : from inbreeding avoidance to incest taboo?

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  • 規範性の要件 : 近親交配回避からインセスト・タブーへ？
  • キハンセイ ノ ヨウケン : キンシン コウハイ カイヒ カラ インセスト ・ タブー エ?

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In this paper I start retracing the history of anthropological approaches to incest taboo, though I regard the so-called incest problem as a kind of pseudo problem. Incest Taboo was first given an exaggerated theoretical importance in the context of 19th century evolutionist anthropology, as a key institution which enabled human society to depart from pristine promiscuity, and has been considered to be a sole institution found universally all over the world, despite frequent indications that it is actually not that universal. What might be truly universal is the tendency to be found among other mammals and primates to avoid inbreeding, and not incest prohibition itself. There even exist societies which lack a rule to forbid incest as such (although such societies actually show almost no cases of incest), and even among many societies with some rule of incest prohibition, contents of the rule, attitudes towards its transgression, kinds of punishment (from death penalty and ostracism to more lenient forms including mild admonishment and ridicule, as far as the total absence of any punishment) widely vary for each society. However, the universal tendency to evade inbreeding and those rules of prohibition were often confused, and as a result, the fiction of the universality of the prohibition has largely remained intact. It follows the very question how to explain the universal Inset Taboo was the empty question in which the object to be explained was actually absent. Westermarck’s hypothesis, which explains the universal tendency of avoiding inbreeding, that close association in early childhood later develops an aversion to their sexual relations, took the limelight again in the latter half of the 20th century, and as the evidence accumulates to prove it, new waves of argument to attempt to explain the universality of the incest prohibition by this “Westermarck effect” have become popular, both in anthropology and other related fields. I would like to show how and why these new attempt to explain incest taboo will turn out to be a failure, and through its examination and refutation, I hope I could throw new light on the nature of rules, what is their proper function, what human mental capacity to be required in order to understand and live by rules.

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