Talk:Incest taboo

message: Why a separate page?
Because the concepts of "incest" and "incest taboo" are very, VERY different. The latter is a myth perpetrated by counter-transferring anthropologists. The former is a reality all too familiar to therapists. And in practice, discussion of the reality is bogged down whenever people get mirred in the myth. That's why they need to be clearly separated.
For example: why does what anthropologists do or do not believe about an "incest taboo" matter at all about the reality of incest today and throughout history? It doesn't.
If someone wants to argue that the incest taboo exists, they're welcome to try.
:you think an incest taboo doesn't exist? try walking up to someone on the street and ask them "hey, incest is totally kickass, right?" and see how they respond. if you want to argue that it is not a genetic/inherent taboo, and only exists socially, you could probably make a strong case, but to call it a myth is naive. --dan 19:32, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Separate page

message: This article is heavily biased towards the field of anthropology.  Opposing viewpoints are raised, discussed in a cursory fashion, and then dismissed with a statement of the accepted view in the field of anthropology.  If there is some reason that anthropologists (as opposed to praticitioners in psychology, sociology, or other fields) have the best claim to the study of taboos, then this is acceptable.  Otherwise, the article needs to be modified to accommodate other academic viewpoints.
:The word "taboo" was introduced into the English language by an anthropologist, and anthropologists are the only scholars who have studied beliefs and practices relating to incest globally. This does not mean that the views of psychologists and sociologists should be excluded from the article, of course. Slrubenstein   |  Talk  15:02, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "Biased"? It's an anthropology article.  That's like complaining that the article on quasar is "heavily biased towards the field of astrophysics instead of astrology. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont]  ‹(-¿-)› 00:04, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anthropology bias 

message: 1.  It ignores--or its author[s] was ignorant of--evidence for towards whom  and between what ages the incest taboo develops in humans. For instance, there is a fairly well known example of the incest taboo at work among collectively reared kibbutz children in Israel, who failed to develop sexual interest in their co-reared age mates.  This suggests that the development of the incest taboo in individuals is mediated in large part by co-residence. Why isn't this aspect of the taboo discussed in the article?
2.  The adverse effects of inbreeding on the very important MHC is ignored; as is the possible connection between the MHC, body scent, and women's preference for scents that are not too similar (nor too different) from the father (or father-figure) she was raised by or around.  These interactions are probably related to the development of the incest taboo, but again the article ignores them.
3.  Evidence for an incest taboo has also been observed in non-human animals, but the article makes no reference to that either. 
I don't consider myself sufficiently informed to revise this article myself, but I've read enough here and there over the years to realize that the current article is woefully inadequate.  Does anyone have time to research this topic adequately? It really is quite interesting, but the current article lacks neutrality by lopsidedly emphasizing purely cultural explanations.  IOW, it not only omits relevant information, but is very selective as to what sort of relevant info it omits.
Lucky strike 00:28, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Incest taboo" not a thorough&mdash;nor neutral&mdash;article 

message: :First, inbreeding does not directly lead to congenital birth defects per se; it leads to an increase in the frequency of homozygotes. A homozygote encoding a congenital birth defect will produce children with birth defects, but homozygotes that do not encode for congenital birth defects will decrease the number of carriers in a population. If children born with this type of heritable birth defect die (or are killed) before they reproduce, the ultimate effect of inbreeding will be to decrease the frequency of defective genes in the population.
This looks odd to me. The idea is, what, that incest is actually healthy for a population? Aren't bad recessive genes sufficiently common that, in general, inbreeding leads to offspring that are at least a bit less fit than normal? How can this be healthy for society under any definition of healthy?
I just can't take this seriously. The defense of incest is so involved that even if it's correct, which I doubt, one would need a fairly advanced understanding of genetics to grasp it, which was surely lacking when incest taboos were formed in any society you can think of.
Evercat 22:07, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Another theory is that the observance of the taboo would lower the incidence of congenital birth defects caused by inbreeding.
The sentence I've quoted above is about question 1, but completely fails to address question 2. Suppose incest does lead to unhealthy offspring (which I think is well known). How does this lead to the taboo? Via genes and evolutionary psychology, or via society noting the problem and forming the taboo? We're not told what the theory is.
But I'm going to go and interpret it as society forming a taboo for this reason, as it doesn't really make sense otherwise. A "gene for incest avoidance" is only "interested" in its own fitness, not that of society as a whole.
Evercat 22:34, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Dubious

message: -Smuglife 22:40, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Clean it up

message: I intend to delete all the unsourced information in this article soon.  Fair warning.  ——Martinphi    ☎ Ψ Φ—— 03:11, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I neglected this article for a long time.  I have restored much of the deleted material, with sources.  I still have a couple more to add and hope you and others will be patient with me.  I did not restore anything to the article that cannot be backed up by a source; I am just waiting to get the proper books to provide full citations. Slrubenstein   |  Talk 22:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Okay, I have completed my revisions and adding of citations.  If people now want to comment and make suggestions/point out problems, please do, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 18:43, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks very nice.  Not knowing the subject, I didn't check the sources, but I'm sure they're fine.  This result was my intent (: ——Martinphi    Ψ~Φ—— 01:49, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

text: Great!  Thanks, Slrubenstein   |  Talk 15:09, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Intent to delete

message: In some cultures and religions, incest is considred to be not as controversial as abortion. For instance, several bishops in the Roman Catholic Church have agreed with this and have recommended that girls who are raped by their parents to continue their pregnancy. This was notably the case in 2009 with archbishop José Cardoso Sobrinho in Brazil. ADM (talk) 19:44, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Incest vs. Abortion

message: There is an ancient tradition in the Catholic Church which considers remarriage to be a comparable to incest, hence the taboo on divorce and taking communion with a second marital partner. This taboo is mentioned in the document Sacramentum Caritatis, which forbids re-married people to have sexual relations, as if they were brothers and sisters. It is not so simple to write about this without any precise sources on hand, but the material could be added after a proper consultation of canon law and ecclesiastic history. ADM (talk) 21:01, 22 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Incest and Remarriage

message: I think the opening paragraph is pretty good, although I'm not understanding exactly why the terms "formal" and "unspoken" are juxtaposed in exactly that way.  A taboo can be very formal but never spoken about (like taboos on speaking the names of the dead or anything about the dead, in many cultures, and taboos that are so formal that the instant they are broken, there is universal response of an identical kind to the offender, but no one has ever mentioned anything about the taboo - ever - to anyone and no anthropologist can ask questions directly about it, as it would break the taboo).  This is one of the chief mysteries of anthropology and one of the most important reasons anthropology had to develop a variety of techniques to speak about the following four kinds of taboos:
formal but unspoken (like the incest taboo in many cultures)
formal and spoken (like the incest taboo in modern nations)
informal but unspoken
informal and spoken
Now -  are there any cultures that have the incest taboo in the final two categories?  Yes.  So there's some small kind of rewrite needed.  "Formal and informal, spoken and unspoken" would likely be the way an anthropologist would say it had to be written.  As to relative occurrences of the taboo in each of those four categories - well, I believe there's quite a literature on that, but is that really the main point of the article?  Perhaps not - so just a footnote there?Levalley (talk) 23:38, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Good points! I will make some changes but you are free to too.  Go ahead and create the Taboo article!! Slrubenstein   |  Talk 23:46, 26 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  General comments 

message: Well, my biggest fear about this page was that it wouldn't adequately summarize what I believe to be absolutely the best research on this subject (including his summaries and criticisms of all the other views mentioned here).  Not only do I believe he's The Expert on the why of the incest taboo, but every anthropologist I know also agrees, everyone I've given his book to, to read, finds it persuasive, he's quoted all over the place in many, many introductory textbooks and in juried articles, his view is hard to get around, he seems to be exactly right, only Marvin Harris didn't do him justice in his textbook (which is one reason it sucks, but to give Marvin a break, he went to school when Arthur was just a young whippersnapper and never looked back once he got onto his "new thang" of cultural materialism - certainly never looked around to see what was being published as he wrote his textbook.  I am in favor of deleting the entire section on "why" until Arthur Wolf's name and his work appears in it, at least.  To me, this is like opening an article on "theory of relativity - physics" and finding "Newton had some ideas about physical laws that were influential on physics" as a topic paragraph.  Westermarck is beside the point almost altogether (although worthy of mention but if and only if the real literature on incest is considered).
Anthropologists do study "real incest."  But, long before you can get people to allow you to talk to them about their most private sexual experiences, you usually need a general understanding of their language and culture.  It takes time.  But in many, many cultures, anthropologists have collected data on "real incest," often being the only ones to do so (journalists and criminal psychologists also come to mind).  The fact that you're trying to collect data on a taboo (again, an article on taboo in general needs to be in focus here) is always problematic.  Arthur's approach is quite interesting.  Everyone should read it.  If there's no Wiki article on Arthur, one could easily research him in a regular encyclopedia (or on amazon.com and deduce which book is relevant here - plus the journal articles have explanatory titles).Levalley (talk) 00:01, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arthur Wolf (and others) 

message: Will commence soon.  --Levalley (talk) 19:38, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scrubbing for talk page needed badly 

message: — Assignment last updated by MichelleEstrada55 (talk) 04:13, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Culture

message: There is one bit of evidence that argues against the existence of this taboo: records from Ancient Egypt where commoners practiced brother-sister marriage. There are multiple mentions of this problematic practice -- one example grabbed at random -- but no good explanation. (IMHO Egyptologists have thrown up their hands & assumed that this was in order to prevent farmland from being divided into too small of pieces. As good as explanation as any, & better than to simply assume abherrant behavior.) Note: this was not common, less than 5% of documented families practiced this -- if my memory can be trusted, I believe the percentage is something like 2.8%. Still, this phenomena deserves mention, despite modern Egyptians wanting to suppress all mention of it due to understandable embarrassment. -- llywrch (talk) 17:21, 4 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  An oversight about a problematic exception 

message: This statement is not accurate as is. I checked the cited book and the incest question is much more nuanced. I believe this should be added to the article text.
Sorry, I don't know how to add a new comment, so I am attempting to do so in this (probably incorrect) manner. My bad... 2.136.139.238 (talk) 03:46, 19 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  [QUOTE]Many mammal species, including humanity's closest primate relatives, avoid incest.[2]