Tylor vs. Westermarck: Explaining the Incest Taboo

Incest avoidance, the incest taboo, and social cohesion: revisiting Westermarck and the case of the Israeli kibbutzim.

During the past 50 years, a consensus has been forming around Edward Westermarck's idea that incest avoidance results from an aversion that develops when individuals are brought up in propinquity. The argument here presented counters this emerging consensus. Reexamining the case of the Israeli kibbutzim, the authors show that individuals who grew up in the kibbutzim's communal education system ...

Westermarck, Freud, and the incest taboo: does familial resemblance activate sexual attraction?

Evolutionary psychological theories assume that sexual aversions toward kin are triggered by a nonconscious mechanism that estimates the genetic relatedness between self and other. This article presents an alternative perspective that assumes that incest avoidance arises from consciously acknowledged taboos and that when awareness of the relationship between self and other is bypassed, people f...

The Biological Foundations of the Incest Taboo

The relationship between familial resemblance and sexual attraction: an update on Westermarck, Freud, and the incest taboo.

Foundational principles of evolutionary theory predict that inbreeding avoidance mechanisms should exist in all species--including humans--in which close genetic relatives interact during periods of sexual maturity. Voluminous empirical evidence, derived from diverse taxa, supports this prediction. Despite such results, Fraley and Marks claim to provide evidence that humans are sexually attract...

Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar

In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or n...