Doing it with the in-laws

Maurice Godelier’​ s Forbidden Fruit is a small book about a big subject. It can afford to be short because, despite all the ink spilled and pencils chewed, what is known about incest and its prohibition can be summarised quite succinctly. The origin of the incest taboo is still a mystery, and though many theories have been proposed, few universal conclusions can safely be drawn; like the appearance of human language, it is a problem that is unlikely to be definitively resolved. Godelier is perfectly aware of this. He is a specialist in the field to which the problem of incest is most intimately related: kinship, the volatile mixture of genealogical, social and biological links between related individuals.

The study of kinship was once ‘the very flower of anthropology’, but by the late 20th century the classical study of kinship systems had foundered on the rocks of the discipline’s endemic self-critique. Godelier’s The Metamorphoses of Kinship (2004) brought the subject back to the fore with an energy rarely found in contemporary anthropological writing. The book ranged widely, examining the long history of the field; the way that kinship had been reformulated in light of gender inequalities, labour and property; and the way contemporary phenomena such as widespread cohabitation before marriage, gay marriage, IVF and surrogacy have changed our conception of matters such as descent and alliance. Forbidden Fruit is a short and focused pendant to The Metamorphoses, which itself dedicated a lot of space to the problem of incest. It is presented in an informal question-and-answer format that reflects both the confidence of a master in his late work and the circumstances of its creation: now ninety, Godelier was taken ill and hospitalised in Greece while writing a wholly different book, and after being discharged he dictated the first version of this one to his assistant, Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke.

The basic facts of the matter are straightforward, and everyone understands them well. You are not supposed to have sex or procreate with certain immediate family members. Typically the list includes your parents, your children and your siblings, and most often the relations that Europeans would identify as grandparents or grandchildren, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces. So far as we know, human beings everywhere and at all times have prohibited sex and marriage with some or all of these relations. Though the exact rules vary between societies and there are many exceptions – brother-sister and even parent-child marriage are not unknown in the historical record – almost all societies start with some sort of prohibition on sex with immediate kin. Frequently the degree of prohibition goes much further than that and covers lots of other people too. Despite this, incest still occurs, seemingly everywhere, and all the time.

The ideas that hold sway in European societies today of what it is to be a parent, a sibling, a child or other relation are not universally shared. Among the Baruya of highland Papua New Guinea, whose social arrangements Godelier has studied since the late 1960s, an individual is thought to have ‘several fathers and several mothers’, so that ‘the notions of father, mother and sibling … are completely different and cannot be thought about or experienced in the same way.’ This can affect the way that incest is understood. In the Trobriand Islands, it was believed that a child was created from the menstrual blood of the mother through the intervention of an ancestor spirit; the father’s semen merely nourished and helped shape the growing foetus after conception. Trobrianders therefore saw fatherhood as a strictly social relation, and father-daughter intercourse was not recognised as incest.

Whatever the rules may be, Godelier says, all the people covered by them are considered in some essential way too close to one another – too alike, in short – for sex between them to be socially, eugenically or cosmically permissible. Usually this ‘too-closeness’ is conceptualised in the idea that related people have some substance in common. In many cultures, including those of the West, the substance is usually identified as ‘blood’ (hence ‘blood relatives’) but elsewhere it might be semen, bones, mother’s milk or breath; it might also be something immaterial, like a spirit or a name. Modern science has added genes to this list, but in most places the taboo has also applied to people related only by ties of marriage. However incest is defined, all such unions are polluting, and the word itself derives from the Latin castus (‘pure’) and in (‘not’): an impure connection, defiled and defiling.

If the rules are broken, something bad will happen, though exactly what the bad thing may be varies from place to place. It ranges from a fear of congenital defects in offspring – a historically novel idea, and very rarely cited as the reason for the prohibition – to natural disasters and existential social perils. Very often, of course, something very bad will happen to the incestuous couple in particular: once discovered, incest is often punished severely. In the UK today, the penalty for those found guilty of incest (defined as ‘sex with an adult relative’) is up to two years in jail: less of a disincentive, perhaps, than the disembowelment said to have been imposed for brother-sister incest among Godelier’s Baruya, but still relatively tough. Elsewhere in Europe, incest isn’t actually a crime: many countries, including Spain, France and the Netherlands, do not legally prohibit consensual incest between adults.

By ruling certain people out of bounds, incest prohibitions typically imply their complement: a list of people with whom sex is permitted, and who might therefore be partners in marriage and procreation. In this way incest, and the prohibitions and proscriptions governing it, often constitute the basis of the social relationships anthropologists have studied under the rubric of kinship. Practically speaking, this means that marriage rules are typically related to incest rules. Occasionally they overlap exactly, but since marriage is as much (or more) about the social as the sexual, the rules governing it can be more elaborate, and go well beyond the rules governing incest. Sometimes marriage rules forbid the union of people who are considered too ‘distant’ to marry rather than too propinquitous (people of a forbidden social class or ethnic group, for instance, as was once the case in some American states or apartheid South Africa); and sometimes marriage is forbidden between people who are, even so, permitted to have sex with each other. In England and Wales, the 1949 Marriage Act listed 46 different ‘prohibited degrees’ of relationship which forbade marriage, including such wholly unrelated persons as one’s wife’s grandmother, or one’s granddaughter’s husband. (The list seems to have been based on the one given in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which listed an additional 22 forbidden degrees. This itself was a notable reduction from the high point of the medieval period, when it was forbidden to marry anyone descended from a great-great-great-great-great-grandparent – that is, a seventh cousin – or to have sex with an in-law’s in-law’s in-laws.) In 1949 sexual incest was still covered by the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act, which referred only to immediate and lineal relatives: parents, grandparents, children, siblings and half-siblings. (It was superseded in 1956 by the new Sexual Offences Act, which added uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews.) UK law long ago reduced the number of prohibited marriage degrees, removing any interdiction on marrying affines (relatives by marriage, not ‘blood’). Marriage rules now map exactly onto incest law, so you can marry anyone you can legally have sex with. In case you were wondering, this does include first cousins, however uncommon such marriages may be.

Once it is granted that some kind of incest prohibition is universal among human beings, the ethnologist proceeds to the detail of how exactly incest and kinship have been defined and experienced by individuals in particular societies at particular times. But deeper, more intractable questions immediately present themselves. Why do such rules exist at all? How did the incest taboo come to be a universal feature of social life? Why do people break it, and what are the results?

We can get somewhere with the last of these questions at least, since incest happens, and there are cases to examine. The commonest forms of incest are between father and daughter, and stepfather and stepdaughter. In these cases, as in most intergenerational instances (mother-son or uncle-niece, say, though Godelier notes that the former seems very rare, and information is lacking), what might once have been considered ‘incest’ has to a large extent been subsumed by two other sets of sexual prohibitions: those on sex or marriage with people who are considered too young (a boundary often managed by phenomena such as initiations into adulthood), and those on obtaining sex by force (most if not all societies place sanctions on rape, though definitions vary widely). Parent-child incest is now commonly understood in Western societies almost entirely through the lens of abuse, which is to say sexual and psychological violence. Incest is a metaphysical crime, an outrage against the social and divine orders – but this is not the way that familial sexual abuse is now understood, and not why it is considered bad. In the UK, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 makes a telling provision in its definition of incest: to qualify as a crime, ‘sex with an adult relative’ must be fully consensual and both parties must be of age; the statute notes specifically that ‘consenting to penetration’ is an essential part of the offence. It may be that the truest notion of incest must always carry with it the suggestion of consent, and indeed desire. Both parties are sinners.

If there is no consent, ‘sex with an adult relative’ is not the relevant charge and is punishable instead – in the UK, as in many other places – as rape, coercion or abuse. If one of the parties is underage, the incestuous element of the crime is not even considered in British law. When it comes to the most common form of incestuous union, that between fathers and daughters, perhaps incest can only be considered the primary offence in a society – there have been many – where the indecent sexual use of daughters by older family members may be regrettable but is tacitly accepted as being in the way of things. Through patriarchally convenient loopholes, this form of incest is sometimes excepted from prohibition, as in the Trobriand Islands.

In modern legal systems, these crimes involve an act which, while incestuous in nature, is classified first and foremost as the violent abuse of a child. It may be, however, that seeing it only as sexual violence neglects some of the specific harms caused by the incestuous aspect of familial sexual abuse. ‘For the victims,’ Godelier writes,

whether they have been forced or seduced, the damage to their personal equilibrium, the loss of references, is extremely serious and usually lasts for life if there is no means to bring the situation to light … Incest destroys the responsibility, authority and protection that family members owe each other in order to sustain their social ties and maintain a social and personal equilibrium.

The suggestion is that the psychic disorder incest creates in the victim, and perhaps even in consenting partners, arises from the violent disruption of socially sanctioned, normative family bonds and obligations: what incest destroys or pollutes is above all the correct order of things. The fact that consent remains critical to the legal charge suggests that the crime is thought to have been committed by both parties against something other than themselves, and in many traditional societies both parties are considered guilty, no matter the facts of the case. Once exposed, the happy marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta – as the Messenger in Oedipus Rex informs us, their love gave them a ‘deep joy indeed’ – is viewed as a terrifying curse, ‘a thing of guilt and holy dread so great it appals the earth, the rain from heaven, the light of day!’ Their crime is to some extent against each other – though it is mostly figured by Sophocles as the crime of Oedipus against his mother – but it is really a crime against the order of the cosmos. And while the plague that afflicted Thebes is linked to the unavenged murder of Laius, it is hard not to feel that the defilement of incest is also to blame. In Bali, a case of brother-sister incest could once have resulted in the perpetrators’ entire village being burned and the population scattered, such was the pollution caused by the union. A village might even be dispersed and purified following the birth of opposite-sex twins, who were considered to have committed a kind of incest in the womb. This applied to commoners, at any rate: opposite-sex twins born into the highest caste were considered holy, and were brought up to be married to each other. It is one of the anthropologically rare cases of a permissible brother-sister union, though it was also known among the elites of ancient Mazdean Iran and in antique Egypt, where societies were imitating the sacred actions of the gods. Elsewhere, as in Thebes, plague, drought and famine could sometimes be blamed on unpunished acts of incest.

When the consequences​ are so grim, why do people do it? Godelier’s view is direct: ‘I think that those who commit such acts do so consciously, to satisfy their desires. They are therefore seeking pleasure – and domination.’ This doesn’t get us very far. Incest of whatever form doubtless involves affects associated with all illicit sexual acts: feelings of power and dominance, the thrill of transgression and fear of discovery, the wish for sexual pleasure and the satiation of socially unacceptable sexual desires and fantasies. The difficult question is why some people enter into consensual incestuous relationships despite their destructiveness; in other words, when they know what they are doing is wrong. Knowing has been central to figurations of incest since Oedipus; Sophocles’ tragedy plays on both the intellectual and carnal senses of ‘knowledge’. (Oedipus and Jocasta wouldn’t have been charged with a crime under the modern legal system in Britain, since the offence depends on one or both parties knowing that they are related in a forbidden degree.) Why is it, for instance, that in Game of Thrones Cersei Lannister passionately declares her commitment – ‘I choose you’ – to her brother and lover Jaime, in the full knowledge that her choice means denying every rule there is about acceptable sexual relationships?

Here, Godelier takes the view that individual human sexuality, being so polymorphic and idiosyncratic, ‘is fundamentally asocial’: it can direct itself towards any object, and it pushes people as much towards social fission and disaster as towards fusion and union. Perhaps because of this unruliness, across the span of human history people everywhere have concluded that sex must be made subject to limits. There is no society that allows complete sexual permissiveness. The rules regarding sexual taboos are, in every society, transmitted to its members with varying degrees of effectiveness. Rules change, boundaries shift and education is never perfect, as our still evolving debates around consent clearly show. But very few people anywhere miss the memo about not sleeping with immediate family: typically, the steering of sexual impulses towards socially appropriate objects occurs from infancy, operating at subconscious and conscious levels, as parents and other adults work to bend the desire of the individual ‘to conform to the social and sexual order supposed to reign in the society’. So, Oedipus notwithstanding, Godelier would say that people who commit incest know what they are doing, and choose it.

From this perspective, the prohibition of incest is only a subset of the various social controls on sex that are also found, in whatever form, in all places and times. Everywhere, it seems, human beings have believed that sexual desire must be curbed – it is ‘a source of conflict’, Godelier says, and ‘cannot be entirely left up to each individual’. It must also be turned to pro-social ends: individual sexual desire is domesticated when what he calls the ‘sexed bodies of men and women’ are gendered and assigned particular forms by society. In the process, sexuality is brought further to heel: something of the extravagance of human sexuality may be ‘amputated’, he says, but that is the cost of maintaining the social order. Sexuality and biology are socially configured as gender, and the bodies of men and women become ‘society’s ventriloquist dummy’, mouthing the diktats of a sexual and social order which provides roles, visual presentations and social expectations for the genders it produces, and prescribes the proper uses of sex.

But if incestuous desire exists because human sexuality is a hot asocial mess, and the incest taboo is just one among many limitations on sex, then why should it seem such a special case? The answer has to do with the correspondences between the prohibition of incest and the rules governing kinship and marriage. Anthropologists have understood these rules as constitutive of the ways that societies organise, maintain and reproduce themselves in time. So the prohibition of incest has appeared to shape human social life in ways that other sexual taboos do not.

The two most influential theories to this effect – the ones, anyway, that Godelier considers it worth responding to – originate with Freud and Lévi-Strauss. Freud’s reworking of the Oedipus myth indicated that a mélange of incestuous impulses and desires – homosexual and heterosexual, and laced with aggression – are foundational to the life of a child in the family. He argued that the eventual control and redirection of these impulses and desires towards sanctioned objects is crucial to successful socialisation and psychic wellbeing. This was a theory about family and individual psychological dynamics, but in Totem and Taboo (1913) he returned to incest in explicitly anthropological terms, advancing the idea that humanity once lived in a ‘primal horde’ ruled over by a despotic father. This legendary father incestuously monopolised all the women of the family as his wives, before being slain and eaten by his frustrated male children, who then decided that in order to avoid reproducing their father’s error they had to give away their own female kin in exchange for the sisters and daughters of other men. Social relations were thereby born from the incest taboo and the subsequent exchange of women it entailed.

Godelier gives this fairy tale short shrift: it is inadmissible from an anthropological point of view because it imagines that some form of family – the patriarch’s primal horde – pre-existed society, and that the murder of the father and the instituting of the incest taboo made possible the creation of social relations between human groups. The opposite is the case, Godelier says: the family and its relationships were formed within society, not the other way round. It is clear that modern human beings, their immediate evolutionary forebears and their current closest relatives are and always were naturally social animals. The human notion of the family probably emerged alongside the sexual division of domestic labour, the appearance of natural language and the domestication of fire, all of which would have come about in an already long-existent hominin social order. Whatever process it was that produced the incest taboo as a set of consciously held rules, it could never have involved a pre-social family horde or the killing of fathers: the example of primate societies suggests that a complex social world of some kind came before the cultural edifices eventually built on it by people. To judge from chimpanzees and bonobos, it may have been a social world in which there were already social mechanisms that effectively limited inbreeding: in both species, females leave their natal band at sexual maturity to join different groups, thus avoiding sexual union with their biological fathers or brothers. The reason appears to be that it defuses intra-group social conflict: there is no sense that chimps and bonobos have any conscious interest in avoiding inbreeding, since no father knows who any of his children are, and no children know their fathers or paternal siblings (though it seems that maternal siblings may recognise one another through shared bonds with their mother).

Powerful and suggestive as Freud’s story may be, it is just a myth. But it does get one thing right: incest rules are at the basis of kinship. For Lévi-Strauss, the significance of incest was even deeper than that. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), he argued that the incest taboo was the pivot point between nature and culture. Like natural language, its universality indicates an organic origin, yet the variable character of the rules in which it is expressed makes it irreducibly cultural too. Also like language, incest underwrote a critical form of exchange: the exchange of women between human groups created alliances, just as language enabled exchanges of meaning. The incest taboo and natural language were the essential signs of the birth of symbolic thought, and so marked the coming into being of human culture proper: they constitute the line in the sand where human beings, as a species, took decisive control of their own social and biological reproduction, and founded human society in forms of symbolic exchange.

Godelier finds fault with this thesis too. Lévi-Strauss naturalises male domination and has to ignore societies in which men, not women, are exchanged; he underplays the importance of descent in favour of alliance; he misses the fact that social worlds are also dependent on people keeping and transmitting certain things – objects, names, sacred rights, social roles, money – not just endlessly exchanging them; and, like Freud, he also supposes some sort of pre-human horde existence that is inconsistent with what is known about primate life.

What, then, does Godelier offer in place of Freud and Lévi-Strauss? The answer is not much. Not much, at least, by way of grand theorising about the birth of human society or the transition from animality. Godelier’s view on the origins of the taboo seems limited to a rationalist shrug: ‘Over its multi-millennial history, humankind has discovered by experience the negative impact on the reproduction of families and society as a whole of sexual unions with persons considered to be too like oneself, and consequently has forbidden them.’ So, people worked out that it was somehow bad, and made rules against it: a view that explains nothing, and also appears to presuppose a prior condition in which incest must have been practised – or how else was this negative impact ‘discovered’? All the old problems appear unresolved. How did people work this out? When? What was human sexual life like before this discovery?

The point Godelier wants to make is that these questions, as well as being unanswerable, put the cart before the horse. The historical emphasis on the incest taboo as a crucial moment of transition – whether from primal sexual chaos to organised society, or from instinctive animality to human culture – is for him a red herring. The introduction of the incest prohibition, rather than being a pivotal shift, was more likely to have been one among many instances of gradual change during the long course of human evolution. The most important thing, for Godelier, is that these changes did not found human society: they took place within the developing society of humans and their evolutionary forebears. Like the control of fire, natural language and the sexual division of tasks, they probably weren’t even the preserve of modern humans alone; and if the example of other primates is any guide, formal incest prohibitions were probably preceded by other social mechanisms that had a similar function. The difference between humans and our nearest relatives isn’t that we have societies and they don’t: it is that human beings, because their evolution has involved the development of symbolic thought and language, choose and change the form of their societies, which among other things means consciously taking social control of biological reproduction. People everywhere have tried to subordinate the chaotic, asocial force of human sexuality to social ends and to compel individuals to respect social mores. And, as we know, in this all societies continually fail: hence the need for sexual prohibitions in the first place.

Complex as our nearest living relatives are, none of this applies to them: the social and sexual lives of chimpanzees and bonobos, and their lifeways within the world, are not open to conscious alteration in any comparable degree. ‘God makes the animals, man makes himself,’ as the 18th-century German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg put it: they do not get to change the terms of their social world, the expression of their sexualities, the arrangement of their lives. Unlike them, we get to choose.