Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest

Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest FranCoise Heritier; Jeanine Herman, trans. New York: Zone Books, 1999.341 pp.

Why do some societies forbid two kinsfolk, such as two sisters or a mother and daughter, to have sex with the same unrelated partner? Is there a way in which this rule underlies the prohibition on sex between close consanguineal kin? Franqoise Heritier claims there is, and in setting out this claim she extends Levi-Strauss's work to provide an answer to the first question. She argues that societies forbid sex among kin for the same reasons that they forbid the sharing of a sex partner by close kin or, as this is called, incest of the second type. As she states it, "Incest of the second type is likely at the conceptual origin of the incest prohibition as we know it, that of the first type, and not the reverse" (p. 13).

This novel argument grounds itself in the social construction of incest and its prohibition from the social meanings of sex and reproduction. Most American accounts of incest are based on issues concerning the behavioral avoidance of sex between kin because of its negative consequences, such as inbreeding depression, withering of alliances and the circle of civil relationships, the undermining of the kinship authority structure, the disorganization of family and kin groups, or the birth of offspring who do not fit existing kinship categories. Instead of looking for problems from incest behavior, Heritier looks toward basic cognitive oppositions in a people's thinking as the source of both types of sexual prohibition. This may make the theory appear to American eyes as both strange and grandiose. As Heritier puts her bold thesis: "I seek to provide a unifying theory that accounts for all aspects of the incest prohibition" (p. 20).

Heritier's theory begins with the idea that each society's social construction of reproduction includes theories of how various bodily fluids constitute the newborn. Further, these constructions involve basic oppositions, such as same/different, male/female, hot/cold, soft/hard, wet/dry, and others. The fluids emphasized, the bodily...