best, rakesh
ps. Judith Butler gave the Gauss lectures here on kinship, psychoanalysis and politics based on a careful reading of Antigone. She also discussed Levi Strauss' writings on the incest taboo and kinship. Which lead me to Maurice Godelier's reflections in Anthony Grafen,ed. Evolution and Its Influence and his afterword to Godelier.ed. Transformations of Kinship.
He argues that Levi Strauss naturalized male domination or the patriarchal family in the form of the exchange of women since Levi Strauss thought that this was the necessary consequence of the endogamy to which the incest taboo gives rise. But there is no reason why men have to exchange women. It could be visa versa or the exchanges could simply not be gender specific.
This leaves open the explanation for male domination if it is not the result of the incest taboo. I understand that Pierre Bourdieu's upcoming book is on the anthropology of male domination; I hope he engages Godelier.
The latter also parts with Levi Strauss because Godelier thinks there is a real biological basis for the incest taboo. He argues that due to the loss of osterus in women and the presence of children into puberty within the family, there arose perisistent sexual competition which threatened the auto destruction of the family units knit together in society. The incest taboo arose as a way of managing the destructive consequences of sexuality. It then had the effect of forcing exogamy which then had the consequence of solidifying society (and forcing the invention of the *sign system* of kinship as well). So it was not that people married out in order to prevent being killed out--as Tylor had it-- though this solidification of social ties through exogamy was the consequence of the incest taboo.
Perhaps Godelier's analysis is close to Malinowski's?
At any rate, I asked Butler about this analysis and she suggested that Godelier still seems to narrowly confine desire to a heterosexual mode and gives no explanation for homosexual desire. Yet from Godelier's analysis of the destructive tendencies of sexual competition within the family there would be no reason why the partners exchanged could not be same sex or why sexuality would have to be confined to monagamous familes from two different kin groups. All that is important in his analysis of the incest taboo is the preventing of human sexuality from destroying the family unit, *however organized*.
Godelier thus provides an explanation for why the incest taboo is indeed effective against homosexual relations, though the genetic dangers would not be present there. That the incest taboo is effective in the prohibition of sexuality which cannot have genetically deleterious consequences seems to me one bit evidence in favor of Godelier against the bad stock theories which explain the taboo in terms of its cultural fitness for limiting inbreeding and genetic deterioration (see Wm Durham Coevolution, Genes, Culture and Human Diversity).
Of course I am very partial to Godelier because he is really all I have read on the topic! Perhaps there are deep problems in his theory as well. And due to ignorance I had trouble understanding the psychoanalytic and specifically Lacanian interpretation of both the reason for and consequence of the incest taboo. What is Seminar 2 and 7 about?