> Claude Levi-Strauss, one of my intellectual heroes,
> made the observation that _all_ human societies
> possess an incest tabu
OK, but I still don't see how this makes it "biologically" based. It's a taboo that gets violated -- or at least, used to get violated -- pretty often, which is why there HAVE to be such strictures against it, and why it appears so often as a motif in mythology.
Engels in "Origins of the Family" cites Marx as critiquing this view of the incest taboo in "Die Walkuere," because the long-lost-twins love affair between Sigmund and Sieglinde (which the composer added, by the way -- because it does not appear in the "Nibelungenlied" and only in a very different form in the Volsunga Saga) is portrayed as an unheard of thing. Marx says that at one point "sister was wife to brother, and that was moral." I don't know if Marx is right on subsequently-discovered evidence, though (I'm no anthropologist).
This form of incest has appeared in contemporary culture, too; I'm thinking of John Sayles's "Lonestar" and Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things." Of these examples, I found Roy's portrayal the most unsettling, since her characters were actually raised together, while in "Die Walkuere" and "Lonestar" they at least did not know they were brother and sister until later in life.
I read recently that the taboo in the US against marrying first cousins is of very recent vintage, dating to the whole Jerry Lee Lewis fiasco.
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