[lbo-talk] Sociality and culture ( was ...)

[Jerry Monaco]

On 5/2/07, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 5/1/07, wrobert at uci.edu <wrobert at uci.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I keep wondering when the incest taboo is going to make an appearance in
> > this conversation, or perhaps the symbolic, imaginary, and real.  robert
> > wood
> >
> >
>
> [clip] All apes observe, in practice, an avoidance of incest, to the
> extent that it is at least behaviorally prohibited. They do this through
> either female transfer to another troop or male transfer to another troop,
> depending on the species and sometimes depending on the density of the
> troop, and abundance or scarcity of resources.  Of course an incest
> prohibition does not make an incest  "taboo". The way the word "taboo" is
> used it implies the sense of symbolic representation or myth or symbolically
> represented "rules" and norms.  [clip]

  [clip] The female when she comes of age wanders off to live with the
> neighboring troop and thus avoids mating with brothers and sisters.
>
> Jerry Monaco
>
>
>

I wanted to add something here.  While I was writing this post I remembered
a paper that I read a few years back.  The paper is by Jim Moore, an
anthropologist at Harvard and USCD. It is called  Female transfer in
primates,    The paper was originally written in 1984, and published *Int.
J. Primatol. *5: 537-589. I think it might have been revised.  It is
currently available here
http://weber.ucsd.edu/~jmoore/publications/Femdelta.html

What interests me in the context of this thread is the first paragraph of
the conclusion

"If, as argued above, FT [Female Transfer]  and NFT [non-Female Transfer]
species differ significantly in the kinship structure of social units, we
should expect systematic behavioral differences between the two clusters of
species. Failure to detect them would imply that either our descriptions of
behavior have not adequately distinguished the nepotism we assume is present
among relatives from the competition we assume must be prevalent among
nonrelatives, or many behaviors we have labelled "nepotistic" in macaques
and baboons actually represent a simple preference for the familiar and
predictable, regardless of degrees of relatedness (preference for the
familiar: Marler 1976, Kummer 1978; see also Washburn and Hamburg (1965),
Bernstein and Gordon (1974), Green and Marler (1979), and especially Myers
(1983))."

Notice that the author (an anthropologist) simply assumes that primates
exhibit something that is called a "kinship structure" and that kinship
structure is significant to studying the sociality of primates, and
understanding their social units.  To dogmatically say that kinship
relations and kinship structure is exclusively human not only eliminates the
continuity between our species and our ancestor and cousin species, but also
takes away a useful tool for primate studies, and useful comparisons between
human social groups and primate social groups.  To eliminate the concept of
kinship structure from primate studies, by definition, by saying the
conceptis only applicable if you can show that there is some
representation of
"dead kin" in the kinship structure, is merely a form of dogmatism.  I can
only guess that the reason for this dogmatic definition is to emphasize
human exceptionalism.   Nobody doubts that among existing species humans are
exceptional in many ways.  But that exceptionalism is not as great as we
would like to think, with our pre-Darwinian mind set.

Jerry Monaco