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

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Wed May 2 09:12:14 PDT 2007


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



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list