The proscriptive marriage rule talks about to whom one should not mate or marry. This is negative rule of marriage. Every society has this rule exists in the form of incest taboo. It is most rigid marriage/mating regulation, found in all culture, which prohibits sexual intercourse or marriage between some categories of kin.
The most universal aspect of the incest taboo is the prohibition of sexual intercourse or marriage between mother and son, father and daughter, and brother and sister. No society in recent times has permitted either sexual intercourse or marriage between those pairs. Proscriptive marriage rule in A few societies in the past, however, did permit incest, mostly within the royal and aristocratic families, though generally it was forbidden to the rest of the population. For example, the Incan and Hawaiian royal families allowed marriage within the family. Probably the best-known example of allowed incest involved Cleopatra of Egypt.
Proscriptive marriage rule: It seems clear that the Egyptian aristocracy and royalty indulged in father-daughter and brother-sister marriages. Cleopatra was married to two of her younger brothers at different times. The reasons seem to have been partly religious—a member of the family of the pharaoh, who was considered a god, could not marry any “ordinary” human—and partly economic, for marriage within the family kept the royal property undivided. Between 30 b.c. and a.d. 324, incest was allowed in ancient Egypt not only among the royal family but among commoners; an estimated 8 percent of commoner marriages were brother-sister marriages. The Tallensi of Ghana also does not strongly prescribe to the norm of incest taboo between brother and sister while a relationship between a man and the wife of a lineage mate is an unpardonable sin (Mair, 1997)
Some societies may extend the incest taboo to first cousins , even second cousins also . In spite of such exceptions, no culture we know of today permits or accepts incest within the nuclear family. Why is the familial incest taboo universal? Several explanations have been suggested in the proscriptive marriage rule.
Childhood-Familiarity Theory of Proscriptive Marriage rule
Proscriptive marriage rule The childhood-familiarity theory, suggested by Edward Westermarck, was given a wide hearing in the early 1920s. Westermarck argued that people who have been closely associated with each other since earliest childhood, such as siblings, are not sexually attracted to each other and would therefore avoid marriage with each other. This theory was rejected upon the subsequent discovery that some children were sexually interested in their parents and siblings. More recent studies have suggested, however, that there might be something to Westermarck’s theory.
Yonina Talmon investigated marriage patterns among the second generation of three well established collective communities (kibbutzim) in Israel. In these collectives, children live with many members of their peer group in quarters separate from their families. Proscriptive marriage rule They are in constant interaction with their peers from birth to maturity. The study among 125 couples revealed that, despite parental encouragement of marriage within the peer group, there was “not one instance in which both mates were reared from birth in the same peer group.”50 Children reared in common not only avoided marriage, they also avoided any sexual relations among themselves.
Talmon reported that the people reared together firmly believed that over familiarity breeds sexual disinterest. As one of them told her, “We are like an open book to each other. In proscriptive marriage rule We have read the story in the book over and over again and know all about it.” Talmon’s evidence reveals not only the onset of disinterest and even sexual antipathy among children reared together but a correspondingly heightened fascination with newcomers or outsiders, particularly for their “mystery.”
Arthur Wolf’s study of the Chinese in northern Taiwan also supports the idea that something about being reared together produces sexual disinterest. Wolf focused on a community still practicing the Chinese custom of daughter-in-law raised from childhood”:
When a girl is born in a poor family . . . she is often given away or sold when but a few weeks or months old, or one or two years old, to be the future wife of a son in the family of a friend or relative which has a little son not betrothed in marriage. . . . The girl is called a “little bride” and taken home and brought up in the family together with her future husband.
Wolf’s evidence indicates that this arrangement is associated with sexual difficulties when the childhood “couple” later marry. Informants implied that familiarity caused the couple to be disinterested and to fail to be stimulated by one another. Such couples produce fewer offspring than spouses who are not raised together, are more likely to seek extramarital sexual relationships, and are more likely to get divorced.
The Talmon and Wolf findings are consistent with Westermarck’s belief that the incest taboo may indicate avoidance more than it does a prohibition of certain matings proscriptive marriage rule.
Another study, undertaken by Hilda and Seymour Parker, that may be consistent with Children in an Israeli kibbutz.
Westermarck’s explanation of the incest taboo compared two groups of fathers: those who had allegedly sexually abused their daughters and those who had not. To maximize the similarities among the men in their test group, the Parkers selected the fathers from the same prisons and psychiatric facilities. In proscriptive marriage rule The Parkers found that the fathers who had committed incest with their daughters were much more likely to have had little involvement with bringing up their daughters; they were not at home or rarely at home during the daughters’ first three years of life. The fathers who avoided incest had been more closely involved with their daughters’ early childhood.
Although Westermarck’s theory suggests that sexual aversion develops during early childhood, some researchers have asked whether the childhood familiarity theory could explain the extension of incest taboos to first cousins. Proscriptive marriage rule The familiarity argument would imply that first-cousin marriage should be prohibited in societies where first cousins grow up in the same community. However, such societies are not more likely to prohibit first-cousin marriage. Even if it is likely that familiarity in childhood normally leads to sexual disinterest, we must ask why societies need to prohibit marriages that would voluntarily be avoided because of disinterest. And if familiarity breeds disinterest, what are we to make of couples who remain actively interested in each other sexually after years of marriage?
Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
Sigmund Freud proposed that the incest taboo is a reaction against unconscious, unacceptable desires. He suggested that the son is attracted to his mother (as the daughter is to her father) and as a result feels jealousy and hostility toward his father. But the son knows that these feelings cannot continue, for they might lead the father to retaliate against him; therefore, they must be renounced or repressed. Usually the unacceptable feelings are repressed and retreat into the unconscious. But the desire to possess the mother continues to exist in the unconscious, and, according to Freud, horror at the thought of incest is a reaction to, or a defense against, the forbidden unconscious impulse.
Freud’s theory may account for the aversion felt toward incest, or at least the aversion toward parent-child incest, but it, too, does not explain why society needs an explicit taboo, particularly on brother-sister incest. Nor does it account for the findings that support Westermarck’s hypothesis that familiarity breeds sexual disinterest.
Family-Disruption Theory
Proscriptive marriage rule The family-disruption theory, often associated with Bronislaw Malinowski, can best be summed up as follows: Sexual competition among family members would create so much rivalry and tension that the family could not function as an effective unit. Because the family must function effectively for society to survive, society has to curtail competition within the family. The familial incest taboo is thus imposed to keep the family intact.
But while this theory might explain why father-daughter and mother-son incest would need to be prohibited, why couldn’t societies have a rule that brothers and sisters could marry when they were adults? Hypothetically, brother-sister incest would not disrupt the authority of the parents if the children were allowed to marry when mature. And brother-sister marriages did exist in ancient Egypt. The family-disruption theory, then, does not explain the origin of the incest taboo in proscriptive marriage rule.
Cooperation Theory
The cooperation theory was proposed by the early anthropologist Edward B. Tylor and further elaborated by Leslie A. White and Claude Lévi-Strauss. It emphasizes the value of the incest taboo in promoting cooperation among family groups and thus helping communities to survive. As Tylor saw it, certain operations necessary for the welfare of the community can be accomplished only by large numbers of people working together. To break down suspicion and hostility between family groups and make such cooperation possible, early humans developed the incest taboo to ensure that individuals would marry members of other families. The ties created by intermarriage would serve to hold the community together. Thus, Tylor explained the incest taboo as an answer to the choice “between marrying out and being killed out.” The idea that marriage with other groups promotes cooperation sounds plausible, but is there evidence to support it? There are, of course, societies such as the Gusii in which marriage is often between hostile groups. But is that society an exception? And does marriage itself promote cooperation? Because people in all recent societies marry outside the family, we cannot test the idea that such marriages promote cooperation more than marriages within the family. We can ask whether other kinds of out-marriage, such as marriage with other communities, promote cooperation with those communities. The evidence suggests not. There is no greater peacefulness between communities when marriages are forbidden within the community and arranged with other communities than when they are not.
Even if marriage outside the family promoted cooperation with other groups, why would it be necessary to prohibit all marriages within the family? Couldn’t families have required some of their members to marry outside the family if they thought it necessary for survival, but permitted incestuous marriages when such alliances were not needed?
Although the incest taboo might enhance cooperation between families, other customs can also promote alliances. The need for cooperation does not adequately explain why the incest taboo exists in all societies. In particular, the cooperation theory does not explain the sexual aspect of the incest taboo. Premarital and extramarital sex is common and tolerated in many societies. Incestuous sex could likewise theoretically be allowed, as long as children were required to marry outside the family.
Inbreeding Theory
One of the oldest explanations for the incest taboo is inbreeding theory. It focuses on the potentially damaging consequences of inbreeding or marrying within the family. People within the same family are likely to carry the same harmful recessive genes. Inbreeding, then, will tend to produce offspring who are more likely to die early of genetic disorders than are the offspring of unrelated spouses. Recent evidence suggests that inbreeding also tends to increase the likelihood of diseases that affect people later in life, such as heart disease and diabetes. For many years, inbreeding theory was rejected because of what is known from dog-breeding, in which, for example, a half-brother and half-sister might be bred (line breeding) or brothers and sisters might be bred (inbreeding). The inbreeding practiced to produce prize-winning dogs, however, is not a good guide to whether inbreeding is harmful; dog breeders have not counted the runts they cull at the expense of producing one superficially show-worthy dog. Nor have they needed to worry about the genetic ailments a dog may eventually display. Indeed, dog-breeders as well as mating humans now have a good deal of evidence that the closer the degree of inbreeding, the more harmful the genetic effects.
Genetic mutations occur frequently. Although many pose no harm to the individuals who carry a single recessive gene, matings between two people who carry the same gene often produce offspring with a harmful or lethal condition. Close blood relatives are much more likely than unrelated individuals to carry the same harmful recessive gene. If close relatives mate, their offspring have a higher probability than the offspring of nonrelatives of inheriting the harmful trait.
One study compared children produced by familial incest with children of the same mothers produced by nonincestuous unions. About 40 percent of the incestuously produced children had serious abnormalities, compared with about 5 percent of the other children. Matings between less closely related kin also show harmful, though not as harmful, effects of inbreeding. The likelihood that a child will inherit a double dose of a harmful recessive gene is lower the more distantly the child’s parents are related. Also consistent with inbreeding theory is the fact that rates of abnormality are consistently higher in the offspring of uncle-niece marriages (which are allowed in some societies) than in the offspring of cousin marriages; for the offspring of uncle-niece marriages, the likelihood of inheriting a double dose of a harmful recessive is twice that for the offspring of first cousins.
Although most scholars acknowledge the harmful effects of inbreeding, some question whether people in former days would deliberately have invented or borrowed the incest taboo because they knew that inbreeding was biologically harmful. William Durham’s cross-cultural survey suggests that they did. Ethnographers do not always report the perceived consequences of incest, but Durham found that biological harm to offspring was mentioned in 50 percent of ethnographic reports. For example, Raymond Firth reporting on the Tikopia, who live on an island in the South Pacific, wrote:
The idea is firmly held that unions of close kin bear with them their own doom, their mara. . . . The idea [mara] essentially concerns barrenness. . . . The peculiar barrenness of an incestuous union consists not in the absence of children, but in their illness or death, or some other mishap. . . . The idea that the offspring of a marriage between near kin are weakly and likely to die young is stoutly held by these natives and examples are adduced to prove it.
Durham concluded that if the harm of inbreeding was widely recognized, people may have deliberately invented or borrowed the incest taboo. But whether or not people actually recognized the harmfulness of inbreeding, the demographic consequences of the incest taboo would account for its universality: Reproductive and hence competitive advantages probably accrued to groups practicing the taboo. Thus, even though cultural solutions other than the incest taboo might provide the desired effects assumed by the family-disruption theory and the cooperation theory, the incest taboo is the only possible solution to the problem of inbreeding.
As is discussed toward the end of the next section, a society may or may not extend the incest taboo to first cousins. That variation is also predictable from inbreeding theory, a fact that lends additional support to the idea that the incest taboo was invented or borrowed to avoid the harmful consequences of inbreeding .