What penalties fall on (a) the individuals concerned (b) the community as a whole? Are such penalties enforced by authority, or are they believed to ensure automatically by all action of supernatural force? Is there any correlation between the severity of the penalty and the nearness of the blood-tie of the partners in guilt? Should children be born as the result of incestuous unions, how are they treated? Are there any methods, ritual or legal, by which persons who fall within the prohibited degrees and wish to marry can break the relationship and become free to marry?Īs this excerpt suggests, anthropologists are interested in the gulf between cultural rules and actual behavior, and many ethnographers have observed that incest occurs in societies with prohibitions against incest. In some societies unions with certain persons related by affinity are also considered incestuous. The more usual practice is that unions with certain relatives only are considered incestuous, the relationships being regulated by the type of descent emphasized. The prohibition may be so narrow as to include only one type of parent-child relationship (though this is very rare), or those within the elementary family or so wide as to include all with whom genealogical or classificatory kinship can be traced. The rules regulating incest must be investigated in every society by means of the Genealogical Method. There is no uniformity as to which degrees are involved in the prohibitions. The two prohibitions do not necessarily coincide. In every society there are rules prohibiting incestuous unions, both as to sexual intercourse and recognized marriage. Incest is sexual intercourse between individuals related in certain prohibited degrees of kinship. The following excerpt from Notes and Queries, the most well-established field manual for ethnographic research, illustrates the scope of ethnographic investigation into the matter.
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