Incest and its Avoidance in the Fragile Sciences

Abstract Part II (Chapters 5 and 6) considers sexual relations between close kin, here wading in darker waters for kin matters. Incest has social, psychological, and biological dimensions and, unlike other kin matters, sometimes has a clinical reality through its relationship to family dysfunction, trauma, and individual pathology. Central to Chapter 5 is the idea that cultural anthropology has carved certain disciplinary grooves in thinking about incest, the most prominent of which are the idea that incest is natural, with incest taboos required for incest avoidance. The chapter defends Care-based Attachment–Sexual Aversion (CASA) as a phenomenon whose existence is incompatible with these disciplinary grooves. CASA updates the much-discussed Westermarck Effect. By positioning our discussion of incest and its avoidance in a broader range of fragile sciences—primatology, anthropology, the clinical sciences—a distinctly phylogenetic argument for CASA is made in the primate lineage that departs from previous adaptationist views.