Escaping Disciplinary Grooves

Abstract Chapter 6 deepens the exploration of anthropology’s disciplinary grooves regarding incest and its avoidance, discussing the influential views of both Sigmund Freud and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as anthropology’s early endorsement of the now-discarded perspective of evolutionary primitivism. It also returns to the clinical reality of incest and locates The CASA Effect with respect to some of the items from our mindful sociality toolkit: Modest Nativism, extended cognition, and the rejection of reductive views of sociality. This allows us to see more clearly how the phylogenetic argument that restricts CASA to the primate lineage provides a more secure epistemic basis for believing in The CASA Effect than do the kinds of global adaptationist arguments that appeal to factors such as inbreeding depression previously made by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on incest taboos and their relationship to CASA.