2 - The incest taboo: social selection as a form of feedback

Summary

Leslie A. White (1948), a founder of neo-evolutionary anthropology (Garbarino, 1977:88), has provided a penetrating analysis of the social functions of the incest taboo, an analysis that affords us an opportunity to clarify the central functionalist concept, that of social survivorship. In the iconoclastic fashion of Emile Durkheim, White begins his lengthy disquisition by evaluating various theories: some essentially biological, some psychological, some sociological. He then explains convincingly why each of these theories is unsatisfactory as to logic, evidence, or range of explanatory power. After mildly castigating his colleagues in sociology and social anthropology for eventually abandoning the effort to explain the incest taboo, White (1948:423) resurrects a nearly forgotten theory developed many decades ago by Edward B. Tylor:

Exogamy, enabling a growing tribe to keep itself compact by constant unions between its spreading clans, enables it to overmatch any number of small intermarrying groups, isolated and helpless. Again and again in the world's history,. savage tribes must have had plainly before their minds the simple practical alternative between marrying out and being killed out.

In a singularly perceptive series of paragraphs, White claims that alliances among small kinship bands are further strengthened by such practices as the levirate, sororate, bride-price, and dowry. The remainder of the article offers a series of trenchant speculations about the way in which severe economic deprivation might intensify competition among small food-gathering kinship bands, thus producing a need for larger fighting groups with reduced mortality from internecine war.