A Delicate Choreography : Kinship Practices and Incest Discourses in the West since the Renaissance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sabean, David.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1092 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin/München/Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2023.

Summary:

The origins of the incest taboo have puzzled many of the most influential minds of the West, from Plutarch to St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, David Hume, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Edward Westermarck, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. This book puts the discussion of incest on a new foundation. It is the first attempt to thoroughly examine the rich literature, from philosophical, theological, and legal treatises to psychological and biological-genetic studies, to a wide variety of popular cultural media over a long period of time. The book offers a detailed examination of discursive and figurative representations of incest during five selected periods, from 1600 to the present. The incest discussion for each period is complemented with a presentation of dominant kinship structures and changes, without arguing for causal relations. Part I deals with the legacy of ecclesiastical marriage prohibitions of the Middle Ages: Historians dealing with the Reformation have wondered about the political and social implications of theological debates about the incest rules, the Enlightenment opted for sociological considerations of the household and a new anthropology based on the passions, Baroque discourse focused upon sexual relations among kin by marriage , while Enlightenment and Romantic discussions worried the intimacy of siblings. The first section of Part II deals with the six decades around 1900, during which European and American cultures obsessed about the sexuality of women. Almost everyone concurred in the idea that mother made the family what it was; that she configured the household, kept the lines of kinship vibrant, and stood at the threshold as stern gatekeeper, and many thought that she managed these tasks through her sexuality and an eroticized relationship with sons. Another story line, taken up in the section "Intermezzo," this one about the physical and mental consequences of inbreeding, appeared after 1850. To what extent do close-kin marriages pose risks for progeny? At its center, lay the incest problematic, now restated: Is avoidance of kin genetically programmed? Do all cultures know about risks of consanguinity? As for the twenty-first century, evolutionary and genetic assumptions are challenged by a living world population containing roughly one billion offspring of cousin marriages. Part III deals with one of the perhaps most remarkable reconfigurations of Western kinship in the aftermath of World War I: The shift from an endogamous to an exogamous alliance system centered on the "nuclear family." An historical anomaly, this family form began to dissolve almost as soon as it came together and, in the process, shifted the focus of incest concerns to a new pairing: father and daughter. By the 1970s, when the father/daughter problematic swept all other considerations of incest aside, that relationship had come to be modeled, for the most part, around power and its abusive potential. As for "incest," its representations in the last three decades of the twentieth century no longer focused on biologically damaged progeny but rather on power abuses in the nuclear family: sexual "abuse." By the mid-1990s, Western culture at least partly redirected its gaze away from father and daughter towards siblings, especially towards brothers and sisters and the sexual boundaries and erotics of their relationships. Correspondingly, siblings became a "model organism" for psychotherapy, evolutionary biology, and the science of genetics.

Contents:

Intro

Cover Image for Vol. 1

Preface

Acknowledgments

Contents

List of Figures

List of Text Boxes

Introduction

Section I: Baroque Europe: The Bible Tells Me So

Chapter 1 Introit: The Wife's Sister

Chapter 2 The Culture of Law

Chapter 3 How to Read the Book

Chapter 4 Cultural Meanings of Blood in the Baroque

Chapter 5 Lineage and Alliance in the Seventeenth Century

Section II: From Enlightenment to Romanticism: Sentimental Journeys

Chapter 1 Kinship: The New Alliance System

Chapter 2 Introduction to the Brother/Sister Imaginary

Chapter 3 Moral Sentiment: A New Language of Cultural Meaning and Foundation for Law

Chapter 4 The Search for the Same: Familial/Familiar

Section III: Fin-et-Début-de-Siècle Europe and America

Chapter 1 Introduction to the Problem of the Mother and Son

Chapter 2 The Biology of Motherhood

Chapter 3 Making Kin around 1900: The Nature of Nurture

Chapter 4 Kinship Structures at the Turn of the Century

Intermezzo

Incest Becomes a Biological Problem

Section IV: Postwar Kinning: The Fall (After a Brief Rise) of the Nuclear Family

Chapter 1 Kinship and the Nuclear Family

Chapter 2 The Family Spun in a Web of Power

Chapter 3 Introduction to the Father-Daughter Problematic

Chapter 4 Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy as Hegemonic Discourses

Coda. Brother/Sister Redivivus

Age of Genetics, Age of Siblings, 1995-2020

Epilogue

Near of Kin

Figure Credits

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://www.degruyter.com/dg/page/open-access-policy

ISBN:

9783111014548

3111014541

OCLC:

1409702451