InterviewThe anthropologist deciphers the meaning of this prohibition, which has been present for millennia in all cultures. Humanity, he underlines in an interview with “The World”, is the only species which consciously and socially sets limits on its sexuality.
Camille Kouchner’s book La Familia grande (Threshold, 208 pages, 18 euros) has revived the debate on incest to the point that the legislator wishes to establish an intangible principle of non-consent when the victims of intra-family rape are under the age of 18. What are the origins of the incest prohibition? Is this taboo universal, as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss affirmed? Do its contours vary in the different human societies which have populated or which still populate the planet? We asked these questions to one of the greatest anthropologists in the world, Maurice Godelier, former scientific director of the department of human and social sciences at CNRS, and author of an anthropology classic, Metamorphosis of the parenté (Fayard, 2004).
Could you define what incest is?
To go directly to the hard core of its definition, I would say that incest, beyond its multiple cultural forms, designates the fact of prohibiting parents from having sex with their children, and prohibiting brothers and sisters to have sex with each other. However, care must be taken: in many societies, given the nature of the kinship system, all of the father’s brothers are considered fathers of the child, all of the mother’s sisters are considered mothers of the child. , and all of their children are considered siblings of the child. In these societies, the prohibition of incest therefore extends to all those people whom we in the West consider to be uncles, aunts or first cousins.
These systems clearly show that societies differentiate between kinship as a social relationship, which can extend to many people, and bodily kinship, which only concerns two people whom we in the West call biological parents. Until the end of the XIXe century, human societies ignored the real biological process of conceiving a child. Faced with this mystery, they invented, before the appearance of modern science, myths about the making of the baby. If we want to understand the variety of forms of incest, it is essential to know these social imaginaries: it is from these collective beliefs that societies have forged prohibitions on sexual practices.
Nowhere is sex between a man and a woman considered sufficient to produce a child. The couple make a fetus, but in all cultures the child is completed in the woman’s womb by the arrival of a vital principle, a spirit or an ancestor. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the individual is the reincarnation of another, and will reincarnate in another. In Christianity, the soul which will animate the body is not manufactured by the sexual relation, but introduced by God, in the woman, when he wants it and in the form he wants. We owe it to Hildegarde de Bingen, a German nun at the end of the 12the century, a painting showing the arrival of the soul in the form of a fireball in the body of a pregnant woman.
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