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ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of anthropology's 150-year discussion of the incest taboo in light of the last 30 years of feminist and psychoanalytic discoveries about the incestuous abuse of children. It invites anthropologists to explore incest ethnographically and offers three suggested ways: one biosocial, a second social relational, and a third psychoanalytic, focusing on a connection between what psychologists call dissociation and what anthropologists call trance or possession. [Key words: incest taboo, childhood sexual abuse, dissociation, trance/possession, innate avoidance mechanism]
THE INCEST TABOO is to anthropology what Shakespeare is to English literature-fundamental and classic. It is "the collective anthropological stock in trade" (Arens 1986:27), "as old as anthropology [itself]" (Schneider 1976:149). There is also widespread recognition that discussion of the incest taboo is stalled. Needham (1974) refers to the endless academic debate on incest; Schneider, to "the present state of chaos in this field" (1976:150). In his plea for "thick description" of the taboo, Schneider complains that "the literature on the incest prohibition is. . . largely speculative, highly theoretical, and presumes that everyone knows what is being talked about" (1976:161). One telling indicator of stalemate is the extent to which textbook discussions of the incest taboo remain static from one edition to the next.1 The authors recite the litany of arguments (Westermarck, Freud, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss), couched in statements of agnosticism such as Kottak's: "There is no simple or universally accepted explanation for the fact that all cultures ban incest" (1994:22; see 2000b:255). Fox confirms the sense of impasse: "When anthropological theorists ran out of steam on the subject, it was largely because each explanation they gave was about as good as any other" (1980:6).
Our goal is to break anthropology out of its stalemate on this topic by shifting attention from the taboo to incest itself. Outside the anthropological arena, there emerged in the 1970s and continues to this day an important American literature on the surprising frequency and traumatic consequences of "incestuous abuse" (see Davies and Frawley 1994; Finkelhor 1979; Meiselman 1990).2 Overall, this new literature signals a paradigm shift in American public consciousness: it is less acceptable to view incest as an infrequent and obscure act more or less effectively controlled by its taboo. It is now understood by...