Two Sisters and Their Mother The Anthropology of Incest

The sharing of a sexual partner between relatives has always been taboo. In thisstunning work, anthropologist Françoise Héritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history,from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes, and finds a secondary type of incest,which she calls the incest of two sisters. The term refers not to incest between two sisters, orbetween two sisters and their mother, but to a love triangle of sorts in which the transfer ofbodily fluids among sexual partners, two of whom are related to each other, creates undeniablebonds. Drawing on her field work in West African societies where the bans against two sisters areparticularly stringent and on various cultural practices (such as milk kinship), Héritier fashions acomplex "mechanics of fluids" in which blood, milk, and semen form the basis for kinship andprohibition. The intricate connections among the social, the natural, and the bodily emerge, fullyapparent, and kinship studies are seen in a new light, one that illuminates the primacy of thesymbolic.