Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest

by Françoise Héritier, Jeanine Herman (Translator)

In this remarkable work, anthropologist Françoise Héritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history, from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes. Through close and subtle readings, Héritier exposes the frequent, but often overlooked, elaborations concerning what she calls a secondary type of incest, namely, the prohibition of two close blood relatives engaging in sexual intercourse with a third person.

Héritier not only understands this phenomenon to be as universal as the more classical “first” type of incest banning sexual relations between certain blood relatives, she advances the controversial thesis that the first type may indeed be an outgrowth of the secondary type of incest, once it is understood properly as the transfer of bodily fluids in a love triangle of sexual partners, two of whom are related to each other.

Héritier pursues this analysis with erudition and brilliance, through the classical ethnographies as well as the classical civilizations and religions of Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, and Islam. Drawing on her own fieldwork in West African societies where the bans against two sisters are particularly stringent, Héritier fashions a complex “mechanics of fluids” in which blood, milk, and semen form the basis for kinship and prohibition. Her theories, based on the identity and opposition of fluids and essences, expose the connections between the social, the natural, and the bodily, shedding new light on the complexities of kinship theory.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology

341 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Cynthia · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is slow going and likes to run around in circles. It is also pretentiously written like the French language likes to do. Not to mention that, apart from a perfunctory chapter on "African societies," it takes a very Judeo-Christo-Islamo-European stance, and cites only white, mostly male, anthropologists, which belies its claims of universality of meaning. But don't mind me too much, I am just frustrated that it never looks at it with a feminist lens, in a way that appears to me to be for pretensions of objectivity and reason.

[Sara G]

It's 50:50. Parts of it seem so narrow minded and full of smoke and self importance and parts seem incredibly interesting but I can't say this book really allowed me to put a lot of stock into it. I don't know what to think but I feel like I would get more by doing additional research on the topic which, while not negative, is somewhat inconvenient since I picked this one up on a whim. Serves me right.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but I kept getting lost in the all the genealogical charts and details. Concerns itself primarily with what the author refers to as "second order incest" including laws and regulations regarding marriage (for example, can someone marry their wife's sister if the wife passes away) and how this frames the wider understanding of what incest means to various cultures.

[marie :) · Rating 1 out of 5]

la folle du coin

[Sam Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most amazing books I've ever read - moving from the Zante and Nuer to Roman law, Aristotle's theory of how boys and girls are generated, to Woody and Soon-yi. A great moment or two - Hertier examines and admires the searching arguments of British MPs over a century about the issue of "deceased wife's sister," and shows that they were serious and much smarter about the nature of kinship - on both sides - then contemporary professional anthropologists who prounounced on the question in the 1930s, like Malinowski. Graceful, witty, serious, and completely indifferent to PC - a masterpiece.