Word: westermarck
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...explained the almost universal ban on incest as a necessary safeguard against man's urge to mate with the most available partner: "The law only forbids men to do what their instincts incline them to do." For years, most scientists discounted a contrary suggestion by Finnish Anthropologist Edward Westermarck that close childhood association discourages erotic feeling...
More recently, Westermarck's theory has been gaining ground. Observation of kibbutz life in Israel indicates that the sibling-like relationship in which boys and girls are reared leads to virtually no pairing-off later. Now a detailed study of old marital customs and problems among Taiwanese villagers, long since superseded, lends further credence to Westermarck's belief that brother and sister have little sex appeal for each other...
Died. Dr. Edward Alexander Wester-marck, 76, Finnish sociologist, a bachelor who was a world-famed authority on marriage ; in Lapinlahti, Finland. No medieval moralist, Dr. Westermarck championed the single standard for marriage, tilted against companionate marriage, polygamy, adultery, homosexuality. His concluding sentence in the first editions of The History of Human Marriage won him honorary vice-presidencies in two feminist societies: "The history of human marriage is the history of a relationship in which women have been gradually triumphing over the passion, prejudices, and selfish interests of men." In 1921, concluding that Woman had been outpaced by Civilization...
...necessities of life in primitive and modern communities. This theory brings him into opposition with such writers as Briffault and Iwan Bloch, who have maintained that primitive societies were promiscuous and that the family, as a relatively recent development in human society, will eventually disappear. Dr. Westermarck says that he has examined the evidence in detail and has come to the conclusion that complete freedom in sexual relations has never existed even "among a single people," makes a strong case for his side...
Analyzing sexual maladjustments, adultery and jealousy, homosexuality and bisexuality and other causes of married unhappiness, Dr. Westermarck methodically weighs the alternatives to marriage in free love, companionate marriage, trial marriage, quickly disposes of the "predicted disappearance of marriage" in a brief chapter. He looks forward to more enlightened opinions on sexual conduct, believes that the frequency of divorce is a sign of the strength of marriage rather than of its weakness, anticipates a time when it will be recognized that "sexual acts are morally indifferent and no proper objects for penal legislation if nobody is injured by them...