David Sabean on Thoughts on Incest

Incest discourse is closely related to changes in kinship and the ecology of familial alliance, as well as to the historical development of the self: issues of identity, subjectivity, personhood, gender, self, and other are all represented directly or indirectly by boundaries constructed through sexual prohibitions on one hand, and by shared biogenetic substance on the other. The approach to kinship and incest through such issues as gender, the body, and personhood connects David Sabeans work to the most recent discussions of kinship. Yet throughout the discourses from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries runs a concern with shared biogenetic substance, which links Baroque representations of blood with modern scientific and cultural concerns with genes. In what ways are our current concerns with genetic heritability influenced by deep-seated Western concerns with blood? In many ways, a concern with how incest has been constructed over time offers a prism through which a large set of issues can be refracted.

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Science & Technology

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