Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck.

Arthur P. Wolf. Stanford University Press, 1995. ISBN: 08047-2426-1 (hardback) £45

Buy the book

In 1891, in his "History of Human Marriage" Edward Westermarck included a discussion of the origins of the "incest taboo" in human beings. Westermarck proposed that childhood association between siblings, or parents and their children, inhibits the development of sexual attraction between such close relatives and underpins the "incest taboo" in human societies. Although Westermarck's hypothesis was well received and accepted initially, it later fell into disfavour due to the contrary opinions of Sigmund Freud, concerning the origins of incestuous behaviour. Freud held that the earliest expressions of childhood sexuality contain strong elements of incestuous preferences. The incest taboo exists to counteract this strong natural inclination of human beings to engage in incestuous behaviour.

Freud was immensely influential and his views gained ascendancy over those of Edward Westermarck. I have always found Freud's notions of stages in infantile sexuality ("oral", "anal" etc) and the notions of "oedipal" or "castration" complexes to be extremely difficult to accept. He did make a major contribution by drawing attention to the existence of childhood sexuality, however, and the problem of incest avoidance has continued to arouse interest among primatologists as well as among students of human behaviour.

In this book Arthur Wolf makes a solid case for the correctness of Westermarck's ideas. Wolf has made a painstaking and most valuable study of marriage customs among the Chinese. One custom concerned so called "sim-pua" brides; female infants adopted into families and raised side by side with the biological offspring in order to eventually marry a son in the household. Wolf compares the outcome of such sim-pua marriages with those in which girls did not meet their prospective husbands in advance of the wedding day. Sim-pua marriages had a high incidence of adultery, low birth rates and high divorce rates. Thus, marriage to a childhood associate was 2.65 times more likely to end in divorce than an arranged marriage to an unfamiliar partner and 1.24 times more likely to end in divorce than marriages based upon personal choice. Wolf carried out very thorough analyses of over 14000 Chinese women, reaching the conclusion that association during a sensitive period of infancy, spanning approximately the first 30 months, effectively inhibits the development of later sexual attraction.

Whether one reads Wolf's book as an anthropological study of Chinese marriage practices, as a history of debates concerning human incest, or as a discussion of the relevant literature on non-human primates, it is a scholarly and impressive account. It should have broad appeal therefore, and I would certainly recommend it to anyone interested in primate reproductive behaviour and behavioural development as well as those concerned with cultural anthropology and human sexological research. It also provides an object lesson in how to compare opposing theories in science, carefully weighing previous evidence, analysing new data and reaching soundly based conclusions. Each chapter is provided with a set of "notes", containing the source references which are referred to by numbers in the text. This does make the text read more smoothly though I have a preference for quoting sources directly in the text and allowing the reader to consult an alphabetical listing of all such sources. The book is extremely well written and indexed:- well worth owning or persuading your library to acquire a copy.