The incest taboo?
A reconsideration of Westermarck
Gregory C. Leavitt

Beyond the Taboo: Imaging Incest
Anna Meigs and Kathleen Barlow
American Anthropologist
New Series, Vol. 104, No. 1 (Mar., 2002), pp. 38-49
(article consists of 12 pages)

The personal site of Keith Hart. Also includes text of his book Memory Bank.

The interpretation of dreams was the first text in which Freud referred to the system of two drives (drive of self-preservation and the sexual drive). In order to understand how this question was at work in Freud's mind, one has to go back to 1898, when Freud began to write the third chapter of The interpretation of dreams. One can then see, in contrast with Sulloway's assertions, how Freud was inspired by Schiller, whose shadow haunted his dreams between April and December 1898. The analysis of these dreams emphasizes how the references to Schiller's works and to the drive of self-preservation cover sexual impulses, in particular, those connected with the relationship to the father.

Freudian thought on origins translates an effort to think the extraindividual, in order to anchor the subject within the ancestral lineage and the history of the species as well as within biology. Several modalities can be discerned: the myth of origins; the genetic myth—the foundational role of the drives as a substrate of the psyche; and primal fantasies and/or fantasies of origins.

Recent contributions to the study of the evolution of early human society from its prehuman primatepredecessors make it possible to reassess Freud’s theory of the ‘‘primal crime’’ put forward in the fourthessay of 
Totem and Taboo 
. Shorn of its antiquated language, and of its unnecessary ‘‘Lamarckism,’’ Freud’spicture of the transition from prehuman to early hominid social structure turns out to have been remarkably plausi-ble and prescient. [psychoanalytic anthropology, Freud’s cultural theory, ‘‘
Totem and Taboo 
,’’ human evolution,egalitarianism

Recent contributions to the study of the evolution of early human society from its prehuman primatepredecessors make it possible to reassess Freud’s theory of the ‘‘primal crime’’ put forward in the fourthessay of 
Totem and Taboo 
. Shorn of its antiquated language, and of its unnecessary ‘‘Lamarckism,’’ Freud’spicture of the transition from prehuman to early hominid social structure turns out to have been remarkably plausi-ble and prescient

To reflect on the relationship of religion to money, there is no better starting-point than “to go beyond time.” In returning to the origin of the question, we may find a grain of truth and thus turn towards the remedy for an otherwise intractable problem. Countless volumes have appeared about the Church’s attitude to war and sex but very little has been written about money.

Professor Weatherford is a cultural anthropologist who has been teaching Anthropology at Macalester since 1983. He graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1967, with a B.A in Political Science followed by a M.A. in Sociology in 1972. He also received a M.A in Anthropology in 1973 and a Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. He went on to post-doctoral work in the Institute of Policy Sciences at Duke University.

A conversation with David Graeber, anarchist and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University about the negative implications of globalization

No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals.

One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization — from the means and material of labor. This means above all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental commune.