These notes are the second in a series of twelve lecture for my class Dynamics of the Family.

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1. Getting it together

   In the spirit of our emphasis with "dynamics,"
   let us start with the classic questions about sexual attraction, sexual reproduction, and the development of infants

   1. All discussions of "the family" in America, both popular and social (psychological) scientific eventually comes back to a concern with how adults get together sexually ("love") and how children are produced and raised (sex & love, again). Perhaps precisely because at no point in history was this completely settled, heated conversations, personal, with one's closest consociates, political, etc., have involved searches for rationalizations of one's choices, or of why one's conditions are intolerable.
   2. Thus continuing searches for the foundations of
      1. satisfying sexuality
      2. the proper rules and regulations of marriage
      3. the proper process of bringing children into the world (including the decision not to bring fetuses to term)
      4. the proper arrangements for child rearing
   3. and perhaps above all the minimally acceptable ways of dealing with the contradictions arising in everyday life as the requirements of one response to the search interfere with the requirements of another response.
2. The classic dispute

   between those who argue that certain kinds of arrangements of any of one of these things is "natural" or "best" or "necessary" or "inescapable" and those who argue that all forms of behavior that are common among human beings are made by human beings, learned in early childhood, and are potentially changeable through political action or education.

   1. The two readings for today make the arguments as sharply as they can be made around the issue of the nature of parental love and, by implication, the aversion towards incest.
   2. For reasons that bear investigation, the "nurlture" argument that was dominant for a long time in the 60s and 70s is being eclipsed in the popular press at least by the "nature" argument as sociobiology is entering the main stream
      1. Polygamy in the New York Times
         
         
3. The sociobiology of sexual reproduction,
   1. and step-parenting.
      1. Darwin and natural selection through the activity of individuals maximizing the chance that their genes will be passed along to their offsprings; from infanciticide of unrelated offsprings of one's sexual partner to the increase risk of abuse and death for step-children at the hand of their step-parents: "Having a step-parent has turned out to be the most powerful epidemiological risk factor for severe child maltreatment yet discovered" (Daly & Wilson 1998: 7)
      2. [compare and contrast with Whitehead's research on the psychological risks of divorce on small children]
   2. the "incest" statistics (particularly for "father-daughter" incest) in the United States: genetics, in loco parentis, marriage, "fatherhood."
   3. infanticide and female competition (Hrdy 1999)
4. Lévi-Strauss and incest as a primary instance of rule-making and humanity.
   1. An older text but one that addresses issues addressed in passing at the end of Daly & Wilson: "[among human beings] we see little reason to imagine that the average reproductive benefits of killing stepchildren would ever have outweighed the average costs enough to select for specifically infanticidal inclinations" (1998: 38). In this paragraph they point at the weight of social conventions but do not develop the point
   2. For Lévi-Strauss, these social conventions are the core. His argument:
      1. the issue for people looking at human beings is not only the biology of reproduction, but rather the rules that have appeared to make the process more complex, varied across the species, with the result that our lives are further confused.
      2. marriage rules (which are much broader than who can have sex with whom) vary enormously and are best understood by examining all the mechanisms that tell us whom NOT to marry--thus Lévi-Strauss's interes in incest as the primordial rule
         1. This in fact points to earlier trends in Western social philosophy--in this case Rousseau on the Social Contract
      3. classifications (interpersonal, communal, political): is a "stepfather" a "father" and for what purposes (are sexual relations between a stepfather and his adolescent stepdaughter a case of incest? statutory rape? expectable--[think Woody Allen]?)? (thus the interest in modes of address both as reflective of condition and what might be dangerous in a relationship).
   3. Thus his conclusion about culture substituting for nature even as it cannot abolish it ().
5. Incest in America
   1. genetic damage through in-breeding
   2. child-abuse
   3. An uncommon restatement of the common-sense: Schneider on American Kinship as cultural fact
      1. not "what Americans believe or have learned" but no one caught by American discourses and institutions can escape (here or abroad)