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Political Organization, Supernatural Sanctions and the Punishment for Incest on Yap 1
Author(s) -
SCHNEIDER DAVID M.
Publication year - 1957
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1957.59.5.02a00040
Subject(s) - politics , citation , sanctions , sociology , kinship , acknowledgement , library science , law , political science , anthropology , computer science , computer security
will confine myself to one problem among the many which bear on the nature of punishment-the problem of the relationship between political organization and the nature and severity of the punishment for incest. I do not thereby deny the relevance of other factors, but simply set aside their consideration. My intention is merely to demonstrate the relevance of the question of who has the right to inflict punishment to an understanding of the nature and severity of the punishment inflicted. The exposition which follows proceeds by a method of successive approximations. I will begin with a brief outline of the Yap incest regulations and of the punishment when those regulations are not observed, and follow this with a first approximation of the relationship between political organization and punishment in general terms. I will then analyze the empirical material more fully to see how well the generalizations apply to the data, and will continue to balance generalization against data until I believe that I have developed a set of precisely defined generalizations which apply to these Yap data. I make no pretense of presenting a full and complete theory of punishment. The incest taboo on Yap, a high island in the West Carolines, Micronesia, applies to members of the nuclear family, the patrilineal lineage, and the matrilineal clan. The prohibition on sexual relations among members of these groups applies to all and any, regardless of genealogical distance (Schneider 1953). Diffuse sanctions in the form of disapproval and shunning are applied if incest should occur, but these are actually mild. The guilty pair are not ostracized, but only whispered about and held to have behaved like animals. In the cases which I observed, as well as in reports of other cases, no one seemed severely embarrassed or emotionally upset, and in a few of these cases the relationship was sustained over a long period. The diffuse sanctions certainly did not break up the relationship. No organized sanctions are ever applied. The events are held to be no one's concern except the kin group of the participants. Consequences of incest are of two sorts. Where incest occurs between brother and sister, who should normally practice a mild avoidance and respect relationship which is explicitly phrased in terms of minimizing sexual interest