A Comparative Approach to Incest and Adultery

Abstract

tN a recent article entitled Changing Emphases in Social Structure | (I955) Murdock maintains that sciences first go through a classificatory Astage and subsequently arrive at a second phase in which an attempt is made to analyse the dynamic processes which give rise to the phenomena thus classified (36I). As far as anthropology is concerned, the initial classificatory task has by now been substantially accomplished in the field of social structure t36I). This thesis, which has been propounded on other occasions by other writers, seems to me not only to take a naive view of scientific discovery, but definitely to mislead those from neighbouring fields of study into thinking that anthropological terms necessarily have some primary referent which is accepted by the large majority of anthropologists. That is by no means the case. In the first place, there is often a considerable measure of overt disagreement. Secondly, even where apparent agreement is found, the ambiguity of the terms themselves may conceal a number of different usages. Partly this derives from the fact that the continuous analysis in depth of different societies calls for more precise conceptual discriminations than were previously required. And partly too it is related to the fact that the terms often employed by anthropologists are those which we use as members of a particularsociety to refer to our own institutions. Such concepts may turn out to be quite inappropriate for the purpose of cross-cultural analysis. The English is an obvious case in point. From the sociological point of view, the term has at least four analytically separable meanings. A statement of the kind, the family is a universal institution among all human societies, is meaningless without further elaboration. In sum, these concepts cannot be regarded as having been defined once and for all time, leaving anthropologists now free to get on with other types of activity. A refinement of concepts is a product of onward going research; it proceeds hand in hand with it. The depth analysis of societies through 286

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