#exogamie

[theplasticman]

hearing the word “Freudian” now having read Freud it’s immediately apparent that most people have no clue what he wrote about and just pepper the word in as a substitute for ‘unorthodox sexual desires’

[cor-ardens-archive]

i think the way jane austen deals with the issue of exogamy is interesting -- even in pride and prejudice, where the heroine marries an outsider, there’s a lot of talk about the distance between her old and new homes (and in that context a little distance is preferable, as opposed to emma’s situation).

[caracalliope]

No thoughts head empty, but for the ask meme: fic in which Mizu is the world's most stoic and suffering meow meow covered in blood and perhaps also, critically, an elf.

Mizu knows nothing of the divisions of the Firstborn who resided in the golden peace of Valinor.

His mother might have been a blacksmith or a shipwright; she might have been a handmaid in service of the highest court. Perhaps she wrestled, or wove, or gardened, or hunted - swifter than Mizu - running with the deer and the hounds.

Prayer makes no sense to him. His sword is not forged in worship of Aulë. His ship takes off without Ulmo's blessing. When the cold stars look down on him, he puts his hat back on and looks down at his hands.

[bredforloyalty]

i keep highlighting these huge blocks of text it's all so interesting sorry to say it quite this way but me when i get to read about the incest taboo

[cicerobussytransplant]

vampirism should be the truest form of familial cannibalism. if you venture too far into the romantic cannibalism you ruin it frfr

[qyburn-in-the-black-cells]

it’s so interesting how Cersei and Rhaenyra having illegitimate kids is both a form of reproductive and sexual agency - and cultural norm breaking. Rhaenyra has children with a non-Valyrian knight - an exogamous affair when Targaryens practice extreme endogamy. Cersei does the inverse and has children with her twin brother. even though Criston’s the main Jamie foil, you can find parallels between Harwin and Jamie - martially talented; known for physical attributes; nonexistent or minimal relationship with their kids; disabled younger brothers who have greater significance in the story; dysfunctional families - there’s no way Harrenhal, a dead mom and two dead stepmoms produces normal childhoods. That’s to say I would eat dirt for a Harwin Strong POV short story - or flashback episodes ffs.

[haggishlyhagging]

“There are reports that, even when the facts about conception and birth were made known to primitive peoples, they refused to accept them as true. Some were inclined to view the information as a defect in the intelligence of the white man. Malinowski relates how the Trobrianders went to great pains to explain to him that sexual intercourse had nothing to do with the birth of a child.

Their attitude to their own children also bears witness to their ignorance of any causal relation between congress and the ensuing pregnancy. A man whose wife has conceived during his absence will cheerfully accept the fact and the child, and he will see no reason at all for suspecting her of adultery. One of my informants told me that after over a year's absence he returned to find a newly born child at home. He volunteered this statement as an illustration and final proof of the truth that sexual intercourse has nothing to do with conception. . . .

My friend Layseta, a great sailor and magician of Sinaketa, spent a long time in his later youth in the Amphlett Islands. On his return he found two children, borne by his wife during his absence. He is very fond of them and of his wife; and when I discussed the matter with others, suggesting that one at least of these children could not be his, my interlocutors did not understand what I meant. (Sexual Life of Savages, pp. 193-94)

Frazer points out that the biological facts of life we take for granted could not have been known to primitive peoples. While the part played by the mother in the birth process is obvious, he wrote, how could people in the prescientific era "perceive that the child which comes forth from the womb is the fruit of the seed which was sowed there nine months before?" (Totemism and Exogamy, vol. IV, pp. 61-62).

Margaret Mead makes the even more important point that to the primitive mind children were not the fruit of a momentary act of sexual congress but of years of patient nurture and care:

The Arapesh have no idea that after the initial act which establishes physiological paternity, the father can go away and return nine months later to find his wife safely delivered of a child. Such a form of parenthood they would consider impossible, and furthermore, repellent. For the child is not the product of a moment's passion, but is made by both father and mother, carefully, over time. (Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, p. 31)

Mead here puts a finger on the most essential characteristic that made the husband the father of a woman's child, namely, that he now had the right to assist his wife in the care and protection of her child. From this standpoint, a new "male mother" makes his appearance in history—the "husband-mother"—as against the former male mother, the mother's brother. Thus fatherhood as a social institution did not begin on the basis of sexual intercourse between a man and woman but as a set of maternal functions performed by the man for his wife's child.”

-Evelyn Reed, Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family

[metamatar]

hello antara, first of all thanks for all your good posts, love your blog and ive learned a lot from it! your recent post about disgust reactions from hindu people made me wonder if you know of any other (non-obvious) signs someone may be hindu supremacist, like how i can clock a mormon by how they look or a christian song by them saying redemption a few too many times. thanks!

this is a pretty good post on tumblr with a bunch of dogwhistles for hindutva. but if you're going for more subtle things? the disgust thing is specifically about caste, which you can also observe for in the wearing of brahmin caste pride markers: a small ponytail or shikha with otherwise shorn hair, the janeu which is a white thread worn by men on their torso which they will often check for under shirts while hugging people, excessive interest in what your family does/your exact surname etc. excessive moralism about vegetarianism, particularly beef. fears of exogamy in general.

[monstrousdesirestudy]

Holy shit. Okay so so:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen in his Seven Theses states that “the monster most often arises to enforce the laws of exogamy, both the incest taboo…and the decrees against interracial sexual mingling…usually in the service of some notion of group “purity”.

And I’ve been thinking a long time about the intersection of racial fetishization and monstrosity and the various ways many monsters are both hypersexualized and racialized in a way to further dehumanize. And it immediately made me think of the werewolves in twilight and how they are constantly called “dirty”, “smelly”, “dogs”, etc by the Cullens who want to keep the werewolves away from Bella because they are “too dangerous”. We’ve always known that the portrayal of the indigenous in twilight was very racist, but Meyer’s werewolves quite literally embody Meyer’s anxieties and obsession surrounding miscegenation.

To nail home this point JJC says: “Feminine and cultural others are monstrous enough by themselves in patriarchal society, but when they threaten to mingle, the entire economy of desire comes under attack.”

And this is where it’s REALLY pertinent because the monstrous being in the story isn’t the Cullens but Bella’s desires!! Bella’s attraction to the wolves and her love for the tribe is something that the very white very bourgeois Cullens cannot fucking stand!! Edward wishes to control Bella’s sexuality and relegate it into a safe structure (Heterosexuality as a Regime ™️)

[myrfing]

actually technically gourd was born in sui no sato his mom was just immediately exiled after and she snuck out with him to doman shores after getting him kojinblessed. so he was always amphibious. also in my twisted evil chinese revision sui no sato/violet tides is equally based on the story of ao guang as it is urashima taro & also his mom's family was allowed into sui no sato 1 generation ago as doman raen for exogamy reasons so make what of that you will. Stares into nothing

[cor-ardens-archive]

i still think this is so insane...

[play-now-my-lord]

relatedness is socially determined. Degrees of kinship are socially determined. If I asked the average person "who are you more closely related to, your sibling or your parents", from a purely genetic point of view the expected answer would be incorrect - we see ourselves as "more related" to our parents but are actually (or, well, taking genetics as "actual" rather than social intuition!) more related to our siblings.

English lacks several relational terms that are commonplace in other languages, and lacks whole concepts that elsewhere dominate exogamy/endogamy (which is where the rubber really hits the road on 'degrees of relatedness', because if you look back far enough most people are vaguely related to each other, and to cattle and bacteria for that matter; it's necessary to draw a line somewhere). the concept of "parallel" and "cross cousins" - that there are cousins you are more or less related to, usually those related to the parent of the same sex or opposite sex (respectively) as you - is extremely difficult to explain to anglophones intuitively.

that being said, as they say, stoplights too are a social construct; ignore them and you might get killed. relatedness is deeply-felt and significant, despite varying intensely from culture to culture.

circling back and changing topics a bit, in many cultures it is simply accepted that humans and animals are distantly related; this is a bit of scientific trivia in our culture, but it's also demonstrably true, and a lot of our intuitions about what animals feel or experience fly in the face of plain empirical logic. ("fish don't feel pain or have memories", etc.) the "truth" in our society is that we have no moral obligation to animals, and preventing animal cruelty with violence towards a person is only accepted in extreme cases and rarely considered acceptable unless the animal in question is a domestic animal. physically slapping a teakettle out of a teenager's hands to keep him from trying to boil an ant colony to death for fun would seem like disproportionate escalation to us! a person mutilating a captured squirrel would seem like a red flag mainly because we associate that kind of behavior with violence against humans! there's a whole 90s comedy franchise about a guy trying to torture and kill a rodent! that's kinda weird, isn't it?

[lefresne]

With how welsh literature consistently calls Guinevere "the giant's daughter", I can't help but develop wild headcanons about this with Galehaut, Lancelot, Isolde... and Morgan

You know what’s so interesting about this is thinking about how according to Arthurian lore the giants are actually the indigenous inhabitants of Britain ?? With Guinevere in particular I find it so interesting that she is so consistently ‘othered’ as a way of exploring anxieties about exogamy I guess ?

[subiysu-chan]

The Innocent manga and HP crossover makes so much sense to me because of the Black family. I've always imagined them exactly the same as Sansons: the underlying rivalry, the emotional incest, the mingling with death and the morbid, the torturing... Moral dilemmas and outcast aristocrats. Do you agree?

I think the Black family is quite different. The Black family is sure aristocratic, but they are not outcasts, and are blood-purity fanatics. Also, fans of HP who claim Sirius wasn't abused. He's from a family that decapitates house elves, and that Bellatrix is seen as "nice" to houseelves by comparison of the other purebloods. Bellatrix is a nutcase, Andromeda is a victim and Narcissa is a snob. Sirius is a nutcase, and Regulus, while a death eater, might be the most normal out of them.

The Sanson actually contribute to society (giving free health care to the poor).

They both are torture addled, wealthy and a bit incestuous. While the Black family view incest as the lesser evil than exogamy, the Sanson simply do not care. Like, Jean-Baptiste hides the fact his mom still allows him to suckle on her breats, but that's about how far the level of shame stops. Jean-Baptiste didn't have babies with Madeleine Tronson because of blood-purity thing, even if her dad was an almost father-figure to him. He did it because she was an acceptable in his eyes member of the opposite sex to marry. Charles-Henri straight up refuses endogamy.

In both cases of endogamy, there is a sense of entitlement.

[allyriadayne]

yeah i don't get the whole daemon is a valyrian supremacist thing?

and from another anon:

Yeah why is Daemon the only one who gets called a Valyrian supremacist?

i posted this question to my twitter mutuals some time ago and got one answer that actually made so much sense when you really think about the issue. it goes something like this (sorry couldn't find the og tweet 😩): most people think of valyrian supremacy/blood purism with a harry potter background and the pureblood ideology when it's a completely different thing that doesn't actually happen in the show or books at all. and everything clicked!!

going back to daemon, show!daemon to be more specific, he does show a preference for reading the histories and knowing the language of old valyria but i wouldn't call it him being a supremacist (very weighty!) or feeling a specific superiority about it that it's not already tied to him being a prince and one of the highest ranking man in the realm. i think what most people forget about this is that targaryens are one of the last scions of a dead culture (well you'll never call a culture dead, only transformed because a part of it will always live in its people etc. but for clarity's sake. i know we are not here for an anthropology class) and to me it's normal that its member would want to preserve it in a way. viserys has his big lego model and the others have the language and their dragons as a way to connect with what it once was. i wouldn't call that a cultural superiority at all esp when daemon or any targaryen try to exterminate or oppress that which is not valyrian (again, very weighty terms! and i wish people would have more care when talking about these issues).

most of the examples i've seen about people calling daemon a purist come from 1) daemon sleeping with silver haired women 2) criticizing alicent's new decor 3) marrying laena/hating rhea 4) speaking old valyrian. which really doesn't cut it for me?? most can be explained by daemon being a hater in general. we know he hates otto and the hightowers because he's always thought they've kept viserys and him apart and therefore made viserys weak. he /would/ had a comment about alicent changing the decor and covering the dragon orgy murals. the silver haired women well, he's still the creepy uncle, we've known he's been fixated on rhaenyra for a while and it's probably also a manifestation of being cast out of the family since he was 16, an illusion of being close to his family. same thing with rhea, he doesn't hate her because she's not valyrian, i thought that was pretty obvious.

lyonel strong is the one who advises viserys to marry laena velaryon because she is of "pure valyrian stock", would you call him a blood purist? i mean there is also the issue that most men in westeros are very proud of their heritage and i wouldn't put daemon above them at all, he's squarely in the middle. would you call the northerners blood purists because most marry in the same area with descendants of the first men and don't care about southerners? i've always thought daemon marries laena in the show because she's one of the few people who could understand him and after spending almost 20 years with a wife who hated him and he hated in return, he wanted someone more compatible and who could share his hobbies (and of course, she grabbed his attention at the wedding and the storyline about the sea lord of braavos' son was someone laena wanted to get rid off too + rhaenyra marrying and him needing to forget her fast).

what i'm trying to say is that i understand there is a sort of need to keep the line "pure" but it is to keep the dragons inside the family and i wouldn't even call it purism because targs are marrying half targs like jocelyn baratheon, aemma arryn etc, at least in this side of the dance. on the other side, after it, it's another different issue altogether where targs start practicing exogamy more often. but i don't think daemon is more or less proud than other people in the same timeline even.

[random-thought-depository]

I think one major potential weakness of the bonobo-like human social system is it might be less effective at preventing inbreeding.

A major Homo sapiens inbreeding-avoidance strategy is communities exchanging people through marriage. Historically, this was often gender-asymmetric, with women being exchanged more than men. I suspect this gender-asymmetrical exogamy pattern was a major contributor to the development of patriarchy; it meant women got their social connections disrupted more. One of my major worldbuilding challenges for bonobo-like humans is giving them features that would either prevent this gender-asymmetric exogamy pattern from emerging, mitigate its disruptive effects on female-female and male-female solidarity, or some combination of both.

@who-canceled-roger-rabbit some of this is kind of relevant re: that conversation we had a while back about matriarchies.

I suspect the causes of this gender-asymmetry in Homo sapiens exogamy are 1) male solidarity was more important to military power, 2) the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimps, and humans had silverback-centered social groups in which a single dominant male was the nucleus of the group and chimps and humans inherited a tendency toward females changing social groups at maturity from them. I'm not really worried about 2), human behavior is pretty flexible, but 1) seems like a probable huge obstacle to the emergence of a female-privilege society (which I suspect is a big part of the reason unambiguously female-privilege societies were rare to nonexistent in Earth history if the known historical record is anything to go by).

IIRC actual bonobos seem to have kept the social pattern inherited through 2) and went the mitigation route; female bonobos change social groups more than male bonobos, and the key to female power in bonobo society is strong solidarity between non-kin females reinforced through sexual bonding. It would be intensely on-brand if bonobo-like human women also use sexual bonding between women to build strong female solidarity between unrelated women and thus mitigate the disruptive effects of females changing communities as an inbreeding-avoidance strategy.

I don't think I'll make that the whole picture with them though, because my ideas on how they got a low-key female privilege society hinge on matrilineal kinship solidarity between mothers and their adult children being important. Importantly, that model would make matrilineal kinship solidarity between women and matrilineal kinship solidarity between women and males both important for maintaining the bonobo-like human social order, which would tend to discourage exogamy of any kind.

Regarding the second thing, I think one big leg-up bonobo-like human women might have over bonobo females there is being smarter. Bonobo-like women are smart and (through language) communicative enough to observe the deleterious effects of inbreeding, realize they are consequences of mating with relatives, and do deliberate and coordinated inbreeding-avoidance. I suspect actual bonobos do inbreeding-avoidance behaviors without realizing that's what they're doing, in an "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" way. Deliberate planning is much more flexible and optimizable than "adaptation executor, not fitness maximizer" behavior. A bonobo-like woman can conceptualize the social benefits of remaining in her natal social group while also conceptualizing the risks of mating with close relatives and then imagine a strategy for exploiting her capacity to track her menstruation/ovulation cycle to simultaneously have the former and avoid the latter; wait until she's near ovulation, then travel to another group and submit to a consensual gang-bang, then travel back to her natal group and rejoin them. That sort of "having their cake and eating it too" reproductive strategy would have big potential social benefits for women compared to changing groups, so once they got the idea I expect it'd become very popular - and older bonobo-like women would start encouraging their daughters and nieces to plan their futures around following it, so their daughters and nieces would stay in their natal group and keep contributing labor to their natal group.

Also, re: bonobo-like strategy of using sexual bonding to recruit unrelated women into strong female solidarity networks...

... An idea I like is bonobo-like women eventually got good enough at that to turn that strategy on males and assimilate outsider males into female-centered solidarity networks in the same way. Basically, male kinship solidarity was less important to the military power of small communities in bonobo-like humans because in their species the community's women could totally take some wandering mercenary, go to work on him, and turn him into a fiercely loyal ride-or-die human guard dog for their community in a few years. Actually, when I put it that way, I suspect Homo sapiens women have a social strategy like this too and it's part of what went into the knight/damsel thing and this and that whole women as civilizers/domesticators of dangerous wild men concept (Enkidu and Shamhat might be allegorically about this!) and a nontrivial amount of male misogyny is rooted in the fear that a woman might rewire your brain in ways your present self wouldn't like by doing this to you. But I guess the bonobo-like human version would be more powerful (when used on bonobo-like human males, at least) and less monogamish (sapiens versions of this kind of male domestication narrative seem to heavily emphasize couples, but that might be culture-specific). Ability to do that might have made ancient bonobo-like human communities much more gender-balanced in terms of bringing in new genes by assimilating outsider women vs. bringing in new genes by assimilating outsider males.

A lot of this wouldn't be directly relevant to bonobo-like human society today, when it's pretty peaceful, but bonobo-like human typical neurotype and culture would be influenced by the social conditions and physical conditions their ancestors lived in, just like our typical neurotype and culture are influenced by the social conditions and physical conditions our ancestors lived in.

Also, I like the idea that bonobo-like humans are a more genetically diverse species than us because they missed Toba and maybe a few other genetic bottlenecks that badly depleted our genetic diversity, so inbreeding would be less damaging to them. So that might help.