From Nature To Culture

The Problem Of The Prohibition Of Incest In Rousseau’s Anthropology

Abstract

Abstract: The dichotomy of the physical/moral world is quite characteristic in the French eighteenth century. It refers to the natural biological dimensions and moral dimensions of man. Many authors of the Enlightenment wished to retrace the conjectural history or the successive metamorphoses that led to the passage of the physical man to the moral man. This theme is also present in the work of Rousseau, being perceived and translated by Lévi-Strauss as the passage from nature to culture. The hypothesis we develop in this article is that the prohibition of incest – present in Rousseau’s work – has a function and a signification very close to the reflections of Lévi-Strauss present in the Elementary Structures of Kinship. Like in Lévi-Strauss, this prohibition marks for Rousseau the beginning of the process of cultural formation, the founding instant of culture. It expresses in a privileged way the point by which cultural processes are distinguished from the natural sphere, the moment in which man stops following his mere instinct and begins to respect socially constructed moral principles.