Incestuous Twins and the House Societies of Insular Southeast Asia

Abstract

In "A Study of Customs Pertaining to Twins in Bali," Jane Belo (1970) addresses a puzzling question. When Balinese commoners gave birth to twins1 (in the 1930s), the parents and twins were banished from the village for a period, their house was dismantled, and a ritual of purification of the village was performed after the untoward event. The birth of twins to high nobles, by contrast, was greeted with joy. The reason for the difference in reception of twins between highand lower-status people rested on the belief "that the twins had had contact amounting to marital intimacy before birth, in the womb of the mother. For some this intimacy was a good and very portentous thing, and the high caste princes and priests claimed that the boy was born like a god, that he brought his wife with him out of the mother's womb" (Belo 1970:3). By this logic, commoner twins, far from the gods, were incestuous: "It is incestuous for opposite-sex twins to occupy a womb; but the higher the status, the less abominable the incest, since for the gods incest is proper" (Boon 1977:138). Twin-birth beliefs form a condensed icon for whole marriage systems in insular Southeast Asia's Indic States, where high nobles strive to marry close (at best, first cousins) while close marriage is abhorred or was prohibited to lower people. Incest or its compromise act, close marriage, in short, is a statement about status; among commoners, Geertz has remarked (1982), incest is less a sin than a status mistake. The "text" of incest prohibitions has been read in a variety of ways. Some commentators explicate the local meanings of particular societies' taboos, often implying that no persuasive general theory of "incest" can be put forward (e.g., Needham 1971:29). Persuasive or not, general theories continue to be generated by others who, admitting the prohibited categories vary, are impressed with the universality of a (variable) prohibition. Throughout this article I tack between a localist's concern with cultural meanings and social and political action, and a universalist's (especially structuralist's) comparative scope-but not beyond Oceania, and with no theory claiming to explain "the" incest taboo. Using "incest" as the rhetorical motivator, I use the occasion of this essay to recast the conceptualization of groupings in insular Southeast Asia, to explore the dynamics of marriage in the preferentially endogamous "cognatic" societies of insular