The Principles of Kinship revealed they do not conceive of the prohibition as such, i. e, in its negative pect; the prohibition is merely the reverse or counterpart of a positive obligation, which alone is present and active in the consciousness. does a man ever sleep with his sister? The question is absurd. Certainly not, they reply: ' No, we don,'t sleep with our sisters. We give our sisters to other men and other men give us their sisters.'I The ethnographer pressed the point, asking what they would think or say if, through some impossibility, this eventuality managed to occur. Informants had dificulty placing themselves in this situation, for it was scarcely conceivable: What, you would like to marry your sister What is the matter with you anyway Don't you want a brother-in-law? Don't you realize that if you marry another man,'s sister i: and another man marries your sister, you will have at least two brothers-in- law, while if you marry your own sister you will have none? With whom will you hunt, with whom will you garden, whom will you go to visit? 2 Doubtless, this is all a little suspect, because it was provoked, but the native aphorisms collected by Mead, and quoted as the motto to the first a: part of this work, were not provoked, and their meaning is the same.Other evidence corroborates the same thesis. For the Chukchee, a"bad family is defined as an isolated family, brotherless and cousinless' .Moreover, the necessity to provoke the comment (the content of which, in any case, is spontaneous), and the difficulty in obtaining it, reveal the misunderstanding inherent in the problem of marriage prohibitions. The latter are prohibitions only, secondarily and derivatively. Rather than a prohibition on a certain category of persons, they are a prescription directed towards another cate gory. In this regard, how much more penetrating is native theory than are so many modern commentaries! There is nothing in the sister, mother, or daughter which disqualifies them as such. Incest is socially absurd before it is morally culpable. The incredulous exclamation from the informant: so you do not want to have a brother-in-law? provides the veritable golden rule for the state of society. There is thus no possible solution to the problem of incest within the biologi- cal family, even supposing this family to be already in a cultural context which imposes its specific demands upon it. The cultural context does not E: consist of a collection of abstract conditions. It results from a very simple act which expresses it entirely, namely, that the biological family is no longer alone, and that it must ally itself with other families in order to endure Malinowski supported a different idea, namely, that the prohibition of incest a results from an internal contradiction, within the biological family, between mutually incompatible feelings, such as the emotions attached to sexual relationships and parental love, or the sentiments which form naturally Mead,1935,p.84 3 bogoras,19049,p.542