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Françoise Héritier

Françoise Héritier is Professor of Anthropology, Chair of Comparative Studies in African Societies at the Collège de France, and Director of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where she is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s successor. She is the author of L’Exercice de la parenté, De L’inceste, Masculin/féminin: la pensée de la différence, and De la violence.

Titles by This Author

Two Sisters and Their Mother

The Anthropology of Incest
By Françoise Héritier

The sharing of a sexual partner between relatives has always been taboo. In this stunning work, anthropologist Françoise Héritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history, from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes, and finds a secondary type of incest, which she calls the incest of two sisters. The term refers not to incest between two sisters, or between two sisters and their mother, but to a love triangle of sorts in which the transfer of bodily fluids among sexual partners, two of whom are related to each other, creates undeniable bonds.