TABOO AND GENETICS 119 



ment of social relationships until we agree with 

 Mr. Crawley that taboo shows that " man 

 seems to feel that he is treading in slippery 

 places." Might it not be within the range of 

 possibility that in the study of taboo we are 

 groping with man through the first blind 

 processes of social control ?* 



It is worthy of note that the most modern 

 school of analytical psychology has recently 

 turned attention to the problem of taboo. 

 Prof. Sigmund Freud, protagonist psycho- 

 analysis, in an essay. Totem und Tabu, called 

 attention to the analogy between the dualistic 

 attitude toward the tabooed object as both 

 sacred and unclean and the ambivalent attitude 

 of the neurotic toward the salient objects in 

 his environment. We must agree that in addi- 

 tion to the dread of the tabooed person or 

 object there is often a feeling of fascination. 

 This is of course particularly prominent in the 



*No study of the tabu-mana theory, however dehmited its 

 field, can disregard the studies of rehgion and magic made by 

 the contributors to L'Annee Sociologique, notably MM. Durk- 

 heim and Levy-Bruhl, and in England by such writers as Sir 

 Gilbert Murray, Miss Harrison, Mr A. B. Cook, Mr F. M. 

 Cornford, and others. In their studies of " collective repre- 

 sentations " these writers give us an account of the develop- 

 ment of the social obligation back of religion, law, and social 

 institutions. They posit the sacred as forbidden and carry 

 origins back to a pre-logical stage, giving as the origin of the 

 collective emotion that started the representations to working 

 the re-enforcement of power or emotion resulting from gre- 

 garious living. This study is concerned, however, with a 

 " social " rather than a " religious " taboo, — if such a distinc- 

 tion can somewhat tentatively be made, with the admission 

 that the social scruple very easily takes on a religious colouring. 



