Political Organization, Supernatural Sanctions and the Punishment for Incest on Yap

Schneider, David M. (October 1957). "Political Organization, Supernatural Sanctions and the Punishment for Incest on Yap". American Anthropologist. 59 (5): 791–800. doi:10.1525/aa.1957.59.5.02a00040. ISSN 1548-1433 0002-7294, 1548-1433 .

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Abstract: The article argues that while custom plays a powerful role in shaping social life, accounts that treat individuals simply as vessels of tradition are incomplete. The author calls for an anthropological approach that keeps the synthetic, concrete human being in view, emphasizing how people continually adapt, reinterpret, and selectively apply customary injunctions. What often appears as the immobility of custom is, the author suggests, an artifact of distance; closer, more sympathetic observation reveals ongoing modification driven both by environmental and demographic pressures and by the will to live as expressed through individual competition and cooperation. Highlighting the growth of self-consciousness, choice, and character formation, the author urges anthropology to attend to the “trees” as well as the “wood,” restoring vitality and process to portrayals of so-called primitive societies. To develop this argument, the study adopts a method of successive approximations. It begins with a concise outline of incest regulations on Yap and the forms of punishment for violating them, then situates these within the island’s political organization and the sphere of supernatural sanctions. The analysis iteratively tests and refines general propositions against empirical material until it yields a set of precise generalizations tailored to the Yap data. The author explicitly limits the scope of the contribution, presenting it not as a comprehensive theory of punishment but as a focused inquiry into how political structures and shared cosmologies interface with rules governing kinship and sexuality. Within this framework, the substantive case shows that incest prohibitions and their enforcement are embedded in a broader nexus of authority, communal expectations, and beliefs in supernatural consequence. The linkage between political organization and sanctioning practices is not mechanical; rather, it is enacted through people’s strategic interpretations and adaptations of norms in concrete situations. The picture that emerges is one of social control as a living process: customary rules guide behavior and provide sanctioning templates, yet individuals and groups continually negotiate, modify, and sometimes contest these rules in ways that keep the system both recognizable and in motion.

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QID: Q137503031