"Anthropologist Francoise Heritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes. Through close and subtle readings, Heritier exposes the frequent, but often overlooked, elaborations concerning what she calls a secondary type of incest, namely, the prohibition of two close blood relatives engaging in sexual intercourse with a third person.

Heritier not only understands this phenomenon to be as universal as the more classical "first" type of incest banning sexual relations between certain blood relatives; she advances the controversial thesis that the first type may indeed be an outgrowth of the secondary type of incest, once it is understood properly as the transfer of bodily fluids in a love triangle of sexual partners, two of whom are related to each other."--BOOK JACKET.