Alex (on the HW rules list) questions Heortling sex and marriage. Quietly despairing that no seems to talk about *important* issues like names for one-legged duck bandits any more, I endeavour to make reply.
Me :
> > All Heortling clans are exogamous, so one of your parents was born into
> > another clan and has been accepted into your clan through marriage.
Alex:
> Even if we accept this statement at face value, that all "legal" marriage
> is exogamous in this sense (never mind that it needlessly contradicts
> significant amounts of earlier sources, canonical and otherwise).
I'd be pleased if you could expand on these sources. ROTO spells out clan exogamy and *clan-level* incest taboos explicitly. What other sources are you referring to? This clan exogamy/clan incest taboo is the official position, expanded upon carefully in TR.
For the record, my own position is more lenient - I play *bloodline* level incest taboos, and would allow 'incestuous' marriages within a clan for particular ritual or religious purposes.
it
> doesn't mean that every _child_ has parents from two different clans,
> since it's surely clear that there's no "incest prohibition" on sex
> between members of different bloodlines of the same tribe (barring some
> other close social or blood relationship between them).
Talking about tribes is pretty meaningless in this case. I'll assume you mean clans. ROTO explicitly spells out just such a taboo on sexual intercourse with other clan members.
I have speculated in the past that the ROTO example is based on a misunderstanding ('mistranslation') of 'exogamy', which in normal anthropological useage refers to marriage but not sex. However, we can all play source games till the cows come home.
Such offspring
> of such unions are inevitable, it's simply a matter of whether they're
> common, and of whether they are "marriages" in any formal or ritual sense.
> (It makes more sense to me that they would be, but I may have been out-
> canoned (or out-retconned at least) on that one.)
We differ in that I don't assume that unwanted pregnancy is particularly common in Ernaldan society. Control of fertility, magical and herbal contraceptives and arborticides, few taboos on talking and educating youngsters about sex... there are too many unquestioned assumptions about the background that I'd want spelled out before accepting your argument. (And mine too, if I was making one).
> Insert "it takes a village" type homilies on the likely rearing of
> such children.
Since sexual conduct rules are socially normative, the child would (certainly in my campaigns) have a social mother but no social father. Normative reasoning: "There is no such thing as incest"; ergo the child must have come from the gods or from the Earth. (I note unusually busy mythic background of Earth Tribe parthenogenesis).
John
(who is unpacking boxes from storage, and found treasures like my Judges
Guild 'Duck Pond, TotRM #1, all the early Different Worlds and a Greg
Stafford pamphlet on channelling dinosaurs. Happy happy, joy joy.)
End of The Glorantha Digest V8 #661
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