In "Totem and Taboo", Freud discusses tribal Totem cultures and how they relate to modern man. He discusses unusual taboos like not marrying inside the tribe, or in some cases, being required to marry inside the group. He also mentions some of Totem cultural taboos that are similar to ours like not engaging in incest. In certain parts of the essay, he compares primitive men and children, relating anthropology back to his own ideas about the human condition.
What might have surprised Sigmund Freud however, is that there is a group of tribal people living in the amazon today, The Pirahã, that have hardly any sexual taboos at all. They don't engage in sex with parents or siblings, but any other form of sexual activity, whether it is homosexual, heterosexual, with multiple people, or with children, has no negative stigma attached to it. Incest within the nuclear family is frowned on, however it is common for cousins and relatives outside the nuclear family to marry or engage in sexual activity with one another. What is also interesting to note is that children in this culture are treated as adults in many respects; it isn't unusual for them to smoke tobacco, play with sharp objects like knives (even as toddlers), and participate in various adult activities like fishing, hunting, and (occasionally) sexual activities. However, because children are treated as adults, if a child were to injure themselves somehow with a knife or from a fire, they are scolded instead of coddled.
The Pirahã do have some cultural taboos however, such as not getting angry with each-other, not eating too often, and not trusting Portuguese-speaking Brazilians and foreigners as much as individuals in their own tribe. If Freud were alive to report on non-totem tribal cultures like these, it might have made him reconsider some of his theories. He might have considered their culture to be childlike, as he did with Totem cultures; but seeing as this culture is so different from even other tribal societies, he might have thought differently about taboos all together.
-Dallas
I agree with Dallas's comment on how if Freud were here to view non-totem tribal cultures he may have considered his theories. It made me think about certain modern day taboos such as "Sister Wives" in "modern day culture". How one man marries more than one women which is polygamy, and all of the wives live together as "sisters" all sharing one man, having children by him; it makes me wonder what his thoughts would be on an aspect like this. Just because it is something that was done centuries ago but what about the term "sister wives". I question how he will view this term and the women who call themselves it. Would he consider them to have some sort of incestuous ideals, which relates to being abused as a child.
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