Emilija Kartalija, MA, research assistant of the SASA Institute of Ethnography, will present   A Prelude to the Research: Basic Starting Points for the Study of Cultural Representations of Incest in Modern Serbia, at 12:00 on Thursday, June 15th, 2023 in the SASA Institute of Ethnography (Knez Mihailova, 36, 1st floor, room 102).

Kinship as a field of research can be considered an invention of anthropology itself, which developed analytical tools for its study, and if there was a subject of research that anthropology could rightly call its own –then it is kinship. Robin Fox points out that kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or what act is to art - the basic discipline of science-and like formal logic or figure drawing, it is both simple and difficult. With this aphorism, it can be said that the incest taboo is for anthropology what Shakespeare is for English literature-fundamental and classic, as well as one of the hardest anthropological puzzles, and the question that has been discussed the most, and which, despite this, remains the most disputed. 

This presentation is an introduction to the doctoral dissertation of Emilija Kartalija, MA, and presents the basis starting points from which to approach the study of cultural representations of incest and the prohibition of incest in modern Serbia, explaining the main idea, theoretical approach, and methodology and research objectives.