爱德华·韦斯特马克

作品

• 1891人类婚姻史

  由其博士论文发展而来的比较史：它反对原始杂交说，主张持久的配偶关系可以追溯到最早的人类，并用一起长大的人之间产生的反感来解释对乱伦的回避。

• 1906道德观念的起源与发展

  两卷本（1906—1908），比较世界各地的道德习俗：道德判断产生于已变得无私和普遍的赞许与不赞许的情感，这既解释了各社会道德的相似之处，也解释了其差异。

立场

Westermarck is on the map as a founder of comparative sociology and anthropology and as a classic defender of ethical relativity. “The History of Human Marriage” (1891) used Darwin’s theory and a wide range of ethnographic material against the then common view that human society began in promiscuity or group marriage: lasting pair bonds, he argued, go back to the earliest humans. To explain why incest is avoided, he proposed that people who grow up together develop an aversion to sexual relations with each other – a hypothesis rejected by Freud and Lévi-Strauss, but later supported by studies of Israeli kibbutzim and of “minor marriages” in Taiwan and now known as the “Westermarck effect”. In “The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas” (1906–08) and “Ethical Relativity” (1932) he held, in the tradition of Hume and Adam Smith, that moral judgements express emotions of approval and disapproval that have become disinterested; since these depend on circumstances, beliefs and customs, moral ideas vary, and none has objective validity. He did not conclude that anything goes, but expected greater tolerance from knowledge of the variety of moral opinion. His Moroccan studies remain an important source on North African ritual and belief.

生平与背景

Edvard Westermarck was born on 20 November 1862 in Helsinki into a Swedish-speaking family; his father was the university’s bursar. He studied philosophy in Helsinki and from 1887 worked in the library of the British Museum in London on the history of marriage, the basis of his doctoral thesis (1889) and of “The History of Human Marriage” (1891). He taught sociology in Helsinki, was professor of moral philosophy there from 1906 to 1918 and at the same time held a chair of sociology at the University of London (1907–30), where Bronisław Malinowski was among his students. From 1898 he spent many years in Morocco, studying rituals, beliefs and customs. In 1918 he became professor of philosophy and the first rector of Åbo Akademi, the Swedish-language university in Turku. He died on 3 September 1939.

其他主要作品

• The History of Human Marriage (1891; 5th ed., 3 vols., 1921)
• The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (2 vols., 1906–08)
• Ritual and Belief in Morocco (2 vols., 1926)
• Ethical Relativity (1932)
• Christianity and Morals (1939)