Edvard Westermarck


Edvard Alexander Westermarck was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo.

Biography

Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsingfors as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there, obtaining his first degree in Philosophy in 1886, but developing also an interest in anthropology and reading the works of Charles Darwin. His thesis, The History of Human Marriage, was published as a book in 1891, and would be published again in a substantially revised edition in 1921.
In 1892, Westermarck became a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Helsinki. He was promoted to professor of Moral Philosophy in 1906 and occupied that chair until 1918, when he moved to the Åbo Akademi University in Turku..
While still teaching Philosophy in Turku, he helped found academic sociology in the United Kingdom, becoming the first Martin White Professor of Sociology in 1907 in the University of London. One of the original reasons he spent time in London is he did not feel safe in Helsinki or Turku because of his advocacy of the independence of Finland, but even when the political situation quieted down, he continued teaching in both London and Turku until 1930 and 1932 respectively. He had also served for some years, between 1918 and 1921, as Rector of the Åbo Akademi University. He retired in 1932, and spent the rest of his life completing and publishing his major works, Ethical Relativity, Three Essays on Sex and Morals, The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization and Christianity and Morals, the latter published in the year when he died. In 1929, he had published the English version, Memories of My Life of his autobiography, originally published in Swedish in 1927.

Views

He has been described as "first Darwinian sociologist" or "the first sociobiologist", as well as “an authority in the history of morals and of marriage customs.” He denied the then prevailing view that early human beings lived in sexual promiscuity, arguing that in fact historically monogamy preceded polygamy.
The phenomenon of reverse sexual imprinting is when two people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, and both become desensitised to sexual attraction, now known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described by him in his thesis The History of Human Marriage.
Westermarck was also a scholar of Morocco and offered a positivist view of how its folk religion was formed in his two-volume work Ritual and Belief in Morocco. He had started his fieldwork in Morocco as early as 1898, and visited the country 21 times in the next thirty years, spending in total seven years in the country. He also studied his favorite subject, marriage, there, publishing in 1914 Marriage Ceremonies of Morocco.
A radical free thinker for his time, he critiqued Christian institutions and Christian ideas on the grounds that they lacked foundation. He was also a moral relativist and in his two-volume The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas he argued that moral judgements are not rational but are based on emotions and on social approval or disapproval. As a consequence, he also denied the existence of general or universal moral truth.
In the UK, his name is often spelled Edward. His sister, Helena Westermarck, was a writer and artist.

Books