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lacking a Ph.D., and had not yet published books themselves. But the editors of the Journal had heard me present a paper at a conference at Columbia University in September and had sent me the galley to review, to my surprise. Yet more of a surprise was my thesis advisor Professor A.’s reaction: he had scarcely been impressed but rather sourly he’d warned me not to “squander” my energy in transient tasks, at this time in my career when completing a substantial dissertation was crucial.
    I was disappointed, and hurt. It seemed to be a melancholy pattern in my life, I brought to others news of achievements which I would have thought might impress them, or cause them to feel pride for me; but the reaction was totally antipathetic. I could not predict.
    So frequently the term taboo occurs in anthropological research, it would be helpful to know what taboo means.
    But we can know only the taboos of others, which we can coolly deconstruct. Our own, private taboos are hidden to us as the contours of our own brains.
    My subject was a number of linked ancient texts dealing with rituals of childbirth/ motherhood. In these texts, there were no father-figures—no father-deities—only the pregnant female, the female-in-childbirth, the female and her infant, and female “spirits” (“demons”?) .
    The number of ancient manuscripts dealing with twins must have been hugely disproportionate to the number of twins born, which was a puzzle. In this culture twins were likely to be “sacred twins”—unless they were “demon twins.” The obsessive subject prevailed across different cultures and eras and into the present day in Africa— much about the rituals was similar, yet, unaccountably, there were rituals that seemed to contradict the others.
    Some twins were “sacred” and beloved. Some twins were “demonic” and were to be killed immediately at birth. In one text, the fullness of the moon seemed to be a relevant factor; in another, the nature of the delivery—whether it was exceedingly bloody, for instance. (If the mother died in childbirth, “sacred” twins were reared by the tribe; “demonic” twins were to be executed at once, and not buried with the mother.) Yet these issues were hedged with doubt and ambivalence and the effort of translating the relevant manuscripts was challenging, for there were words that, translated, might mean what they usually meant or their opposite. And there were key words that baffled translators. In such cases infanticide was not considered murder but “ritual cleansing.” Professor A. had written extensively of the puzzles and paradoxes of the Eweian texts which dated from A.D. 700 yet retained older, ancient passages and single words that had become extinct by A.D. 700 so it was not clear what the author of the text meant by them. Professor A. had spent much of his mid-career on this paradoxical subject and had tried to explain to me where the more crucial problems lay. Basically, Professor A. was involved in a genteel feud with other translators and scholars for it was his belief that the texts had been inadequately translated—the (unclean) infants had not been murdered but in some literal way “cleansed.” There was a Eweian term— sRjAApuna— that can be translated as “cleansing”—“eradicating”—“purifying”—(more rarely) “destroying.” There were recipes for sacred ointments, baths, amulets to “purify”—or “protect”—the mother who had just given birth, who would have been, like all such mothers, then as now, extremely vulnerable to lethal infections; except these ancient people did not know about bacterial infections, only that mothers often died in childbirth, a time of terrible “uncleanliness.” In all this, the taboo functioned mysteriously: some sort of (never-spoken) acknowledgment of the Great Mother, represented as a genial sort of demon with ornamental skulls around her neck.
    Working on the Eweian texts, I sometimes felt that I