The Cradle of Dominations

Dorothée Dussy

An ethnographic investigation on incest in France, based on a series of interviews of men convicted for child rape within their family.

Every day, not far away from your homes, in Lyon, Paris, Barcelona, Toronto, Mexico, or Dallas, a good father is sleeping with his 9-year-old daughter. Sometimes, she just gives him a fellatio. Or it is an uncle with his nephew. Or an older sister with her little sister. The term used to refer to sexual activities imposed on a child from the family is “incest”. This is the definition given by ladies and gentlemen, doctors, magistrates, journalists, writers, playwright, singers, historians, psychologists and psychiatrists. Actually this is how everybody defines it, except for anthropologists, who do not have a name for this common practice in the daily life of families, their attention being drawn to the theory of the incest taboo.
[...] I am then taking the case of incest from the beginning: What is incest? What do people who go through incest go through? How to understand that incest is a frequent practice while it is theoretically prohibited in every society in the world?

In this anthropology of incest, Dorothée Dussy studies the complex mechanisms of incest, a frequent practice in France, while illegal and condemned. As a result of the banality of sexual abuse on children, incest appears to structure social order. It appears to be a training tool for abusive behaviours and gender and social class domination. This study is based on five years of ethnographic investigations led on adults who were abused as children, and on their families.
A subversive journey inside families, who are not that different from yours.
- A gripping investigation on a subject absent from the media and publishing.
- Dorothée Dussy has led a long investigation and tells about her own experience. This is an extremely precise and intellectual work, which remains fairly accessible.
- As one of the few specialists in the subject, Dorothée Dussy has contributed many interviews and articles - including about news items and the rise of the hashtag MeTooIncest on social media. The publication of The Cradle of Dominations has already been announced in French and foreign papers.

Dorothée Dussy is a director of research at CNRS and an anthropologist. She has published several works on domination in several contexts: In New Caledonia, where she led a research on urban environment
in France, where she led an important investigation on incest
in Europe, where she studied the collaboration between men and bees and the technique and scientific aspects of beekeeping.