Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 August 11

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

August 11

On incest and the gentry

Somebody told me that a reason freud’s oedipus deal found traction among influential people was that a lot of people from the higher class and nobility were raised away from their family for the most part, and because of that didn’t develop a distaste for thinking of relatives that way. Has this idea been addressed by academics? Are there examples of incestuous acts or impulses in the letters of people from this demographic in this time period? The one that’s in my database just isn’t coming to mind. Temerarius (talk) 02:36, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

See Genetic sexual attraction and Westermarck effect. Though neither mentions 19th century European gentry, perhaps those articles could be a starting point. Someguy1221 (talk) 02:42, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Dunno about traction among influential people but the idea that Freud himself may have lacked the imprinting is mentioned in our Oedipus complex#Sociocultural criticism article, sourced to Steven Pinker who'd generally be consider an academic albeit to How the mind works rather than an academic paper. It's suggested this may have been one of the reasons why Freud once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. Nil Einne (talk) 05:00, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Being raised separately was quite common. You might also be interested in fosterage, which I believe survived in Ireland in less formal terms much longer than implied there, and also the way a page was brought up. They all kept good track of who their relatives were though. Dmcq (talk) 08:05, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Incest in high life is a common theme in the fiction of the 19th century, a fact often now explained by the influence of the supposed affair between Lord Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh – a huge scandal. They were not raised together, and met in adulthood almost as strangers. For an example of fictional treatment see the subplot of Lord Glenallan's marriage to his half-sister in Walter Scott's The Antiquary, the novel I usernamed myself after. --Antiquary (talk) 08:59, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

We don't know what the relation between fiction and reality is though. It might be lie detective novels where five people are killed. I wonder if DNA tests can tell if there was incest at some point? Dmcq (talk) 18:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Not a scientific answer, but an additional fictional example (suggesting the idea might have been widely familiar) is the 17th-century play 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.0.130.143 (talk) 18:25, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Nelly Sbton or Nelly Sebton

l would like to know how l can get information on my maternal grandmother who was born in Alexandria, Egypt and was the first female lawyer in Egypt. She was born round about 1772 or 1777. She was Jewish. Her father was Moīse Sbton (Sebton) and her mother was Fortuna Viterbo. She married Anthony (Antonín) Chromovský, who was a musician and came from Czechoslovakia. They had two children, a son named, Serge Jan Chromovský and a daughter named, Sonia Anna Margarita Chromovský. Annemarieditondo379762 (talk) 13:54, 11 August 2018 (UTC) Annemarieditondo379762 (talk) 13:41, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@Annemarrieditondo379762: the only mention I was able to find online was this site, which you may have already seen. It gives her birthdate as 1895 (1772 does seem too early). There was another Antonín Chromovský who lived in Rožďalovice. His wife was born in 1870 or 1871, but her name was Anna so presumably she's unrelated. According to Wikipedia, the first female lawyer in Egypt was Naima Ilyas al-Ayyubi. I'm sorry I've not been able to help more. If you know where they lived, perhaps you'll be able to find marriage records, or perhaps local papers will have printed obituaries for them. Best of luck, › Mortee _talk 16:12, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@Annemarrieditondo379762: I passed this query on to a non-Wikipedian friend of mine who is a Jewish Geneologist. He has replied as follows (Real World names redacted where not relevant):

Hi T—,

Ancestry.com has nothing other than the small Di Tondo family tree submitted by Anne Marie Di Tondo herself. On it Nelly CHROMOVSKY nee SEBTON is listed as dying in 1973 in Melbourne, Australia, so a birthdate of 1877 is plausible.

In the 1890s there were about 9,000 Jews living in Al-Iskandariya, a mixture of ancient Mizrachi from the Ottoman Empire and 19th-century Sephardi & Ashkenazi European Jews.

www.familysearch.org (the Mormons) has nothing for Al-Iskandariya apart from a small number of Christian records.

www.jewishgen.org however has someone researching the SEPTON family of Al-Iskandariya - but they have been inactive since 2004 and might no longer be alive.

The same applies to Ariel Viterbo of Jerusalem, who is researching VITERBO from Tunis and Italy.

There is nobody researching anything like Chromovský from anywhere: the nearest is someone researching Kramovsky from Hermanivka (Germanovka) near Kiyev - not too far from Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the 'tail' of Czechoslovakia. This person is currently active.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to pass it on to Anne Marie Di Tondo and Mortee,

See you on Tuesday,

All the Best,

R—

{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.0.130.143 (talk) 18:38, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

No advice regarding your grandmother, but my five cents regarding her husband. The surname Chromovský (masculine variant) / Chromovská (for females) seems to be quite rare - there are only 25 people with this surname in the Czech Republic (12 males [1] and 13 females [2]. Despite its low occurence it seems (at least to a native speaker) as a genuinely Czech surname. This indicates your ancestors in that family branch were probably of Czech origin. I would suspect some Polish trace (cf. placename Chromów) in more distant past, but this is purely my speculation. The aforemantioned site draws its data from official population database of Czech Ministry of Interior, which means the above given numbers of surname bearers residing in the Czech Reopublic are complete and more or less up-to-date. Unfortunately the distribution is published only down to county level or so, it doesn't pinpoint location of individuals. If the responder above states Rožďalovice as one of possible locations of interest, then, assuming your grandfather wasn't of Jewish faith) you can have a look into parish registers. For Rožďalovice (as well as rest of Central Bohemia) they are maintained by Státní oblastní archiv v Praze (State Regional Archives in Prague) and they have recently been recently digitized and published through website ebadatelna.soapraha.cz. For accessing the digitized images you need to register with the site (free of charge), then try searching parish registers for location "Rožďalovice" (sometimes in the past the searching was broken in English version of the site, in case of a malfunction simply switch the site language to Czech, this should work). From search results I recommend to your attention books "Rožďalovice 23" (Roman Catholic Church, births 1878-1916) and "Bošín-ev 08" (Evangelical Church, births 1873-1903). See also Toyen (band), a Czech band whose leading musician is Petr Chromovský - maybe your relative... Given the small pool of Chromovskýs in the Czech Republic it seems quite plausible. Good luck with your research. GCZPN3 (talk) 13:53, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Chromów appears to have been part of Silesia, which is a territory that passed hands many times, and may have had Czech speakers for large parts of its history, even those parts which are now part of Poland. --Jayron32 14:22, 14 August 2018 (UTC)

Dance name

There are some videos featuring characteristic leg-twisting dance that looks like a mix between twist and swing. What's the name of that dance? Thanks. Brandmeister^talk 14:08, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

@Brandmeister: it seems to be called the shuffle or sometimes "cutting steps". There seems to be lot on YouTube about it, this instructional video, for example. › Mortee _talk 16:22, 11 August 2018 (UTC)