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in sum, the nomenclatures support our view that the broader marriage principle is generational and ideological, and the refining principles are biological and strategical. The system can be summarized as follows' (1) When possible, marry within a stratum (generation within a group; caste, or subcaste within the whole society). if not, a superior male weds inferior females, according to respect lines. Thus antihypogamy at the caste level is the same rule (at a different locus) as antiauntnephew marriage within a concrete ancestor group. (2) Do not marry too close (for example, true siblings, or sometimes first cousin, or ill particular FZD), for incest, or sister exchange, or the exchange of women between alternating generations of two groups threatens tile process of creating social networks.

This then is a conceptual world which reiterates generationlike strata at every level and vehemently prohibits both sibling incest and contracts between classificatory siblings which would perpetually satisfy their marriage needs by sister exchange. In such a world it is not surprising that phenomena of twin births have taken on rich dramatic and structuralist significance. The variable meaning of births of twins is a classic topic of Balinese ethnography. Belo (1935) suggested that twins of different sex are used to emphasize caste differences, since their birth is auspicious for high castes and catastrophic for tow. Moreover, my own data on same-sex twins, corroborated ill the colonial ethnography, suggests that the numerical as well as the sex aspect of twin births is important in Balinese conceptions.'s Any twins are seen as a meaningful contradiction of the natural fact of birth order - one order per birth. Different-sex twins are doubly complex because t lie normative stratification of the sexes, male over female, might also be contradicted. Indeed, twin brother-sister incest is relatively less contradictory than twin sister-brother incest, because at least the elder twin is male, as befits his inherent superiority. Given incest, an upper-male-lower-female incest is less contradictory than the reverse. This correlates in actual practice with the guarded acceptability of an uncleniece marriage versus a strictly tabooed aunt-nephew union, although ally intergenerational family marriage contradicts the primary same-generation marriage norm.

Briefly, it is incestuous for opposite-sex twins to occupy a womb; but the higher the status, the less abominable the incest, since for the gods incest is proper. It appears from the persistent Balinese interest in twins that native theorists have reasoned that superior mortals, while still inferior to gods, can approximate divine patterns of incest through cousin marriage. Ill their eyes one of the recurring proofs of this godly capacity would he that mortals bear opposite-sex twins. With its qualified patriparallel-cousin-marriage norms, the system values incest, mythically advisable in the maharaja's line:

The effort to keep lower castes (onderkasten) pure (rein) was indeed not foreign to the development of the legend that the Dewa Agung was duty-bound to wed his full