thumb|Portrait of Westermarck
Edvard Alexander Westermarck (20 November 1862 – 3 September 1939) was a Finnish social anthropologist, sociologist and philosopher. He was the most internationally prominent Finnish scholar of his time, known for his work on the history of marriage and the origin of moral ideas. He was the first to lecture on sociology in both England and the Nordic countries, and held professorships at the London School of Economics, the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University, where he also served as the first rector. He is perhaps best remembered today for the Westermarck effect, the hypothesis that children raised in close proximity develop a natural aversion to sexual relations with each other. His scholarly interest in human sexuality and marriage has been linked by some biographers to his own presumed homosexuality.
Biography
Early life and education
Westermarck was born in 1862 in a well-off Lutheran family, part of the Swedish-speaking population of Finland. His father worked at the University of Helsinki as a bursar, and his maternal grandfather was a professor at the same university. It was thus natural for Edvard to study there. He enrolled in 1881, initially studying aesthetics, literature and history before turning to philosophy, and obtained his degree in 1886.
Academic career
In 1892, Westermarck became a lecturer in sociology at the University of Helsinki. He was the first to lecture on sociology in England, as well as in the Nordic countries. An arrangement allowed him to hold his London and Helsinki (later Turku) professorships in parallel, and to spend part of each year in Morocco. In 1898 Westermarck first visited Morocco, and was immediately captivated by the country. At a later visit he bought a house in Tangier and learned the local Arabic dialect. His students included Ragnar Numelin.
While still teaching philosophy in Turku, he helped found academic sociology in the United Kingdom, becoming the first Martin White Professor of Sociology (with Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse) in 1907 in the University of London. as well as "an authority in the history of morals and of marriage customs."
The phenomenon of reverse sexual imprinting, the diminution in sexual attraction between persons who lived in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, now known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described in his thesis The History of Human Marriage (1891).
Morocco
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 (1926).