The Anthropology of Sex

Hastings Donnan, Fiona Magowan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189841
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex scholarship has a long history in anthropology, from the studies of voyeuristic Victorian gentlemen ethnographers, to more recent analyses of gay sex, transsexualism, and the newly visible forms of contemporary sexuality in the West. The Anthropology of Sex draws on the comparative field research of anthropologists to examine the relationship between sex as identity, practice and experience. Sexual cultures vary enormously and, while often the topic of tabloid titillation, they are more rarely subjected to strict cultural analysis. The Anthropology of Sex is the first work to critically synthesise over a century of comparative expertise, knowledge and understanding of diverse sexual forms. - Explores sexuality from diversity to perversity and asks how diverse sexual practices are linked. - Probes the cultural and comparative context of contemporary sexual practice and belief. - Examines the shaping of sex by global and globalizing forces. The Anthropology of Sex will be key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in anthropology and related disciplines.

1 SEXUAL ADVANCES

Sex is not the answer, sex is the question, yes is the answer

(Howard Hoffman)

TEASING OUT AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SEX

This book examines how sex acts, sensuousness and sexual experiences are variously narrated and embodied across cultures. We approach the study of sex by drawing out the perspectives of those whose sex lives have been buried within ethnographic examples. Performative, experiential subjectivities are brought to the fore and thus our theoretical pretensions are primarily to highlight the positions and agendas of those being studied and to argue from their own understandings and interpretations. Rather than being a series of ‘just-so’ sex stories, this book tries to bring together critically and comparatively what people in other countries say and do about sex and how their perspectives relate to sexual theories developed by anthropologists and other social scientists of sex.

While this book is concerned primarily with sexual practices and experiences as expressed in sexual intercourse, sex acts are indicative of much broader societal concerns. Sex is both productive and reproductive of social identities that, in turn, are constrained by official and unofficial sexual contracts. However, our analytic emphasis is upon how practices surrounding sexual embodiment are at once emotional, social, political and physiological. In looking at sexual experiences, we acknowledge a problem of reductionism in that it could be argued that such experiences are confined to those engaged in them and, as a result, it sometimes appears as if scholars feel more comfortable with discussing sex and sexuality in terms of representations and identity constructions. Nonetheless, singular experiences of sex are derivative of a multiplicity of positions and perspectives that are intersubjectively embodied and circumscribed by socio-political, racial, national and legal concerns. The anthropology of sex is also the anthropology of religion, economics, politics, kinship and human rights, as we show throughout this book.

In early academia, the remit of anthropologists was not always clearly distinguishable from that of their neighbours in biology and sociology. Consequently, theoretical agendas in the study of sex have become blurred over time as similar concerns have been taken up across disciplinary boundaries. This means that our objective of analyzing ethnographic case studies by anthropologists is not straightforward, since the field of sex has grown and overlapped with other disciplines and so we have not been able (and nor would we wish) to avoid drawing upon theories of sexual experience and desire from other areas of the social sciences. Thus, while we have tried to attend mainly to anthropological studies of sex in this book, it has only been possible up to a point, since to ignore contemporary works by scholars from related disciplines would be to impoverish the scope of the arguments and insights that have been developed in other domains. This book tries to bring ethnographic cross-cultural analyses to the fore and to ground its themes in broad cultural comparators.

Many studies have viewed sex from a position of theoretical dominance, but this book comes at sex from underneath, privileging the views of those involved. The field of sex is huge and this book is necessarily one of limited ambition. We are aware that we have not tried to assimilate all the areas of sexuality (or sexual abstinence) that have been covered by sexologists, feminists and sociologists, or to synthesize the large arena of queer studies which now combines a range of disciplines and would require another volume devoted solely to this purpose to do it justice. We aim to review some of the approaches that anthropologists, for the most part, have taken to sex, focusing on what they have had to say about the sexual experiences of people from different cultures.

THE MEANING OF ‘SEX’

The anthropological study of sexual intimacy and desire brings with it particular methodological problems that other areas of anthropological research do not en counter. One of the questions raised by personal experiences of sex is: how can we get inside the minds and bodies of those being studied? Sexual experiences are at the core of sexual identity, and yet accessing and appreciating the affective power of sexual experience are often the most difficult aspects of engaging with sexuality. The problem of obtaining information on sex acts is compounded by the fact that anthropologists cannot verify what their informants say, although some have tried to do so by way of asking their informants to draw sexual positions (e.g. Berndt 1976). Instead, sexual experience must be decoded through verbal and other symbolic attitudes, values and expressions. This is further complicated by the fact that the same act may have many different meanings.

Even in ethnographic accounts which relate the particularities of sexual activities, there is seldom first-hand reference to sexual experience per se but rather an analytical code about what sexuality means for those people and how it should be approached, often through gender constructs (Caplan 1987: 16). Speaking of gender models, Henrietta Moore (1994: 6) suggests that they come from an anthropological imagination of projection and introjection, identification and recognition and that much greater attention is needed to unravel imaginative fantasies about the anthropological self. Indeed, the same could be said about attending to sexual experiences which have sometimes reflected the passions, prudishness and pruriences of the anthropological imagination as much as of the people being studied.

Although there are many theorists who would argue for the inextricable nature of sex and gender (see MacKinnon 1982; Wilton 1996), we take the position that sex and gender should not be subsumed within each other, as some studies have done. Lesbian studies, for example, have been criticized for being asexual and for stressing gender at the expense of considering the sexual understandings and practices of lesbian life (Stone 2007; Wekker 2006). But there is a way of talking about sex and sexuality productively that both sheds light upon and advances gender arguments and vice versa. While many Euro-American scholars would find the work of some sex and gender theorists from other disciplines, such as MacKinnon (1982), Laqueur (1990), Butler (1990, 1993), Harding (1998) and Richardson (2000), useful starting points for theorizing sex in the West, and while we also refer to their work periodically in what follows, they are not the focus here, as the book is not about theorizing Western relationships between sex and gender per se. Instead, we aim to show how cultural difference generates multiple experiences and classifications of sex, rather than treating sex as a product of gender relations or indeed purely as mental or physical urges, as sexologists and psychologists have done previously.

The term ‘sex’ poses many problems before we even begin to discuss its embodiments. Anthropologists, feminists, sexologists, gender studies scholars and others use terms such as ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ in quite distinct ways. As we have said, it is not our intention to examine all the debates around these terms. However, in collating and comparing particular debates within the literature on sex and gender, we recognize that authors employ these terms for different ends and it has been necessary to take account of some of their critiques in order to engage with the complexity they entail. What is clear in each case is that there is no consensus on what is meant by each of the terms. For example, while the concept of sexual rights is widely applauded, the term defines a wide range of activities and principles. Neither are sex accounts self-evident depictions of personal experiences; they are historical portraits of limited viewpoints that often frame theoretical concerns within a particular period. Thus, in this chapter we provide a review of key debates on sex conducted by some philosophers, sexologists, anthropologists and gender theorists, locating them in historical and cultural perspective to show how sex is a hotly contested practice.

SEX IN THE WEST

Sex has increasingly been put on show since it became an object of study in the social sciences from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (Bullough 1994). Much early sex research took for granted the question of what is ‘natural’ about the sex act in terms of biological instincts and thus derived sexual abnormalities on the basis of deviation from the norm. The normative benchmark was heterosexual sex in which sexual desires were ascertained through a limited range of accepted practices. However, as diversity was socially engendered, this ensured that even so-called ‘normal sex’ was potentially ambivalent or even deviant. In order to understand the development of theories of normativity and deviance as critiqued by early anthropologists of sex, we must first appreciate the social and academic conditions of Western society in which these scholars were working.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian morality operated a series of binarisms with regard to sexual norms, oscillating between social prurience and restraint set alongside possible promiscuity, and sexual privacy in the home com promised by potential corruption and vice in public spheres. Social purity movements in Britain sought to regulate this harmful divide in organizations such as the Vice Society, the Obscene Publications police squad and the initiation of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864, 1866 and 1869, which were instigated to deal with venereal disease in the armed services arising from liaisons with prostitutes (Weeks 1993: 84, 85). These acts brought into public view distinctions between acceptable and immoral acts which required further regulation. The suppression of legal places for sex, for example by closing Victorian brothels or outlawing prostitution, drove sex underground and increased the danger to prostitutes by putting them out on the streets and into the hands of ruthless customers, as have similar rulings in much later times and places, such as the prohibition on twenty-first-century sex workers in Sweden (see Kulick 2003a). Inevitably, the privacy of sex acts was one reason why sex was a subdued focus of scholarly analysis.

Yet, sex has always been viewed as a powerful force of social life by Western theorists. Sexologists were primarily concerned with the biological bases of sex but they did attend to social factors to a certain extent, including marriage rules, exo gamy, incest and non-reproductive sex. The relationship between these ‘scientific’ accounts and the naturalness of sex was determined by the expectation that sex ‘facts’ could be deduced from the research. However, the essence of what was ‘natural’ became the foundation for anthropological critique in establishing what terms such as ‘the body’, ‘nature’ and ‘sex’ referred to. What was considered natural before the eighteenth century, i.e. that men and women were fundamentally the same with women’s genitals on the inside and men’s genitals on the outside, was challenged by the 1800s, as various writers posed sexual and racial differences between men and women on the basis of genital and bodily distinctions (Laqueur 1987; Martin 1989). At this time naturalists and scientists created the myth of the Hottentot apron, a large flap of skin which they believed hung from the navel of Khoi and San, a belief that was eclipsed when they had the opportunity to view the ritually elongated labia minora and enlarged buttocks of Saat-Jee (known as the Hottentot Venus or Sarah Bartmann), a San woman who was made to display her genitals for paying customers in London and Paris around 1810 (Lyons and Lyons 2004: 31–4).

Sexologist Havelock Ellis saw sex as the essence of life, which he analyzed as both biologically based and culturally relative. In its biological essence he considered that each person was suffused by sexual urges, erotic dreams, feelings and involuntary manifestations such as hysteria that were part of an individual ‘auto-eroticism’ (Ellis 1900; Ellis and Symonds 1897). He identified multiple varieties of sex practices for reproduction and pleasure, including ‘coprophilia, undinism, sadism and masochism, frotage, necrophilia, transvestism (eonism), inversion and many others’ (Ellis 1900, cited in Weeks 1993: 149). All these processes arose from impulses of arousal and release that explained whether the sexual act was an exaggeration or distortion of its social purpose for marriage and the family.

Still, the historical background of Victorian prudery became the sexual hallmark for classifying as unacceptable works of science that were seen to invite titillation, most notoriously those of ‘armchair’ theorists that included plates of bare-breasted natives in what came to be vulgarly referred to as ‘tits and spears’ ethnography. At the same time, early primitive porno-exotica captured one element of the nineteenth-century public and marked a departure from the more socially oriented focus on sex as incest, taboo and marriage exchange. Sex was subjected to a popularization and voyeurism of decadence and excess by the media that to some degree undermined the study of sex by researchers as well as their reputations and credibility. Social pressures and fears about damaged reputations thus affected anthropological and sexological research interests. Medical writings such as those by Krafft-Ebing (1931: 115) got away with ‘it’ by using Latin when sex was discussed. Others, such as Havelock Ellis, were not so fortunate and suffered the condemnation of their texts as obscene, because they were written in an accessible manner for the public rather than obscuring tantalizing details. Embarrassment over exposing and honing in on native sexual practices was also apparent in Malinowski’s apology for including the word ‘sex’ in the title of so many of his books (Lyons and Lyons 2004: 10; MacClancy 1996: 26–7), though his academic interest in the topic does confirm the centrality of sex from the very beginning of the modern discipline.¹

SEX-TALK AMONG EARLY ANTHROPOLOGISTS

In the early twentieth century Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead brought foreign sex home to British and American shores to show that the natives were ‘like us’, but only in some regards. Primitive sexuality thus claimed a field for itself set in opposition to Victorian prudery. It also offered those who desired to break loose from this prudery a means of doing so. In both cases, sex remained outside of mainstream topics of research and everyday conversation as it presented a threat to the morality of the nation. Portraits of primitive sex were framed in terms of Western notions of love and lust, but they were still seen as more emotionally provocative and licentious than sex in the West. At the apex of sexual excess were Africans, who were considered to be sexually ‘rapacious and dominating’ with exaggerated genital endowments that were not thought to be matched by their intellectual capacity (Lyons and Lyons 2004: 7). Ethnographic accounts of the time tended to expose primitive sex in a guise that reflected the sexual anxieties of anthropologists or public ideas about sex. Anthropological prudery was inevitable as scholars such as Morgan, McLennan and Lubbock were products of a society with sexual sanctions acting upon the nature of their prudish discussions (Lyons and Lyons 2004: 55). Victorian sexuality, like much of Victorian anthropology, was male biased and focused on men’s views of women by men. Phallocentric theories predominated at this time, drawing evidence from Indian and Egyptian religion and ritual. One paper by Sellon (1863–4) examined male and female fertility sects for the worship of linga in which young women rubbed themselves against phallic objects, and other sects for the worship of yoni (Lyons and Lyons 2004: 58).²

While the public viewed sex as needing to be brought under moral wraps, psychiatrists and sexologists considered sex as contributing to physical illness or well-being. When further located in cross-cultural contexts, sexual practices were subjected to Western neuroses about superstition, religion and the animal urges of primitive sex. In order to secure its place and legitimacy in the scientific academy, anthropology was forced to turn its attention to more ‘noble’ causes than sex, and so, as sex moved to the margins of academic research, the acceptable framing of sexual topics was posed in terms of family, marriage, kinship and social structure. For instance, although there were many other aspects of sex that might have been studied, incest received disproportionate theoretical attention and we highlight some of the key issues here.

Anthropological and Western notions of kinship shaped early anthropologists’ views of incest and adultery (e.g. Malinowski, Freud, Radcliffe-Brown, Murdock and Talcott Parsons). Taboos pertained primarily to the nuclear family unit of mother, father and children, though their precise explanation was often hotly disputed. It was posited that because siblings were in close contact with one another in their early years, they would develop feelings of ‘positive’ sexual aversion, which were then reflected in a culturally codified proscription:

Generally speaking, there is a remarkable absence of erotic feelings between persons living very closely together from childhood . .. sexual indifference is combined with the positive feeling of aversion when the act is thought of . .. Hence their aversion to sexual relations with one another displays itself in custom and in law as a prohibition of intercourse between near kin. (Westermarck 1926: 80)

For example, amongst Mountain Arapesh children, familiarity was thought to breed sexual indifference, as evidenced in Mead’s (1950: 43–4) descriptions of their relaxed emotional and sexual engagement:

Four-year-olds can roll and tumble on the floor together without anyone’s worrying as to how much bodily contact results. Thus there develops in the children an easy, happy-go-lucky familiarity with the bodies of both sexes, a familiarity uncomplicated by shame, coupled with a premium upon warm, all-over physical contact.

Mead (1950: 70) suggests that although these relationships are marked by carefree caress, they do not go further but lead to sex aversion between brothers and sisters. In Mead’s account, sibling warmth and aversion teach Arapesh boys and girls how to respond to the other sex and develop acceptable child marriage relationships with other people.³ In contrast to the Arapesh, Trobriand siblings enjoyed no such physical contact, for though they lived close together, they must ‘not even look at each other’ and ‘the sister remains for her brother the centre of all that is forbidden’ (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Sexual Advances
• 2 Beautiful Bodies
• 3 Dancing Desires
• 4 Erotic Economies
• 5 Foreign Affairs
• 6 Forbidden Frontiers
• 7 Sex Crimes
• 8 Intimate Cultures
• References
• Index