Empires of Love

Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity

Carmen Nocentelli

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812207774
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Through literary and historical documents from the early sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries—epic poetry, private correspondence, secular dramas, and colonial legislation—Carmen Nocentelli charts the Western fascination with the eros of "India, " as the vast coastal stretch from the Gulf of Aden to the South China Sea was often called. If Asia was thought of as a place of sexual deviance and perversion, she demonstrates, it was also a space where colonial authorities actively encouraged the formation of interracial households, even through the forcible conscription of native brides. In her comparative analysis of Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish texts, Nocentelli shows how sexual behaviors and erotic desires quickly came to define the limits within which Europeans represented not only Asia but also themselves.Drawing on a wide range of European sources on polygamy, practices of male genital modification, and the allegedly excessive libido of native women, Empires of Love emphasizes the overlapping and mutually transformative construction of race and sexuality during Europe's early overseas expansion, arguing that the encounter with Asia contributed to the development of Western racial discourse while also shaping European ideals of marriage, erotic reciprocity, and monogamous affection.

CHAPTER 1
Perverse Implantations

Antonio Pigafetta’s Relazione del primo viaggio attorno al mondo (An account of the first voyage around the world, ca. 1526) is relatively well known as an eyewitness narrative of Magellan’s historic voyage of circumnavigation. As the first ethnographic report on the newly discovered Philippines, it is also the earliest European description of what has come to be known as palang piercing. In the Iban language of Borneo, “palang” means crossbar; palang piercing is the name now commonly associated with the practice of perforating the glans of the penis via the insertion of a crossbar device, which is then left in place.¹

In certain parts of Asia, palang piercing boasts a long history, going back at least a millennium and a half. The Kāma Sūtra, which is generally dated to the sixth century, records its currency in “southern countries,” details the piercing procedure, and describes the kinds of implements that could be threaded through the piercing: “The artificial aids used … may be round, ring-shaped, curved, in the shape of a lotus bud, irregular like bamboo bark, resembling a heron’s bone or elephant’s trunk, octagonal, square, [or] horn-shaped. They can be made hard or flexible.”²

In the West, the palang (also known as ampallang) is far more recent. In the United States, its introduction seems to date to the 1970s, when it entered the BDSM (bondage/domination, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) scene along with other forms of genital modification. While still a marginal practice of body marking, palang piercing has lately achieved mainstream visibility: the piercing procedure is performed at most piercing-and-tattoo businesses around my campus.

Long before becoming a piercing parlor staple, however, the palang played an important role in early modern ethnography, featuring conspicuously in the works of humanists, travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators. Nor was it alone: throughout the sixteenth century and for much of the seventeenth, European writers often associated (and sometimes confused) palang piercing with another form of genital modification thought to be just as “foul and diabolical.”³ This was reputedly original to continental Southeast Asia, and required the insertion of round hollow bells under the skin of the penis. The English merchant and adventurer Ralph Fitch, who traveled through the kingdom of Pegu (southern Burma) around 1586, noted that some of these inserts were called “Selwy” because they rang “but litle.”⁴ According to the Flemish merchant Jacques de Coutre (1575–1640), Peguans and Siamese knew them as “buncales”; early modern Europeans generally referred to them as “bells” or “yardballs.”⁵

In this chapter, I explore Europe’s fascination with palangs and bells. Drawing from a wide range of sources in a variety of languages—from Niccolò de’ Conti and Poggio Bracciolini’s India Recognita (1492) to João de Barros’s Décadas da Ásia (1552–1615), Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596), and Thomas Herbert’s A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile (1634)—I trace the contours of a transnational discourse that joined evolving constructions of racial difference to emerging constructions of sexual identity. Never innocent digressions or mere expressions of jocularity, early modern representations of palangs and bells imprinted with alterity bodies and minds that might otherwise have been construed as not very different from European ones. Increasingly invested with metaphoric significance, Asian practices of genital modification came to be seen as stigmata of identity: the implantations they left behind revealed a peculiar nature that was both racially alien and sexually perverse. A single process of incorporation thus produced subjects that were simultaneously racialized and eroticized.

PERVERSE IMPLANTATIONS I: THE PALANG

In an entry for April 1521, Pigafetta wrote that on Cebu, a chief port in the Visayan Islands (Philippines), all males had pierced genitals:

Big and small have the head of their members pierced from side to side with a rod of gold or tin, as thick as a goose quill. At each end of this rod some have what resembles a star with pointy ends; others [have] what resembles the head of a cart nail. I often asked many, both young and old, to see [their members], because I could not believe it.

Grandi e picoli hanno passato il suo membro circa de la testa de l’una parte a l’altra con uno fero de oro overo de stanio, grosso como una penna de oca, e in uno capo e l’altro del medesimo fero alguni hanno como una stella con ponte sovra li capi, altri como una testa de chiodo da caro. Asaissime volte lo volsi vedere da molti, cosí vechi como ioveni, perché non lo potteva credere.⁶

Although scholars have often assimilated it to the realm of the marvelous—along with Pigafetta’s Patagonian giants, wind-caused pregnancies, and perambulating leaves—this meticulous depiction of Visayan privities inaugurates a gesture that would soon become a topos obligé of early modern ethnology.⁷ It is at this point that the ethnographer becomes voyeur, inviting readers to share not only in the repeated scrutiny of these ornamented genitalia but also in the scopophilic contemplation of Visayan intercourse:

They say that this is the wish of their wives, and that if they did otherwise they would not have intercourse with them. When they want to lie with their women, the latter take [the member] still soft and begin little by little to put inside first the one star on top and then the other. Once it is inside, [the member] stiffens and remains there until it becomes soft [again], for otherwise they would not be able to pull it out. These peoples do this because they are of a weak nature. They have as many wives as they want, but only a principal one. … The women loved us much more than the [men of the country]. All of them, from the age of six onward have their natures gradually opened by reason of their men’s [enlarged] members.

Loro diceno che le sue moglie voleno cussí e, se fossero de altra sorte, non uzariano con elli. Quando questi voleno uzare con le femine, loro medisime lo pigliano non in ordine e cominciano pian piano a metersi dentro primo quella stella de sovra e poi l’altra. Quando è dentro diventa in ordine e cusí sempre sta dentro finché diventa molle, perché altramenti non lo porianno cavare fuora. Questi populi uzanno questo perché sonno de debille natura. Hanno quante moglie voleno, ma una principalle. … Le donne amavano asai piú noi che questi. A tucti, da sei anni in su, a poco a poco li apreno la natura per cagion de quelli sui membri. (241)

The passage locates palang piercing firmly at the center of aberrant practices that confounded and denaturalized accepted erotic scripts. Since at least classical antiquity, sexual intercourse was conceptualized as an activity based on a rigid dichotomy between active and passive, penetrator and penetrated, masculine and feminine.⁸ As described in the Relazione, Visayan coitus effectively undermined this dichotomy: while intromission without erection scrambled the linear narrative (arousal-penetration-climax-resolution) that structured dominant understandings of sexual intercourse, the agency of women (and the relative passivity of men) blurred the line between penetrator and penetrated, thereby disturbing notions of sex/gender difference that reserved the “active” role for adult males. Although still recognizable as a legitimate sexual act—that is, one that was heterosexual, marital, and potentially reproductive—Visayan coitus mixed dominance with submission, confused prescribed gender roles, and disrupted accepted scripts of sexual intercourse. From this perspective, the palang served quite literally as an index of perversion (from the Latin pervertere, meaning “to turn about” or “turn the wrong way”). Wherever it appeared, even that most orderly form of human sexuality, the decorous, reproductive embrace between husband and wife, turned indecent and disorderly. It is therefore hardly coincidental that Pigafetta should alight on a language of order-disorder—“still soft” (“non in ordine”), “stiffens” (“diventa in ordine”)—to describe the appearance and behavior of the palang-equipped penis during coitus. The presence of this language creates a normative baseline against which the coital dynamics described in the Relazione are assessed, and implicitly registers the anxiety generated by the mismatch between the two.

The close of Pigafetta’s description provides native disorder with a specific etiology: at its root, we are told, lies a peculiarly “weak nature” (“debille natura”). An erudite reading of this phrase would point us in the direction of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. “These peoples” (“questi populi”) would refer to the entire population, and “weak nature”—construed as an essential or permanent characteristic—would indicate a weakness of the will known ever since antiquity as akrasia or incontinence.⁹ Yet the Relazione is quick to remind us that, in sixteenth-century Italian, “nature” was also a common euphemism for genitals. In fact, the noun is used precisely in this sense just a few lines later, when we learn that Visayan women “have their natures gradually opened” (“a poco a poco li apreno la natura”) to suit the oversize members of their countrymen. Read in this light, “weak nature” would indicate less a moral incapacity than a physiological deficiency, and “these people” would refer more restrictively to native males. This allows Pigafetta to turn ethnographic description into an ethnological argument in the service of European prowess and superiority: as he makes sure to point out, Visayan women enjoyed the company of Magellan’s crewmen much more than they enjoyed the company of their countrymen.

If Pigafetta’s double entendre reminds us that in early modern Europe notions of “nature” were never too far apart from the image of “Nature” as the goddess of procreative sex, it also alerts us to the existence of an inextricable link between culture and biology.¹⁰ With both meanings of “nature” simultaneously at play, Visayan “weakness” is configured as a physiological and psychocultural disposition that could prove refractory to religious conversion as well as to physical coercion.¹¹ “Since arriving among these people, the Spaniards have had special care to abolish this abominable and bestial custom, confiscating many of these [genital implements] and flogging those who use them,” wrote a sixteenth-century reporter, “and yet in spite of this [the natives] keep on using them, and it is very common for them to keep the pin or nail that goes … through their virile member constantly stuck in place.”¹²

By the mid-seventeenth century, palang piercing had become somewhat of an ethnographic commonplace. In part, this was simply the result of the Relazione’s wide circulation: first published in epitomized form as Le voyage et navigation faict par les Espaignolz es Isles de Mollucques, the account appeared in Italian in 1536 and again in 1550, this time as part of Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Delle navigationi et viaggi; abridged and translated, it was then included in Richard Eden’s Decades of the newe worlde (1555) and History of Travayle (1577), eventually finding its way into Samuel Purchas’s Pilgrimes (1625).¹³ By and large, though, the notoriety of palang piercing in early modern Europe was the combined effect of texts ranging from Andrés de Urdaneta’s “Relación del viaje de … García de Loaisa à las islas de la Especería” (ca. 1535) to Francesco Carletti’s Ragionamenti del mio viaggio attorno al mondo (ca. 1606; pub. 1701). While often covering much of the same ground as the Relazione, these sources made clear that practices of genital piercing were not circumscribed to Cebu and neighboring Mactan, but rather distributed throughout the Philippines and beyond. The Suffolk gentleman Francis Pretty, who visited the region with Thomas Cavendish in 1588, saw palangs on Capul Island, even obtaining a specimen “from a sonne of one of the kings which was of the age of 10 yeeres, [and] did weare the same in his privie member.”¹⁴ The Portuguese factor Gabriel Rebelo observed similar piercings in the Moluccas, the Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo located them in Sulawesi, and the Jesuit missionary Francisco Ignacio Alcina reported them in use among Cambodians, Malays, and Bengalis.¹⁵

As the palang’s geographical scope dilated, so did the amount of detail made available to European readerships. In the Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535–50), Fernández de Oviedo characterized the implement as a “little tube” through which metal ticklers could be threaded as occasion demanded. For his part, Friar Juan de Medina described it as a “brass bolt” that held in place a device “resembling a St. Catherine’s Wheel with the points blunted.”¹⁶ According to Antonio de Morga and Francisco Ignacio Alcina, the spur-like implement was worn just above the glans, and was known among locals as a “sagra” or “sacra.”¹⁷ An especially detailed account of the piercing can be found in the Boxer Codex, a lavishly illustrated manuscript datable to the last decade of the sixteenth century. Presumably compiled for Philippine governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas, or for his son and successor, Don Luis, this ethnological compendium surveyed the entire stretch between Borneo and Japan, passing through China and the Philippines.¹⁸ Although the manuscript contains little that was new or original —much of the Philippine material, for instance, has been traced to earlier sources such as Miguel de Loarca’s Tratado de las yslas Filipinas (1582) and Juan de Plasencia’s Costumbre de los Tagalos (1589)—several passages suggest that the writer “was either a keener observer or had spent more time with the [native] people than his contemporaries.”¹⁹ The close of the section entitled “Constumbres y usos, serimonias y ritos de Bisayas” (Customs, traditions, ceremonies, and rites of the Visayas) is one of those passages: it details what a “sacra” looked like, describes how it was used, and complements this description with a life-size illustration of the device, drawn in the folio’s margin and illuminated in costly gold leaf (Figure 1):

The men place and commonly carry on their genital members certain wheels or rings with round spurs—similar in shape to the one [drawn] in the page’s margin—that are made of lead or brass and sometimes of gold. The round part of the wheel or ring has two holes, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note on Quotations and Translations
• Introduction
• 1. Perverse Implantations
• 2. The Erotic Politics of Os Lusíadas
• 3. Discipline and Love: Linschoten and the Estado da Índia
• 4. Polygamy and the Arts of Reduction
• 5. The Ideology of Interracial Romance
• 6. English Whiteness and the End of Romance
• Notes
• Bibligraphy
• Index
• Acknowledgments