The New Anthropology of Sexuality

Abstract

Popular images of our discipline often feature a focus on sexuality as one of the defining elements of anthropology. These impressions are only partly true, because there have been substantial periods of time when relatively little was written on the topic. Nonetheless, sexuality has been an intellectual concern of the anthropological tradition since the Age of the Enlightenment. It was involved in the formation of representations about in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and was also crucial in the construction of images of difference within metropolitan societies. The questioning of such representations has formed an important part of the modern and postmodern history of anthropology.In our recent book, Irregular Connections, we traced the appearances and disappearances of sexuality in the history of anthropology in Britain and North America. Ideas of sexuality played a critical role in the formation of the fictions of primitive which underpinned many of the evolutionary schemata of the 19th century. In the late evolutionary period Edward Westermarck (1906-08 vol. II) attacked ideas of primitive promiscuity. He also discussed homosexuality in Morocco and concluded that homosexual desire could be culturally acquired. In the late 1920s Malinowski (1987) and Mead (1928) showed how the Trobrianders and Samoans offered a model of premarital heterosexual freedom which Westerners might-with due caution-wish to emulate. In the 1930s Isaac Schapera (1966) and Raymond Firth (1957) discussed sexual behaviour among the Tswana and the Tikopia. Then for about 40 years sexuality retreated from centre stage in our discipline, because anthropologists sought scientific respectability and therefore eschewed topics which were personal, not serious and uneasily transcended the nature-culture boundary.In the middle of the 1970s the anthropology of sexuality came out of the cold. Its return marked ruptures with the past as well as continuities. In the postcolonial era anthropology's focus shifted from the periphery to the metropolis so that our sexualities as well as the sexualities of others came under scrutiny. In addition there was increasing attention to gays and lesbians within Western societies and to same sex sexualities and third genders elsewhere. These ethnographic and theoretical trends reflected the convergence of many changes and dispositions: the personal positioning of the ethnographer in an era which no longer denied that ethnographers participated in the social fields they described; the advent in practice of the feminist second wave and gay and lesbian liberation; new sexual prescriptions and proscriptions in both metropolis and postcolony; Lacanian and Foucauldian notions of gender and sexuality and latterly the emergence of queer theory.The connection between debates about morality, ideas of equality, hierarchy and difference and anthropological ideas about sexuality is not new. It dates back well before Mead and Malinowski to the first foreshadowings and the very early decades of our discipline. For example, in the 18th century Diderot, an anthropologically minded philosopher, idealized the sexual generosity of semi-fictional Polynesians in order to criticize the proprieties of his age (Diderot 1989). Edward Long and Charles White, both polygenists, propagated popular legends about the genitalia of blacks (Lyons and Lyons 2004:29-40). The theorists of mother-right-Morgan, Bachofen and McLennan-conjured promiscuity as the zero point of morality from which Victorian society had thankfully evolved (Lyons and Lyons 2004:73-80). Richard Burton praised polygamy in Utah and Southern Nigeria in order to express his disdain for Victorian prudery (Burton 1861). Westermarck, Ellis and Crawley criticized the notion of primitive in ways that may not have been accidental, because they were among the late Victorian and Edwardian critics of the sexual status quo (see Lyons and Lyons 2004:100-130). …