Male Sociability Research Articles

Race and Economic Justice in Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue

Michael Chabon’s novel Telegraph Avenue (2012) offers a feel-good narrative of interracial male sociability by way of its fictional Brokeland Records store. Yet at the same time, the novel purposefully evokes the dire economic consequences of America’s racialized history in cultural fields as diverse as midcentury urban redevelopment and the American music industry. Ultimately, however, the novel dodges the gnawing fact that its privileged interracial bonhomie avoids the harder truths of American racial and economic history. In gesturing toward but finally not grappling overtly with the devastating economic effects of American racial policy, Telegraph Avenue is symptomatic of a certain strain of American ideology that regularly reduces racism to a problem to be solved simply via diversity rather than through economic justice.

Delectable pleasures: Alcohol, Drinking and Subversive Masculinities in the Comedies of Etherege and Wycherley

The year 1660 not only meant the return of the English monarchy, but it also signalled the return of parties and feasts, of drinking and eating in excess after eleven years of Puritanical abstinence. Both the tavern and the banquet halls were prominent spaces of homosocial male sociability at the time, intended for male bonding, sex talk and discussion of sexual prowess, three essential stages in the manhood-acquiring process. This paper argues that Etherege and Wycherley, two of the most prominent Restoration playwrights, not only present us with instances of banqueting and drinking in their plays, but also that their representations of drinking subvert the manhood-affirming nature of alcohol and drinking, thus questioning and subverting established gender roles. Keywords: Gender performativity, Drinking, Alcohol, Masculinity, Sexuality, Homosocial relations.

Vulnerable Masculinities? Gender Identity Construction among Young Undocumented Sikh Migrants in Paris

This paper discusses the impact of immigration policies on the ways young undocumented Sikh migrants in Paris negotiate their masculinity. The current criminalization of labor migration from the global South in Europe is disrupting long established patterns of upward mobility through international migration, that entailed remitting money home, getting married and reuniting with one’s family in the host country and moving up the socio-professional ladder from low-paid jobs to self employment. Instead, the life of an increasing number of Sikh migrants in France and elsewhere is marked by irregular status and socio-economic vulnerability. In this context, undocumented Sikh migrants try to assert their gender identity in multiple ways, characterized by homosociality, the importance of manual labor, specific forms of male sociability marked by the cultivation of their body, while remaining firmly grounded in a Sikh/Panjabi religious universe through seva (voluntary service) and gurdwara attendance.

Antidepressant exposure reduces body size, increases fecundity and alters social behavior in the short-lived killifish Nothobranchius furzeri

Social and mating behavior are fundamental fitness determinants in fish. Although fish are increasingly exposed to pharmaceutical compounds that may alter expression of such behavior, potential effects are understudied. Here, we examine the impact of lifelong exposure to two concentrations (0.7 and 5.3 μg/L) of the antidepressant fluoxetine on fecundity and social behavior (i.e. sociability and male-male aggression) in the turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. When exposed to the highest concentration of fluoxetine (5.3 μg/L), fish were smaller at maturation but they more frequently engaged in mating. In addition, in both fluoxetine treatments females roughly doubled their overall fecundity while egg fertilization rates were the same for exposed and unexposed fish. Although aggression of male fish was not impacted by fluoxetine exposure, exposed male fish (5.3 μg/L) spent more time in the proximity of a group of conspecifics, which implies an increased sociability in these individuals. Overall, the results of this study indicate that exposure to fluoxetine may result in disrupted male sociability, increased mating frequency and an increased reproductive output in fish populations.

Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts by Daniel Siemens

Reviewed by: Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts by Daniel Siemens Katrin Paehler Stormtroopers: A New History of Hitler's Brownshirts. By Daniel Siemens. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. xli + 459. Cloth $32.50. ISBN 978-0300196818. Daniel Siemens's comprehensive history of the SA is an impressive achievement that fills a major lacuna. Deeply researched, finely contextualized, and eminently readable, Siemens destabilizes the traditional historiography of the SA, which sees the organization's influence wane after the so-called Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934. He shows that the SA fulfilled numerous important roles thereafter—at home and abroad, in peace and in war—and investigates the organization's "long-term effect on large numbers of Germans living in the Third Reich, an effect that lasted even longer than Nazi rule" (xxiii). Framed by an excellent introduction and a powerful conclusion, the book is divided into four parts of unequal length. In the first part, Siemens focuses on the history of the SA before 1933, discussing its development from its inception to a social movement, as well as its organizational and political history. A "community of action" based on loyalty and commitment, the SA gave "political orientation, job opportunities, and diverse outlets for male sociability" to young men in search of worth, belonging, and power when male identity seemed under modernity's attack (331). Siemens investigates SA violence, showing its communicative aspects, and integrates the development and the role of the SA into the broader study of everyday [End Page 646] violence at the time. It is, indeed, important to show in detail that the growth of the SA, its activism, and its finely calibrated provocations—protected, nolens volens, by the Weimar police—undermined Germans' trust in the state. The book's second part concerns the violent and hard to control heyday of the SA in 1933–1934 and "the forms and aims of [its] parapolice violence." Siemens is particularly interested in the ways in which "SA violence was embedded in the political transformation of Germany from a democratic to a dictatorial state" (xxxviii)—the communicative aspect of the SA's violence—and how individual SA men tried to make sense of their activities. The chapters add much to our understanding of the establishment of the Nazi state and its most violently active—or actively violent—supporters. However, their expected reward was not forthcoming; instead, this chapter of the SA's history ended with the murder of Ernst Röhm and other SA leaders, seemingly leaving the organization in shambles. In the third part of the book, Siemens tackles the least understood and least studied years of the SA. He shows that between 1934 and 1945 the SA was a heterogeneous mass organization that reached far beyond the strictly faithful and significantly contributed to the Nazification and militarization of society—for example, by infiltrating bastions of hometown middle-class respectability such as riding clubs and shooting associations. He discusses the paramilitary tasks the SA took on during Germany's prewar expansion; its settlement plans for Eastern Europe; the SA's wartime role in the occupied territories, as well in stabilizing the home front; and the role and tasks of those high-ranking SS generals appointed to diplomatic posts in southeastern Europe at the very moment that the Final Solution began to take shape. The SA that emerges in this account is anything but unimportant. In the book's last part, Siemens explicates how the conception that came to define the historiography—namely that the SA lost its importance in 1934 and filled no relevant role thereafter, a view he masterfully dismantles in Part 3—came into being as a juridical defense in the immediate postwar era and served its former members well. Indeed, it allowed many of its former members to recast their wartime activities as having been restricted to an organization of minimal importance and remember fondly not the organization's violence but its alleged anticapitalist and egalitarian nature—while ignoring its restriction to the racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft, that the SA itself had helped violently create and maintain. The book's great strength is its focus on 1934...

Street Textuality: Socialism, Masculinity, and Urban Belonging in Tanzania's Pulp Fiction Publishing Industry, 1975–1985

AbstractFrom the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, a network of young urban migrant men created an underground pulp fiction publishing industry in the city of Dar es Salaam. As texts that were produced in the underground economy of a city whose trajectory was increasingly charted outside of formalized planning and investment, these novellas reveal more than their narrative content alone. These texts were active components in the urban social worlds of the young men who produced them. They reveal a mode of urbanism otherwise obscured by narratives of decolonization, in which urban belonging was constituted less by national citizenship than by the construction of social networks, economic connections, and the crafting of reputations. This article argues that pulp fiction novellas of socialist era Dar es Salaam are artifacts of emergent forms of male sociability and mobility. In printing fictional stories about urban life on pilfered paper and ink, and distributing their texts through informal channels, these writers not only described urban communities, reputations, and networks, but also actually created them.

Las relaciones entre la representación hegemónica de lo masculino y las subjetivaciones. Género y sexualidades en los relatos autobiográficos de integrantes del Colectivo Varones Anti-Patriarcales (Mendoza, 2013)

This article is about the relations between the hegemonic representation of masculinity and the subjectivities. It is addressed through the analysis of autobiographical accounts of members of the Collective of Anti-Patriarchal Men, Mendoza 2013.The notions used in the analysis are those of Gender, in terms of the processes of identification, and sexuality/ies.The findings indicate that these subjects developed disidentifications with the hegemonic model of masculinity from the experiences of violence as an intrinsic feature of male sociability. Sexualities have an important place in the identification processes, so that gay and straight reported having different paths.Finally, collective reflection and political practice demonstrated as part of a process of de-identification of hegemony and proposes an alternative (counter- -hegemonic?) masculinity.

OCCASIONAL POLITENESS AND GENTLEMEN'S LAUGHTER IN 18thC ENGLAND

ABSTRACTThis article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.

Imagining the Cockney University: Humorous Poetry, the March of Intellect, and the Periodical Press, 1820–1860

This essay attempts to read the aesthetically and culturally unambitious to be found in the newly proliferating cheap illustrated journals from the 1830s to the 1850s as a significant form of social history. This is not to say that diversionary or comic is necessary simple in its formulations, but rather to raise the larger question of how far commercially successful and relatively poems and lyrics, many of them deriving from performances taking place elsewhere within culture, might offer access to an important strand of historical understanding. In order to give shape to this investigation the focus is on poems published in magazines in this period that discuss a single major historical topic, the of intellect, that set of socio-economic, cultural, and scientific changes that underpinned the transformations in the class structure and economic base of British society in the first half of the nineteenth century. (1) Central to these transformations was the democratization of print culture and the acknowledgement that mass literacy and access to the printed word was an inevitable consequence of, and a major force in structuring, the march of intellect. (2) A discussion of the ways in which a major socio-political phenomenon was evaluated and analyzed in the published in literature between 1820 and 1860 appears at first sight a relatively straightforward undertaking. The complexities and resonances of the terms used here--especially humorous verse and periodical literature--in relation to the print culture of the late Regency and early Victorian period, however, render the task anything but simple. The verses gathered here for discussion derive from a wide variety of print cultural sources--serialized song books, part issue collections of lyrics derived from the theater as well as publications more readily identifiable as periodicals--and thus expose the generic and formal instability that characterized the marketplace for comic literature in this period. They were consequently written in a variety of forms that were as likely to derive from the needs of the theatre or the concert room as the demands of a magazine editor. They were as likely to adopt the formal characteristics of a broadside ballad or a theatrical monologue as any more conventionally literary kind of poetry. Accordingly, it is important to begin by asking a number of fundamental questions that recognize the origins of these verses in print culture. An immediate difficulty is that of ascribing such lyrics to their appropriate cultural level, a question that cannot be addressed simply by recourse to an analysis of literary quality. Are we discussing poetry or verse, or lyrics, or songs, or even doggerel? In any case are the songs and recitations that feed into literature at this time, despite the often crudely produced and clumsily illustrated small scale publications they appear in, easily located as down-market productions aimed at vulgar though hardly culturally dispossessed readers? How far is the popular and doggerel that filled many a page in magazines aimed at middlebrow readers truly vernacular? How widely accessible was the framework of cultural allusions invoked by even the simplest poems? And, given that punning was a central mechanism for the activation of a and satirical social vision in the Regency period, what levels of linguistic skills would a reader have needed to decode the verbal humor of the printed version of a song that had its origins and original performances in the supper rooms and penny gaffs of London? Recognition of the origins of in songs and lyrics first written for the concert room or other occasions of male sociability raises another set of interpretative difficulties to do with performativity. How far can the tone of a song/poem originally offered to an audience by means of performance be read off from a printed text that has been separated out from its performative occasion? …

Mary C. Neuburger. Balkan Smoke: Tobacco and the Making of Modern Bulgaria.

After laying down Balkan Smoke, this lifelong non-smoker longed for a cigarette from a Bulgartabak packet. Mary C. Neuburger's brilliant new book recounts the social life of tobacco in the past two centuries. In her hands tobacco becomes a surprisingly transparent and focused lens reaching through the dense smoke at the contours of Bulgaria's political, economic, social, and cultural history. From the sixteenth century, the Ottoman coffee-house had been a locus of male sociability for Muslims, but in the nineteenth century it also became a meeting ground for Christians and Jews. The Bulgarian kafene (coffee-house) and kruchma (tavern), both filled with smoke, were places of leisure and idleness as well as hotbeds of political agitation and intellectual ferment. By the end of the century, despite the general economic crisis and the fall of grain and cotton prices, the global tobacco addiction stimulated the expansion of tobacco cultivation, processing, and commerce both in the Ottoman Empire and the autonomous Bulgarian principality. Until the Balkan wars, Bulgaria's growing production was satisfying primarily local needs and following the traditional Ottoman trade routes. The Balkan wars and especially World War I revolutionized tobacco production and consumption. Not only did Bulgaria's tobacco industry expand meteorically, it reoriented itself decisively toward Austria and Germany, forging new networks of foreign dependency.

Lincoln's Ladder to the Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit. By Guy C.Fraker. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 328 pp.

Lincoln's Ladder to Presidency: The Eighth Judicial Circuit. By Guy C. Fraker. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 328 pp. The key word here is circuit. During 1840s and 1850s, bevy of lawyers, state's attorney, and judge itinerated twice year through Eighth Judicial Circuit in central Illinois, going from courthouse to courthouse to address accumulated backlog of litigation. At its heyday between 1847 and 1853, circuit included 14 counties--ten thousand square miles of prairie between Indiana state line and Illinois River, a vast sea of tall grass stretching as far as eye could see (p. 10). This kind of work threw men together for many weeks at time. At primitive inns en route, they battled insects, slept two and three to bed, and made terms with less than appetizing fare, generally served at long table at which everyone--the judges, lawyers, parties, witnesses, even bailed defendants--all sat together and swapped tales long into night (p. 42). The court proceedings became a popular spectator sport and some participants gained celebrity status (p. 41). Many endured circuit, because they needed fees it generated. But others also enjoyed male sociability, equivalent of a long fishing trip (p. 43). This was especially case with young lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, who kept his colleagues entertained with a seemingly endless inventory of jokes and anecdotes (p. 43). While most of his colleagues returned home on weekends, Lincoln took advantage of his time on road to make contacts and build personal relationships with local residents. He knew, or appeared to know, everybody we met, name of tenant of every farm-house, and owner of every plat of ground, one visiting newspaper reporter discovered (p. 47). Law provided Lincoln with way to make living and setting in which he might realize his political ambitions. The district he represented in Congress between 1847 and 1849 overlapped with Eighth Circuit. But there was nothing inevitable about astonishing sequel. Lincoln's next elective office was president of United States. How in world did that come about ? Guy Fraker traces convergence of several factors. We now know, of course, that Lincoln was endowed with remarkable gifts, but what also mattered great deal was the place where he chose to use those gifts (p. …

In the company of cowbirds, Molothrus ater ater: Robust patterns of sociability predict reproductive performance.

Many species exhibit behavioral tendencies that are stable over time and across contexts. Robust variation in sociability, or the propensity to approach others, is widespread across the vertebrates. Nonetheless, the influence of sociability on reproductive performance is largely unknown. In this study, we explore the relationship between sociability and reproductive behavior in flocks of Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater ater). In spring 2011, we separated birds into three large aviaries based on the number of approaches they initiated and received during fall 2010. Females were separated into high, intermediate, and low sociable flocks, while male sociability was spread evenly across the three flocks. Here we report for the first time that different patterns of social approach tendencies in the fall predicted reproductive behavior in the spring. The high sociable flocks contained more laying females who produced more eggs in contrast to the other flocks. Male courtship behavior was comparable across the three flocks. These findings suggest that robust variation in sociability is an important factor in reproductive performance.

Gender at Stake: The Role of Eighteenth-Century London Clubs in Shaping A New Model of English Masculinity

The English club, as an arena of exclusive male sociability, contributed to the refashioning of a new model of politeness, which did not posit refinement and masculinity as opposites. Some of the main aims of clubs were to preserve their members’ masculine identity and to reinforce their cohesion by developing a strong male affiliation network. The success of clubs in England enabled to establish a unique model of male sociability, proving that being an Englishman did not imply being unsociable and rough. The club was an exclusive social space, where a man can perform his masculinity through his activities, his conversations and his behaviour. The visibility of gender and social performance induced the respect and support of his fellow clubmen and could determine a man’s future social and political success. The eighteenth-century club thus played a crucial role in the process of gender identification and of social recognition. This article shows that masculinity was a social construction as well as a social performance. Being a man obeyed gendered norms, which corresponded to gendered social manners and practices. During the first half of the eighteenth century, the ideal of the gentleman served as a means to shape the Englishman’s masculine identity, but it revealed the limits and the paradoxes of politeness, thus questioning the French model.

The Hell-fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies by Evelyn Lord

263 such an act of self-immersion.’’ Readers who like unsettling experiences will enjoy this book. Lengthy quotations of primary sources, which function both as a tribute to the author’s interest in blogging and as an enhancement to the work’s conversational feel, are also strengths. Paradoxically, they ground discussion. Readers who want a wild ride into the world of eighteenth-century breeding, or those who do not mind using the book’s Index to steer their way through discussions, will not be disappointed . Pam Lieske Kent State University at Trumbull EVELYN LORD. The Hell-fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies. New Haven & London: Yale, 2008. Pp. xxix ⫹ 247. $32.50. Ms. Lord casts a skeptical eye on the lurid descriptions of previous writers in order to demythologize, to sift fact from fiction, but in the end she leaves us no better informed. We may, in fact, wind up a few steps back. The first sign of danger is Ms. Lord’s statement that she will not embark on ‘‘a search for the truth about the clubs,’’ which she says is impossible, given the lack of evidence. Instead, she will offer ‘‘an approximation of the truth’’ based on her interpretation of the available sources and ‘‘modern vision.’’ This sounds like an excuse for not digging deeply into primary sources. Ms. Lord makes much of the surviving minutes of the apparently colorful meetings of the Knights of the Beggar’s Benison, but rather less than she should of the fact that they are an 1892 ‘‘transcript’’ of destroyed originals that could well have been cooked up by a Victorian with a taste for the salacious. She briefly mentions that a reference to Fanny Hill (1750, under that title) in the proceedings for 1737 may be a later interpolation , but that does not prevent her from saying on the previous page that a manuscript copy of Cleland’s novel probably found its way, via East India Company officers, to the Beggar’s Benison in Scotland in the 1730s. The approximate truth clearly works both ways. This theory of history allows Ms. Lord to move from the frequently repeated allegations of the Duke of Wharton’s participation in a hell-fire club in the 1720s to statements that the members of such clubs did this, that, and the other. What clubs? What members ? She has established nothing: she merely rehashes the old stuff, with no more critical involvement than the addition of ‘‘allegedly’’ or ‘‘reputedly’’ to the tired old tales, or a brief disclaimer that it might all be fictional. If it is fictional , the historian’s job is to say why and present the best evidence of what actually did happen, or else not bother. She (correctly) concludes there was no actual Satanism, but puts it in the title of her book anyway. There were ‘‘many links’’ between rakish clubs of the seventeenth century and those in the next, but no actual evidence is provided, and a few lines later she tells us that in any event ‘‘the links may be coincidental.’’ A coincidental link is no link. Ms. Lord loves to ask unanswered questions (‘‘Was Bubb Dodington just a chubby eccentric with a taste for the exotic , or a serious politician and public figure?’’; ‘‘Was the Kingdom of Dalkey a front for revolutionary activities, or simply an excuse for a good day out?’’). This is no substitute for analysis. The book contains a good deal of filler, for example the potted biographies of Sir Francis Dashwood, the Earl of Sand- 264 wich, George Bubb Dodington and John Wilkes, which are not used in any significant way to develop conclusions about the clubs they belonged to or the nature of that activity. At best, Ms. Lord asserts, ‘‘boys will be boys.’’ There is also no real engagement with recent scholarship on masculinity and male sociability in the eighteenth century. Members of rakish groups may not have been acting ‘‘against accepted social and moral norms’’ as much as conforming to their own expectations of gentlemanly leisure activity. The book is ostensibly about ‘‘hell-fire’’ clubs, but is often just about clubs (the Beefsteaks); and sometimes not even about clubs at all...

Manly Matters: The Theatricality and Sociability of Beards in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio and Sixteenth-Century Italy

Beards, both real and fake, acquire a special status in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio as symbolically charged objects that reveal not only much about the characters and their functions within the play, but also much about social norms and expectations regarding the performance of male sociability in sixteenth-century Italy. To this end, understanding the social and cultural context within which Italian men grew and cared for their beards during the period will help explain the meaning of a unique feature of Bruno's play, while examining Bruno's play will in its turn help dramatize more concretely a number of pervasive social and cultural anxieties about masculine self-presentation in Bruno's time. This essay brings together literary and cultural history within the broader context of gender and body studies of Renaissance Italy, in particular, and, more generally, of the European Renaissance.

Consumo, colecionismo e identidade dos bibliófilos: uma etnografia em dois sebos de Porto Alegre

No presente artigo, buscamos desvendar o comportamento de consumo dos colecionadores de livros. Por meio do método etnográfico, percorremos o universo dos bibliófilos que circulam por dois sebos de Porto Alegre. O trabalho de campo revelou aspectos que extrapolam a visão funcionalista utilitária da aquisição de bens, evidenciando sociabilidades e reações emocionais ligadas ao consumo. Os referenciais de comportamento do consumidor e da antropologia do consumo nos permitiram acessar algumas particularidades dos bibliófilos, que incluem sociabilidades masculinas, consumo obsessivo, construção e reforço de uma identidade por meio do consumo. A principal contribuição do estudo reside na análise de um universo consumidor com características extremas, o que provê subsídios para a compreensão de alguns elementos do consumo na sociedade contemporânea, notadamente no que tange às propriedades simbólicas dos bens e os processos de apropriação e personalização das mercadorias quando da sua passagem do domínio da produção para o domínio do consumo.

Plebeian Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880-1930

Plebeian Masculinity and Sexual Comedy in Buenos Aires, 1880–1930 Pablo Ben University of Chicago In describing late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires, Argentine historians often invoke the category of "progress." Basing their analysis on the immense economic and urban growth of the period, scholars usually deploy this category without much nuance. While this growth wrought profound social transformations, to be sure, the historical research framed by a one-dimensional conception of progress has overlooked key aspects of the period. A major topic usually occluded is the living conditions and cultural traits of the urban lower strata. This essay deals with one aspect of that topic—plebeian masculinity and sexuality—and demonstrates how demography, the job market, and family structure shaped the emergence of spaces of male sociability. It was in these spaces that cultural negotiations of masculinity took place through competitions involving the male sexual capacity to subjugate others. The recent historiography on gender and sexuality in Argentina—that is, since the end of dictatorship in 1983—has attempted to explore how the elite perceived plebeian Buenos Aires as a threat to the social order. Against the background of a growing literature on the social control of the poor at the turn of the century, various studies have explored the state's perceptions of gender and sexuality as well as its attempts to regulate them.1 [End Page 436] However, few of these studies have paid much attention to plebeian social and cultural life.2 Scholars have tended either to ignore this topic altogether or to imply simply that the popular classes internalized elite norms. This essay departs from existent historiography through an analysis of male plebeian sexuality in turn-of-the-century Buenos Aires. In what follows, sexuality is analyzed in the context of the broader historical transformations of the period. I argue that plebeian sexuality was to an important degree independent of elite control and representation. Although the positivist intelligentsia represented plebeian sexuality as a pathological obstacle to national development, the state did not create institutions capable of affecting sexuality in significant ways until the 1930s, with the exception of its regulation of female prostitution.3 The sources that receive the most attention in the following analysis are drawn from the work of Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, a German anthropologist who came to Argentina in 1897. He was employed by the Museo de Ciencias Naturales at the Universidad de La Plata in the capital of the province of Buenos Aires. La Plata is located approximately thirty miles south of the city of Buenos Aires. During his time in the country, Lehmann-Nitsche published multiple studies, and he became a leading local scientist.4 His work reflected the interest of contemporary German intellectuals in the topic of "primitive sexuality." Lehmann-Nitsche was in contact with the renowned German sexologist Iwan Bloch and with a group of researchers who published the journal Anthropophyteia (a Greek word meaning "primitive human sexual instinct," what the Germans called Urtrieb).5 In order to explore the Urtrieb of the popular classes of the River Plate, Lehmann-Nitsche gathered an extensive collection of orally transmitted poems, riddles, tales, and sayings. This collection was published in 1923 in the city of Leipzig under the pseudonym of Victor Borde. The majority of the entries [End Page 437] collected by Lehmann-Nitsche in the early 1900s were drawn from Buenos Aires. It is an extremely useful source for historians of the popular classes because Lehmann-Nitsche limited his work to a classification of literally transcribed plebeian expressions of sexuality. Yet historians have ignored this source despite its value for the exploration of plebeian representations, and, surprisingly, only book collectors and journalists have shown interest in Lehmann-Nitsche's text. The book by Lehmann-Nitsche is useful not only because he transcribed orally transmitted expressions but also because of the nature of such oral material. The cultural expressions contained in it depended on...

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

Firewater, Desire, and the Militiamen’s Christmas Eve in San Geroónimo, Baja Verapaz, 1892

Sociabilidad en Buenos Aires: Hombres, honor y cafés, 1862–1910

A round of drinks, an angry challenge, a flash of steel: these are the central motifs of this pioneering study of male sociability in modernizing Buenos Aires. Waxing nostalgia for a vanished “mythology of knives” and duels, Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, “a song of heroism has been lost in sordid police reports.” Digging deep into those very police reports—the first research to do so—Sandra Gayol has produced a theoretically astute and empirically grounded account of the emergence of an urban café world. In contrast to a poetic tradition that has tied male violence almost exclusively to a criollo past, Gayol stresses the importance of immigrants and modernity, tracing the broader patterns and rituals of conviviality in a rapidly changing city. One tantalizing strand of her analysis traces how women, who had held an important place in the earlier pulperías, were gradually driven out of the space of the new cafés. Gayol tells of male friendships forged and broken in these new spaces, in the sharing of drinks, the strumming of guitars, the playing of cards and—at times—the baring of knives.Writing with playful verve, Gayol pays close attention to language and makes productive use of theorists ranging from Erving Goffman to Pierre Bourdieu. Extensive and well-chosen source quotes add depth and flavor to Gayol’s account, and she puts those quotes to good analytical purposes, drawing insights and methods from the “discursive turn” of recent cultural history. Yet the roots of her project lie more in traditional social history. Gayol mined police records to assemble a data set of 1114 incidents over 50 years. This data enables her to speak of patterns, adding quantitative depth to the qualitative richness of her analysis. It allows her to make some striking observations—for instance, that hardly any fights (4 percent) were over women (p. 205). Yet this approach also has its limits: we learn little about these men before or after the incidents, save their age, nationality and profession—and the arguments they offered in their defense. Gayol rightly critiques earlier studies of class and ethnicity for neglecting the specificity of social interactions in cafés. But the richness of her analysis repeatedly leads back out into the street, towards broader questions which require examining other types of sources.This is not a flaw of her work, but a sign of how answering the questions she has posed will require further research. Consider her treatment of honor: towards the end of the book, Gayol makes the argument that fights for honor served more to flatten than to reinforce hierarchy (among men) in the rapidly changing city. The point is intriguing, and seems reasonable on its face, but it is only weakly supported by the evidence presented in this book. A more comprehensive account would demand looking more fully at interactions between popular and elite sociability. It would draw not only on European and U.S. studies, as Gayol does, but also on the recent boom of work on gender and honor elsewhere in Latin America. But it would also build on the fundamental advances made by Gayol here, and by anthropologist Eduardo Archetti in his recent work, in turning masculine identity into a key area of inquiry in Latin American cultural history.

Mother‐Son Intimacy and the Dual View of Woman in Andalusia: Analysis Through Oral Poetry

Mediterranean ethnography is coming of age. Following the comparative thrust introduced by Davis (1977) and Herzfeld (1980, 1984), Mediterraneanists are identifying many provocative areas conducive to crossnational research. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of sexual politics. Receiving most attention is the honor/shame syndrome (Pitt-Rivers 1977; Herzfeld 1980), but there are many other striking parallels in domestic organization, sexual morality, and in sex role and gender relations (Boissevain 1979; Saunders 1981). One theme stands out here as a near universal in the Mediterra-