Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology) - Softcover

Lyons, Andrew P.; Lyons, Harriet D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080328036X ISBN 13: 9780803280366

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2004

Synopsis

Irregular Connections traces the anthropological study of sex from the eighteenth century to the present, focusing primarily on social and cultural anthropology and the work done by researchers in North America and Great Britain. Andrew P. and Harriet D. Lyons argue that the sexuality of those whom anthropologists studied has been conscripted into Western discourses about sex, including debates about prostitution, homosexuality, divorce, premarital relations, and hierarchies of gender, class, and race.

 

Because sex is the most private of activities and often carries a high emotional charge, it is peculiarly difficult to investigate. At times, such as the late 1920s and the last decade of the twentieth century, sexuality has been a central concern of anthropologists and focal in their theoretical formulations. At other times the study of sexuality has been marginalized. The anthropology of sex has sometimes been one of the main faces that anthropology presented to the public, often causing resentment within the discipline.

 

Irregular Connections discusses several individuals who have played a significant role in the anthropological study of sexuality, including Sir Richard Burton, Havelock Ellis, Edward Westermarck, Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead, George Devereux, Robert Levy, Gilbert Herdt, Stephen O. Murray, and Esther Newton. Synthesizing a wealth of information from different anthropological traditions, the authors offer a seamless history of the anthropology of sex as it has been practiced and conceptualized in North America and Great Britain.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew P. Lyons is an associate professor of anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Harriet D. Lyons is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Irregular Connections

A History of Anthropology and SexualityBy Andrew P. Lyons Harriet D. Lyons

University of Nebraska Press

Copyright © 2004 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8036-6

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................xAcknowledgments..........................................................................xiSeries Editors' Introduction.............................................................xiiiIntroduction.............................................................................11. Three Images of Primitive Sexuality and the Definition of Species.....................202. Sex and the Refuge for Destitute Truth................................................513. Matriarchy, Marriage by Capture, and Other Fantasies..................................734. The Reconstruction of "Primitive Sexuality" at the Fin de Sicle......................1005. "Old Africa Hands"....................................................................1316. Malinowski as "Reluctant Sexologist"..................................................1557. Margaret Mead, the Future of Language, and Lost Opportunities.........................1858. The "Silence".........................................................................2169. Sex in Contemporary Anthropology......................................................277Conclusions and Unfinished Business......................................................324Notes....................................................................................333References Cited.........................................................................349Index....................................................................................385

Chapter One

Three Images of Primitive Sexuality and the Definition of Species

Three persistent images of primitive sexuality emerged in the 18th century. Each of them had political as well as scientific resonances. Each of them was linked to the fact of miscegenation through processes of affirmation or denial. The politics of miscegenation (and/or interracial copulation) appear to be linked to controversies concerning the definition of the biological concept of species.

It was at this time that an image of Polynesia emerged that has endured and is still resonant. Tahitians were said to occupy a paradise of natural luxury and sexual liberty. This positive image was not uncontested, particularly by Evangelical Christians. Nonetheless, it distinguished the Tahitians from other non-Western groups. Africans of both sexes were portrayed as lascivious and bestial. The Hottentot, often racially distinguished from the Negro, was viewed as the symbol of the worst form of sexual excess. The appearance and size of the genitals in sub-Saharan Africans and African Americans was the visible index of moral degeneration. The sexuality of South American Indians, Lapps, and Inuit was also depicted in negative fashion. It too was excessive. In contrast, some North American groups such as the Iroquois supposedly lacked sexual ardor. Given that this too was a departure from the European norm, such continence was also seen as unnatural. Underlying all three images was a notion of a natural, biological sexuality. Where and among whom it existed was another matter. If savagery might diminish or exaggerate it, civilization was said to repress it, for better or worse. The happy mean, according to some Enlightenment thinkers, was to be found in the newly discovered South Seas.

Roy Porter (1990) has drawn our attention to the significance of early writings about Tahiti. He discusses the eyewitness accounts of Samuel Wallis, Phillibert Commerson, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, and Georg Forster as well as Denis Diderot's philosophical commentary Le Supplment au voyage de Bougainville. Our examination of Diderot's Supplment reveals that there is continuity between some of the earliest portrayals of South Seas societies and the scientific monographs of 20th-century anthropology.

After Wallis's vessel arrived there in 1767, Tahiti was visited three more times in the next five years (by Bougainville and subsequently two voyages of Captain Cook). The various crews were entertained by scantily clad Tahitian ladies who exceeded contemporary European standards of beauty. The cost of this entertainment was cheap. Because there was no iron in Tahiti, nails were a welcome item of exchange. Tahitian males were not loath to share their daughters and even their wives with the European newcomers. Bougainville observed that in Tahiti there was an abundance of natural resources and that commonality in both property and sexual partners was part of the idyll. Banks indicated that both he and other members of Cook's 1769 crew amply enjoyed the sexual opportunities they were offered (Porter 1990).

There were dissenting opinions. Cook noted that Tahitian marriages were stable, stating that the women who presented themselves to the crew were from the lower orders of Tahitian society and were in every way comparable to the prostitutes who abounded in English port cities (Porter 1990). The equation of primitive women and prostitutes is one we shall discuss later. However, Cook's aim was to avoid exoticism by remarking that not all Tahitian women were comparable to prostitutes. For the same reason, he expressed his doubts that there could be common ownership of property in any society that relied on individual labor in horticulture. The Evangelical Forster, who was also an officer on Cook's ship, was distressed by the morality both of the Tahitians and of the European visitors who had taken advantage of them.

Diderot's Supplment relies on Bougainville's account rather than Cook's. It also relies a little on Plutarch and Plato, who may be presumed not to have visited Tahiti. It contains a dialogic commentary by two individuals, A and B, into which are inserted two set pieces. One consists of a speech supposedly made by a Tahitian elder bidding an angry adieu to the chef des brigands (Bougainville) and his crew (Diderot 1989:589-595), who have corrupted Tahitian innocence and communalism with Western notions of property and colonial territory:

We follow the pure instinct of Nature, and you have tried to erase its mark from our souls. Here everything belongs to all, and you have preached to us some unspeakable distinction between thine and mine. Our daughters and our wives are shared in common; you have partaken in this privilege with us and have begun to kindle unknown passions among them. We are free, and behold! you have buried the deed of our future slavery beneath our own land.... Were a Tahitian someday to disembark on your shores and were he to carve on one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees, "This country belongs to the inhabitants of Tahiti," what would you think? (Diderot 1989:591, our translation)

The second set piece is an imagined dialogue between a Tahitian sage, Orou, and the ship's chaplain (aumnier) that concerns what we may call the cultural relativity of morals (Diderot 1989:599-613, 617-627). The chaplain is appalled by the offer of Orou's daughters and wife, although he is quickly drawn into a sexual relationship with the youngest daughter. His defense of Christian morals is undermined by Orou's defense of Tahitian alternatives. The incident ends with the semiconversion of the chaplain, whose sexual encounters with the sage's wife and remaining two daughters are punctuated with cries of "Mais ma religion! Mais mon tat!" [But my religion! But my state!] (Diderot 1989:626). At one point, Orou expresses his moral indignation at the European custom of monogamous marriage for life. The chaplain has portrayed it as following the law of God, but the sage views it as contrary to nature to suppose that a free, thinking, sentient human could be made the property of his or her fellow being (Diderot 1989:604). Tahitian marriage is a terminable, consensual relationship:

The Chaplain: What is marriage like among you?

Orou: An agreement to live in the same hut and to lie in the same bed, so long as we are satisfied with the arrangement.

The Chaplain: And when you're dissatisfied?

Orou: We split. (Diderot 1989:609, our translation)

Subsequently, Orou challenges the necessity of an incest taboo, including not merely parent-child but also sibling incest, a stance that would have been as alien to the real Polynesians as it was to the imaginary chaplain (Diderot 1989:619-620).

Michle Duchet (1971) has appropriately remarked that Diderot's Supplment is a critique of French institutions, particularly the marriage laws and the role of the Catholic clergy, and that the Tahitians were merely a foil. While Diderot may thus be absolved of any genuine ethnographic intent, his and Bougainville's Tahitians were surely the adumbrations of Mead's Samoans, Malinowski's Trobrianders, the subjects of Gauguin's portraits, and countless other representations and fictions. Opposed to the paradisiacal image of Oceania is a counterimage of a verdant, subtropical Hell, the world of Somerset Maugham's Rain. The counterpart of these fictions is a Polynesia that has become the haunt of sometimes exploitative European males, who visit as voyagers, penetrators, or voyeurs.

Cornlius Jaenen (1982) has remarked that representations of North American Indian society in the 18th century often replicated "concepts and constructs" of the pre-Columbian as well as post-Columbian era. These included "the Terrestrial Paradise, the Golden Age, the Millennial Kingdom, the Monstrous Satanic World, the Utopian New World, the Chain of Being, etc." (Jaenen 1982:45). In Deconstructing America (1990) Peter Mason observes that 16th-century Europeans accommodated the strangeness and apparent incommensurability of the New World by means of preexistent representations concerning internal strangers and distant aliens. Commonly, these representations involved symbolic inversion, monstrosities, and liminal phenomena. They included elements of the medieval image of the witch, the wild man or woman, the madman, and the fool. The teratological tradition of Hesiod, Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, and John Mandeville was extended to the Americas, which found a new home for depleted humans with one eye, leg, or testicle or with no breasts and for phantasmagoric confusions such as the Blemmyae (who had no heads but had eyes on their shoulders), the Cynocephalae (dog-headed people), and others who mixed animal and human features. Ideas of inverted behavior (cannibalism, extravagant sexuality, or sexual depletion) are the correlates of bodily deformation. The existence of similar "ethnoanthropologies" among Amerindian peoples (e.g., accounts of the headless Ewaipanoma given to Sir Walter Raleigh by inhabitants of Guiana) added another layer to the creative invention of the New World. Mason argues persuasively that accounts of effeminate males, Amazons, and sexually voracious females and transgressive sexuality (incestuous copulation in the writings of Amerigo Vespucci, homosexuality in the writings of Oviedo, lesbianism in the illustrations to Theodor de Bry's America), which are common during this period, are fictions that interweave renewed mythologies and ethnoanthropologies. To Mason the "factuality" of these accounts is beyond, or almost beyond, the point. For us, what is significant is that over 300 years of culture contact these images may have softened but were hardly obliterated. By the 17th and 18th centuries, groups who had converted to Christianity were less likely to be viewed as devil worshipers and perverts. On the other hand, 18th-century images of degeneration were utilized to contradict paradisiacal and Utopian images. One specific image that persisted through this time was that of the effeminate, sexless Amerindian male.

Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, the prominent French savant and naturalist, was dismayed to find that his portrayal of North American Indians as weak, ignoble, and sexless savages was utilized to support anti-Utopian ideas of moral decline (rather than a more neutral notion of "degeneration" or alteration in type). His remarks about them in his Histoire naturelle (which appeared in several volumes between 1749 and 1788) were intended merely to demonstrate that "human nature was everywhere the same but there were racial or national differences because of such factors as climate, region, degrees of civility, government, or other accidental causes" (Jaenen 1982:49). The following is Jaenen's translation of the relevant text by Buffon:

For though the American savage be nearly of the same stature with men in polished societies, yet this is not sufficient exception to the general contraction of animated Nature throughout the whole Continent. In the savage, the organs of generation are feeble. He has no hair, no beard, no ardour for the female. Though nimbler than the European, because more accustomed to running, his strength is not so great. His sensations are less acute: and yet he is more cowardly and timid. He has no vivacity, no activity of mind.... Destroy his appetite for victuals and drink, and you will at once annihilate the active principle of all his movements; he remains, in stupid repose, on his limbs or couch for whole days. (Jaenen 1982:49)

The abb Guillaume Thomas Franois Raynal believed that the supposed sexual inadequacy of Amerindians was a sign of their immaturity, indeed, of the infancy of the continent (Jaenen 1982:51). Perhaps immaturity as a condition is preferable to degeneracy. William Byrd of Virginia spoke of their "Constitutions untainted by Lewdness" (Jordan 1969:162). Cornelius de Pauw announced that the Amerindian penis was smaller than that of Europeans (Jordan 1969:163).

One wonders if such a belief has any other basis than superstition and prejudice. One obvious explanation is the relative lack of facial hair among Amerindian males, to which Buffon indeed refers. Another is the strong sexual honor code that was manifest in many traditional North American cultures along with rules prescribing sexual abstinence for warriors in time of battle or for participants in some rituals. This resulted in a significant cultural difference: "Indians in eastern North America did not rape female captives; Europeans did" (Abler 1992:13). As William Smith noted in 1765, "No woman ... need fear violation of her honour" (quoted in Abler 1992:14). Ironically, it would appear that their failure to make sexual prey out of female war captives may have led European commentators to cast aspersions on the virility of Amerindian males!

Significantly, Winthrop Jordan remarks that, although white-Indian miscegenation in the American South may not have been as frequent as miscegenation between whites and blacks, "the entire interracial sexual complex did not pertain to the Indian" (Jordan 1969:163). Indeed, "of the various laws which penalized illicit miscegenation, none applied to Indians, and only North Carolina's (and Virginia's for a very brief period) prohibited intermarriage. On the contrary, several colonists were willing to allow, even advocate, intermarriage with the Indian - an unheard of proposition concerning Negroes" (Jordan 1969:163). The gist of Jordan's argument is that there is a correlation between the image of the Other's sexuality and attitudes and practices concerning miscegenation with that Other. Inasmuch as Tahiti was and still is a sexual Utopia for some Europeans and Tahitian standards of beauty appealed to them, the European attitude to miscegenation was positive. Because Native North Americans were viewed as sexually non-threatening, there was no bar to miscegenation. We shall discuss attitudes toward Africans and African Americans shortly.

We move from supposed deficiencies in male, heterosexual ardor to a related question, the presence (or absence) of what we might now call a "third gender" or "transgender phenomenon." Early reports of transvestism and/or homosexuality among Aztecs, Incas, and Cueva (Panama) and in various parts of South America are, quite simply, unreliable. Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo y Valds, the early-16th-century chronicler of the Spanish conquest, reported that the "lords and chieftains" of the Cueva kept young men who were transvestites, household servants, and passive homosexuals. Such individuals were the object of derision (Trexler 1995:90, 91). Oviedo also reported that same-sex relations between males were common throughout the new Spanish territories (Trexler 1995:1, 2). The existence of male temple prostitutes in the Valley of Mexico was reported by Bernal Daz del Castillo (Trexler 1995:104; Keen 1971:61). In 1516 Peter Martyr reported that in Panama Vasco Nez de Balboa had supposedly thrown 40 transvestites to the dogs (Trexler 1995:82). In the middle of the 16th century, when Juan Gins de Seplveda and Bartolom de Las Casas conducted their famous debate concerning the possibility of saving Indian souls, the credibility of such reports was at stake. Seplveda was inclined to believe most of them, whereas Las Casas was skeptical about claims that deviant sexuality was common and openly tolerated. No one suggested that some of the reported behaviors might indeed exist and that there might be nothing intrinsically wrong with them. This limitation of argument was to persist for 400 years.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080328036X
• ISBN 13: 9780803280366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 420