Sex
Ethnographic Encounters
Edited by Richard Joseph Martin and Dieter Haller
iii
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First published in Great Britain 2019
Copyright © Richard Joseph Martin, Dieter Haller and Contributors, 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Martin, Richard Joseph, editor. | Haller, Dieter, editor.
Title: Sex : ethnographic encounters / edited by Richard Joseph Martin and Dieter Haller.
Description: London, UK : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Series: Encounters: experience and anthropological knowledge | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008130| ISBN 9781474294713 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781474294706 (hbk.)
Subjects: LCSH : Sex. | Anthropology.
Classification: LCC HQ 21 .S47115 2018 | DDC 306.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008130
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List of Contributors vii Acknowledgments xi Preface John Borneman xii Introduction Dieter Haller and Richard Joseph Martin xiv Part One Institutions 1 Towards an Intimately “Impure” Ethnography: Considering the Limits of Non-Participant Observation Timothy M. Hall 3 2 When Bodies Talk: Indulging Ethnography Sebastian Mohr 15 3 “She Goes with the Refugees”: Desire and Power Amid the Politics of Asylum in Greece Heath Cabot 27 Part Two Interpellations 4 A Camel Walks into a Brothel: Passing Anxieties in the Sexual Economies of Brazil Gregory Mitchell 47 5 The Anthropologist’s New Clothes: Ethnographic Exposure and BDSM Richard Joseph Martin 59 6 Dating a Gypsy Punk Musician: Cultural Appropriation and Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Brazilian Romanies Diana Budur 73 Part Three Intimacies 7 In Bed with My Informant (and Her Lover/s): Navigating Intimacy and Ethics in Singapore Adlina Maulod 87 8 All Acts of Love and Pleasure are My Rituals: Fieldwork and Erotic Subjectivity in an American NeoPagan Community Susan Harper 101 9 Invulnerable Men and Dangerous Women: Encountering HIV Risk Perception in Urban South Africa Hans Reihling 115 Contents v
vi Contents 10 Public Vegetarianism and Public Menstruation: Staging Chastity Among Jains in Gujarat Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg 127 Part Four Incommensurabilities 11 The Naked Fear: Desire and Identity in Morocco Dieter Haller 145 12 Faux Amis: On the Morals of Not Being Gay in Istanbul Samuel Williams 157 13 Im/possibilities in the Field: Lessons from Jerusalem Robert Phillips 169 14 Guide to Further Reading William L. Leap 179 Notes 183 References 189 Index 201
List of Contributors
John Borneman is Professor of Anthropology and currently Director of the Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society at Princeton University. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Central Europe, and in Lebanon and Syria. His research focuses on two sets of relationships: on the relation of the state and law to intimacy and practices of care, specifically the care for refugees; and on the relation of political identification, belonging, and authority to memory and forms of justice. He also works on questions of epistemology and knowledge in the public sphere, and on psychoanalytic understandings of the self, group formation, and political form. His most recent monograph is Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany (University of Chicago Press 2015).
Diana Budur holds a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University. She resides in New York and is working on a book on sex and love addiction. She is also a freelance consultant and researcher involved in a research project on transcendental meditation (TM ) alongside Columbia University child psychology professor Renae Beaumont and several other researchers.
Heath Cabot is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a political and legal anthropologist whose research examines citizenship, ethics, and rights in Europe, with a focus on Greece. She is author of On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece (Penn Press 2014). She is also co-editor-inchief of PoLAR : Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Dieter Haller is Professor for Ethnologie at Ruhr Universität Bochum (Germany). Previously he has held positions as visiting professor in Frankfurt/Main (2000), Hamburg (2001), Granada, Spain (2002), at New School University, New York (2003), and at the University of Texas, Austin (2003–5). His main fields of interest are port cities, sexuality, corruption, Morocco, Gibraltar, and the Mediterranean. His latest publications are a volume on corruption (Pluto Press 2005, co-edited with Cris Shore), an introduction to cultural anthropology (DTV-Atlas Ethnologie, 2005; published in German, Hungarian, and Spanish), an ethnography on Texas (Lone Star Texas, transcript Bielefeld 2007), on the history of anthropology in the Federal Republic of Germany between 1960 and 1990 (Die Suche nach dem Fremden, Campus Verlag 2012) and on the Moroccan city of Tangiers (Tanger—der Hafen, die Geister, die Lust, transcript 2016).
Susan Harper is an educator, activist, and advocate in Dallas, Texas. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Southern Methodist University and a Graduate
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Certificate in Women’s Studies from Texas Woman’s University. Her ethnographic research focuses on new religious movements in the American South; the intersection of gender, sexuality, and religious identity; and sex, sexuality, and sex education. Her work has been published in the Journal of Bisexuality. She serves as Graduate Reader/ Editor for Texas Woman’s University. She is currently working on an autoethnography about burlesque and a visual anthropology project exploring the use of Pinterest by practitioners of NeoPaganism.
William L. Leap, PhD, is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the American University (Washington, DC ) and an Affiliate Professor in the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, FL ). He is the founding senior editor of the Journal of Language and Sexuality and, since 1993, has coordinated the annual program of the Lavender Language Conference. Key publications include American Indian English (1993), Word’s Out: Gay Men’s English (1996), Out in Public: Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World (co-edited with Ellen Lewin), Speaking in Queer Tongues: Gay Language and Globalization (co-edited with Tom Boellstorff ), and the widely reprinted papers “Language, socialization and silence in gay adolescence,” “Queering gay men’s English”, and “Homophobia as moral geography.” He is currently completing a multi-disciplinary study of language, identity and same-sex desire in the US military, in Renaissance-era Harlem, in women’s softball teams, in cruising sites, and in other locations “before” Stonewall.
Andrea Luithle-Hardenberg is a lecturer at Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main (Germany). She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the Free University Berlin in 2006. Her thesis, Die Reise zum Ursprung. Die Pilgerschaft der ShvetambaraJaina zum Berg Shatrunjaya in Gujarat, Indien, establishes the importance of this particular pilgrimage for the collective memory of the Jains. Her current habilitation project deals with Jain child ascetics.
Richard Joseph Martin is Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University. He is completing his first monograph, The Magic of Consent: Cultural Phenomenology and BDSM in Berlin. His recent work appears in The Journal of Language & Sexuality. Drawing on his research interests, he has taught courses on the anthropology of sex and gender, the anthropology of media, the anthropology of play, religion and sexuality, social science writing, and graduate research methods in anthropology and psychology. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and a BA from Columbia University.
Adlina Maulod is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Ageing Research and Education, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. He obtained a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Purdue University, USA for his dissertation research on same-sex family households and queer reproductive practices in Singapore. His current research in gerontology expands his interests in queer methodologies, social inequalities, intersectionality and the body, to develop and advocate new and inclusive life design for highly-aging communities.
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Timothy McCajor Hall, MD PhD, is a psychiatrist and a psychological anthropologist at UCLA , where he is Assistant Clinical Professor in the Department of Family Medicine. He has studied at Harvard, UCSD, Karlova Univerzita, the University of Chicago, UCLA , and the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Since 1999, he has carried out nearly four years of fieldwork in Prague, Czech Republic, on processes of sexual identity development and maintenance among gay and bisexual men, and on aspects of mental health and HIV risk. He has also conducted fieldwork in Los Angeles since 2011 on non-gay-identified men who have sex with men, and clinical research on various aspects of addiction treatment and HIV prevention.
Gregory Mitchell is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Williams College and a faculty affiliate in Anthropology and Latina/o Studies. He is the author of Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press 2016), an ethnography of male sex workers and their clients. His work appears in American Ethnologist, GLQ, Brasiliana, Wagadu, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, and edited volumes in the United States and Brazil. His second book project examines violence against female sex workers during mega-events like the World Cup and the Olympic Games to reveal the overlapping interests of evangelical Christian groups, anti-prostitution radical feminist organizations, neoliberal business developers, and corrupt state security apparatuses that appropriate the discourse of human rights.
Sebastian Mohr is Senior Lecturer at the Center for Gender Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. His research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and technology. He is interested in the formation of subjects with a sense of self, identity, and belonging, and asks what role gender, sexuality, and technology play thereby. He attends to this dynamic through ethnographic explorations of diverse technological contexts: military life, reproductive biomedicine, scientific knowledge production. He has a special interest in the epistemological groundings of ethnography and the ethnographic history of gender theory and ethnography’s gender theoretical legacy.
Robert Phillips is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He lectures on ethnographic methods and anthropological approaches to technology and religion. His early fieldwork was in south India, but most of his empirical research was conducted in Singapore, focusing on how interactions on the internet affect sexual subjectivity. More recently, Phillips has been conducting research among Orthodox Jewish men in Brooklyn, NY and Jerusalem, Israel, focusing on religious subjectivity.
Hans Reihling is a postdoctoral fellow in the Becoming Men Research Group at the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie Universität, Berlin and is currently working on the manuscript “(In)vulnerable Men: Navigating Affective Health in Urban South Africa.” Reihling is also a licensed
ix List of Contributors
psychotherapist and works with men who suffer the effects of structural and interpersonal violence.
Samuel Williams is postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University.
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List of Contributors
Preface
John Borneman, Series Editor
Sex: Anthropological Encounters examines encounters with sex in the fieldwork experience of contemporary anthropologists. The focus here, like that of other volumes in this series, is on personal encounters with a particular theme or object in the field— for example, money, violence, children, food. With “sex” as the object, authors are confronted with peculiar challenges, above all, as Dieter Haller and Richard Martin write in the introduction, “the main question when anthropologists deal with sex in ethnographic contexts: what is considered to be sex, and what isn’t?” Although the same question, of the instability and variability of the object, can be asked of money or violence, questions of encounters with sex betray an intimacy with the difference between one’s own conception of sex and that of our interlocutors. That intimacy, when disclosed in writing, leaves the anthropologist vulnerable in a way research on other objects does not, while also revealing a domain of activity—“sex”—both surrounded by taboos and, as Foucault taught us, subject to discursive proliferation. It may seem paradoxical that the challenges anthropologists face in writing about sex remain much the same as they did half a century ago. On the one hand, sex and gender have become mainstays of anthropological research. Whether the focus is on politics, religion, or the economy, the question of how sex and gender, much like race, structure such domains of activity is now considered an essential part of most investigations. Sex and gender now even constitute their own field of study, with positions earmarked for this scholarly focus. And this field that keeps evolving, as Haller and Martin in the introduction, and Leap in the final chapter, make clear. On the other hand, reflexive work on the sex part of this unit has largely grown out of a particular subset of this field, now defined as LGBT studies. While LGBT studies itself has diversified its objects, it has had a difficult time enticing anthropologists whose experiences are with the opposite sex to write about them. In soliciting contributions for this volume, the editors had difficulty securing contributions from anthropologists with fascinating and theoretically rich experiences that involved opposite-sex eroticism of, for example, the sexualization of a white man by black women in Africa, or the erotic experiences of women with their fieldwork informants that resulted in marriages with them.
In this volume thirteen anthropologists explicate their own experiences with this object, sex, in the field. They talk of experience in thirteen countries: the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Greece, Brazil, France, Germany, Singapore, the USA , South Africa, India, Morocco, Turkey, and Israel. The diversity of countries changes the object and one’s relationship to it. Sex in one place is physical intimacy; in another friendship; in one about identity, in another what one does. The contributions range from discourses
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about “sex” in ethical review boards, to sartorial exposures, unruly refugee desires, being perceived as sexual, the allocation of qualities of sexual fidelity or infidelity, the space of the bed, the significance of sex for public health discourses, its power to split or unify the subject, and much more. What the authors bring to the fore is always intersubjective, relational, initially taking shape through participant observation in the unique social dramas of ethnographic encounters.
We asked the authors in this series to write with a particular concern in mind: to focus on stories that showed their own engagement with “sex” in fieldwork. We also requested that they resist the temptation to let theoretical concerns dominate their writing. We encouraged them instead to allow their descriptions of fieldwork to show how and in what way cultural difference is learned in an encounter with “sex.” We invited them, in other words, to write outside the current normative genres of anthropology, and to risk exposing themselves—warts, private pleasures, misunderstandings, and all—in the thick of it. Hence, contributors have elaborated their specific interactions and totally eschewed the conventions that authorize most ethnographic accounts, such as footnoting, long bibliographies, or dense theoretical language.
Such rhetorical change makes new demands on our readers: we ask them to enter, openly, into the often threatening, sometimes embarrassing, but always potentially insight-bearing situations of fieldwork. In return, we hope that the reading of these essays awakens an appreciation for the quality of subjective sensual experience (personal, tied to a particular time and place); for curiosity in difference itself, in translating the strange, foreign or unassimilable; and for a kind of storytelling that contributes both to the documentary function of the ethnographic encounter and to its analytical potential.
Finally, in the “Guide to Further Reading,” William Leap reflects on the various contributions of the authors in this volume and situates them within different anthropological literatures. He also identifies one of the central contributions of this volume: to take “sexuality out of the exclusively interiorized domains . . ., and [instead] engage the difficulties associated with confronting sexuality as a social experience in the ethnographic research setting.” Indeed, while recording and publishing the social experience of sexuality may present its own challenges, future work might do well to ask about the relations between interiorized domains—desires, object choices, drives—and the experience of these in fieldwork settings.
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Introduction
Dieter Haller and Richard Joseph Martin
Jules: [. . .]. Eating a bitch out and giving a bitch a foot massage ain’t even the same fucking thing.
Vincent: It’s not. It’s the same ballpark.
Jules: Ain’t no fucking ballpark neither. Now, look, maybe your method of massage differs from mine, but, you know, touching his wife’s feet and sticking your tongue in the holiest of holies ain’t the same fucking ballpark. It ain’t the same league. It ain’t even the same fucking sport. Look, foot massages don’t mean shit.
[. . . .]
Vincent: [. . .] But you’re saying a foot massage don’t mean nothing, and I’m saying it does. Now, look, I’ve given a million ladies a million foot massages, and they all meant something. We act like they don’t, but they do, and that’s what’ so fucking cool about them. There’s a sensuous thing going on where you don’t talk about it, but you know it, she knows it, fucking Marsellus knew it, and Antoine should have fucking better known better. I mean, that’s his fucking wife, man. He ain’t gonna have no sense of humor about that shit. You know what I’m saying?
Jules: That’s an interesting point.1
“O boy, if you want to gladden my heart/You must give me kisses after serving me wine” (Ey pesar gar del-e man kard hamikvāhi šād/Az pas-e bāda marā busa hami bāyad dād; Abul Hasan Ali ibn Julugh Farrukhi Sistani, p. 46).2
The above epigraphs are taken from expressive culture rather than ethnography, but both quotations speak to key questions anthropologists ask when dealing with sex in ethnographic contexts. Is a foot massage, as Vincent argues in Pulp Fiction, in the same “ballpark” as cunnilingus (eating a bitch out)? Amongst scholars of Persian culture there is a fervent discussion about the character of the poem, written by medieval Persian author Abul Hasan Ali ibn Julugh Farrukhi Sistani (c. 980–1037 or 1038): is it “only” a poetic expression of friendship? Is it about a spiritual experience, coated in a language that today is considered erotic and sexual? Or is it about a man’s sexual desire to kiss a desired youth? In both cases, the writers pose their questions in ontological terms: What is sex? However, these questions are also semiotic: What does “sex” mean; what makes an act intelligible as sexual—or not—for those who participate in or observe it? Likewise, they are phenomenological: How do people, in various contexts, experience and understand phenomena as sexual?
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While these questions can be asked philosophically, they can be answered ethnographically. In this sense, we hold open questions of definition: what are the limits of our object, when and where does a sexual act start, and when and where does it end (Oppitz 2008)? Does it start with physical arousal and end with an orgasm? Or does it start long before the physical act, with phantasies, desires and thoughts— phenomena intrinsically linked to physical activity of the brain and the nervous system? In their treatise on The Anthropology of Sex (2010), Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan consider “how cultural difference generates multiple experiences and classifications of sex” (3). As anthropologists, we take seriously the variation in answers to questions of definition concerning sex and sexuality, and therefore take our encounters with others as the basis for conceptualization. As interpreters of culture, we are especially well positioned to consider problems of meaning, as that meaning is made and remade intersubjectively. When the authors of the present volume talk about sex, these questions of definition do not vanish: as in cross-cultural contexts any generalization comes to its limits.
We therefore focus instead on assumptions basic to the volume as well as the series in which this volume is published. Firstly, we take as a point of departure the inductive method of field experience rather than starting from pre-given definitions. We want to know what in the situations under observation is considered to be “sexual,” by those who inhabit the culture in which such experiences take place. It is not the academic categories and concepts that are the main focus of the anthropologist’s interest, but those of the researched. Our premises reflect basic constellations of ethnology, between relativism and universalism: to what extent is it possible to unsettle ethnocentric ideas when documenting, analyzing and trying to understand “foreign” behavior? Is sex a separate domain of knowledge and/or practice in the fields that we study? What are local conceptions of sexuality, and how are they informed by trans-local practices and discourses? From the at-once laborious and satisfying work of ethnographic research, we try to liberate ourselves of our own patterns of thinking and acting, and to immerse ourselves in the worlds of others. Based on this experience, we then strive to unfold the interconnections within their understandings and practices of sex and, to develop appropriate categories and concepts from their reality. This is a central intention of the book series and of this volume.
Secondly, the rationalist conception of nature as something given, that can only be known and understood by using reason has long been refuted in various works, such as those by Sperling (1997) on primatology, Descola’s (2013) typology of ontologies, or Viveiros de Castro’s (2004) work on Brazilian perspectivism. We also know that health and disease and sometimes even ostensibly natural disease symptoms are also always linked to culture, as was already shown by ethnomedicine in the 1950s (Drobec 1955). Thanks to Marcel Mauss (1935) and Pierre Bourdieu (1977), the understanding that bodies are also culturally determined, and that cultural values and norms can be habitualized in bodies, is an important, although already old, discovery. This also applies, as shown in the contributions to this volume, to sex.
Thirdly, cultural realities are reducible neither to static structural constraints, nor to fluidity and individual agency, but they are informed by both. The moment of
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anthropological experience is always embedded into wider local, regional, and global, historical, and political contexts. The fleeting ethnographic encounter can only be interpreted within these wider frames. When we remember the cultural historical tradition of our discipline, then a wealth of other sources helps us to embed our field experiences: artifacts, historical documents of various genres, religious and legal sources, poetry, literature, and paintings.
However, at the center of the contemporary anthropological endeavor lies ethnography, experience, and the methods of contemporary field study paradigms. Our senses, bodies, and mental capacities become a survey instrument in participatory observation. Participant observation can highlight different aspects of cultural reality: we can listen to discourses on sexuality in the field, discuss sexuality with women and men, old and young, married people and singles, city and country dwellers, pious and secular, virgins and sluts, homo- and heterosexuals, and an interminable et cetera. Which discourses are dominant, which peripheral? Which are verbalized, which expressed in the visual media?
But, in addition to listening, we can also observe. Generally ethnographers do not get to see intimate relations, because they mostly occur in places to which we do not have access. So often we have to limit our observations to publically accessible behavioral traces of sexual behavior: this could be anything, for example, from graffiti to the range of contraceptives in pharmacies. The separation of public and private is fundamental to the methods we select; we must question what the perceptions are of the public and private in the society we are studying, to whom intimate spaces are accessible, if they exist at all. When male informants—as Kulick (2014) experienced— masturbate in front of one another and fantasize about women, they clearly do not see the male ethnographer’s presence as a disruption of intimacy; the presence of a woman, however, would probably destroy the intimate space.
Finally, we have the opportunity to participate physically. A review of the relevant subject literature reveals three main contexts in which ethnographers—beyond individual sexual relationships which are generally not reflected in ethnographies because they are linked to emotional love—participate directly: tourism, prostitution, and homosexuality. Until recently, sexual practices and field experiences have been described almost exclusively by gay men and only a small number of female researchers. Accordingly, we know more about homosexual than heterosexual practices and more about male than female sexual practices. In this sense, not much has changed since the publication of the groundbreaking Taboo: Sex, Identity, and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork (Kulick and Willson 1995).
Anthropologists use the research methods of participant observation as a path to knowledge. Gerd Spittler (2001) has defined four criteria that inform these methods: besides being present on-site for a long time (at least one year), mastering the local language and assuming a social role in the field, it is above all what he calls deep involvement. This means participating in as many aspects of daily life as possible and eye witnessing what happens. It is almost certain that this last approach is hardly possible in the practice of field studies on sexuality. Protecting sexual distance in the field has for a long time been an unwritten imperative. However, researchers have had relationships with informants in the field; many of them even got married. But
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for many reasons hardly any of them wrote about the sexual side of the relationship.3 Also, it would be epistemologically doubtful that the individual relationship between the researcher and his or her partner(s) could say something about the culture as a whole. One would have to amass many sexual experiences with different partners or to observe them to be able to generalize. But even Murray (1996), who had many sexual partners in Guatemala, believed that he could not learn about sex between the natives by having sex with the natives. Rather, sexual contact with a foreigner offers not only the researcher, but also the researched the possibility of expressing otherwise inexpressible desires, which would not (or could not) be revealed to another native. Even if there is something in Murray’s argument, it is doubtful that we cannot learn anything about what takes place among our interlocutors by having all sorts of sexual relations in the field. Good field studies are not the result of using a single research technique. One would be a poor field researcher if relying on participant observation alone and not relating one’s findings to various other sources: contextualization is the basis of understanding in interpretive anthropology.
The task, then, is to show what encounters with sex can tell us. When we depict ethnography as the sine qua non of ethnological knowledge and theory formation, we generate knowledge about others’ sexuality using the techniques of participation, observation, and contextualization—this does not relate solely to individual desire, but to broader fields of culture which can tell us something about sexuality. Instead of being guided by “big” notions, insights containing the germs of generalizations are garnered from the field: about the culture as a whole, perhaps even, tentatively, about humanity itself. So, we take the title of the book—Sex—as a starting point and working concept, and embark on field studies in the hopes that insights will emerge that will challenge in a productive way our own ideas about sex and sexuality.
Approaching sexuality from social and cultural studies perspectives has a long line of false starts and neglected histories. In the 1930s, Hirschfeld (2006) unsuccessfully called for a specific sexual ethnology. This had existed for a brief period when Friedrich Salomon Krauss was publishing the journal Anthropopytheia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although the staff of the journal included important figures of German, US -American, and Italian anthropologies, such as Karl von den Steinen, Franz Boas, and Giuseppe Pitrè, the interest in sexuality attracted little attention in the center of the subject. Unjustifiably forgotten anthropologists such as the great Finnish ethnologist and sociologist Edward Westermarck had been studying human sexuality thoroughly. His doctorate challenged the assumption that sexual promiscuity was a behavioral norm in primitive societies. He later studied sexuality in Morocco. His book The Origins of Sexual Modesty (Westermarck 1921) argued that sexual shame was a by-product of evolutionary adaptation, namely the natural aversion to incest.
But Westermarck and Hirschfeld had almost no influence on how academic anthropologies—cultural, social, and ethnological disciplines alike—dealt with sexuality. As Lyons and Lyons have shown in their incisive history of anthropology and sexuality, with notable early exceptions such as Malinowski (1987 [1929]) and Mead (1928), modern ethnographic writing veered away from sexuality, submersing sex “in other discourses” such as gender and kinship (2004: 216–17). Initiated by psychological and psychiatric works (Opler 1980; Hooker 1965), anthropologists only turned their
xvii Introduction
attention to sexuality in the 1960s. Research was primarily focused on homosexuality, transvestitism and third genders. These diverted from the unquestionably accepted sexual norm and appeared worldwide in such varied cultural forms, like the North American Berdache (Callender and Kochems 1983) or Two-Spirits (Lang 1990, 1994; Carocci 1997), Indian hijra (Nanda 1985), Sevillian travesties (Haller 1992); Pakistani khusra (Pfeffer 1995), Albanian sworn virgins (Grémaux 1996; Young 2000), the xanith of Oman (Wikan 1977) and the mahus of Tahiti (Levy 1971), that research on them was deemed necessary. For a long time, these phenomena were approached through cultural comparison (Ford and Beach 1968; Churchill 1968; Klein 1974; Fitzgerald 1977; Davis and Whitten 1987). Even beyond research within gay and lesbian studies— in anthropology of women and initiated by feminist ethnology—there was increasing interest in gender roles and identities. However, all these studies were primarily about identities, roles, power and dominance relationships in their cultural imprint, and less about sexual practices.
It was not until the 1990s that a flurry of edited volumes—Taboo (Kulick and Willson 1995), Out in the Field (Lewin and Leap 1996), and Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist (Markowitz and Ashkenazi 1999)—initiated a new, sustained, reflexive engagement with sex, sexuality, fieldwork, and erotic subjectivity. Rhetorically, these volumes all positioned themselves, as breaking the “silence” concerning what Esther Newton (1993) had famously dubbed “the erotic equation in fieldwork.” Building on Newton’s insights, Kulick and Willson highlight how failures to critically engage erotic subjectivity in fieldwork serve to reinforce and naturalize sexual, racial and colonial hierarchies (1995: 12). They propose, in response to the Taboo of the volume’s title, to start a conversation on the epistemological productivity of erotic subjectivity (1995: 23). Similarly, Lewin and Leap (1996: 22) discuss “breaking our silence” in terms of coming “out” as gay and lesbian anthropologists. They respond to sexuality’s status as “virtually prohibited” in “even the most candid ethnographic chronicles” (1996: 3), by making explicit how (homosexual) subjectivity shapes fieldwork and ethnography. The paradigm of being “out” frames visibility and vocalization in relation to questions of identity. Likewise, Markowitz and Ashkenazi highlight how emerging reflective discussions on the anthropologist’s positionality had not extended to sex and sexuality. Methodologically, they conclude that “ethnographers ought to address the sexual issue proactively . . . sexuality cannot be brushed aside” (1999: 14). These volumes position themselves as breaking certain kinds of silences surrounding sexuality, and they all frame the need to talk about sex through attentiveness to the anthropologist’s subjectivity, identity, or positionality, adopting to some extent a confessional mode along Foucauldian lines. In this way, these volumes turned to questions of desire and erotic subjectivity of the anthropologist, focusing on issues of the fieldworker’s self, building on as key points of reference the posthumous publication of Malinowski’s Diary, the reflexive turn of the Writing Culture school, and the influence of Foucault. Twenty years have passed since those groundbreaking collections. Both the world and the discipline of anthropology have changed in the intervening years. In this volume, we suggest that, as Gayle Rubin famously put it, once again “the time has come to think about sex” (2011: 137), and, to think about sex in ways that account for both a changing discipline and a changing world. In recent years, we have seen increasingly
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widespread recognition of same-sex marriage and transgender rights, as well as increasing awareness of sexual harassment and assault, as in the #MeToo movement. These social and political changes are reflected in recent anthropological research, made thinkable by the groundbreaking works of the previous generation. Our volume is, in some ways, a follow up to these works which, as the chapters in this collection attest, remain foundational in the education of anthropologists—especially those who set out to study sex-related topics.
This is not to suggest, of course, that the conversation stopped with the edited volumes of the 1990s. Indeed, the work of thinking about sex and fieldwork has been taken up in a number of places, especially in the burgeoning subfield of queer anthropology. Thus, many of the shifts being developed in this volume are already underway, as ethnographic works become suffused with discussions of sex and sexuality, as in Boellstorff on “dubbing culture” (2005), Dave on ethics and affect (2012), Manalansan on “cultural citizenship” (2003), Povinelli on “intimate events” (2006), Ramberg on “marriage” to the goddess (2014), Stout on intimacies (2014), Valentine on the ethnography of categories (2007), and Weiss on “circuits” (2011), to name a few.
But, while the silence about “sex” has been broken, the “taboo” on writing ethnography on sex from the standpoint of an observing participant in many ways persists. Very little ethnographic work on sex makes explicit use of the ethnographer’s body as research instrument—sociologist Staci Newmahr’s (2011) immersive study of BDSM being a notable exception—and while talk about sex now proliferates in academic writing, the use of intimate encounters as a basis for anthropological knowledge remains underdeveloped; indeed, even a volume dedicated to the “shadow side of fieldwork,” concentrating on blurring between professional research and personal life in the field, contains only a single index entry referring to sexuality—and that refers to a citation of other studies rather than the anthropologist’s own encounters (McLean and Leibing 2007: 59). Yet, as the chapters in this volume attest, encounters with sex in the field shape ethnographic knowledge in diffuse and important ways; rather than writing out or wishing away such moments, we pursue their potential, within the anthropology of sexuality and beyond it.
The chapters that comprise this volume, having had the benefit of absorbing the lessons and insights of previous scholarship, are able to build on and depart from the preoccupations of the earlier volumes in important ways. Here, questions of identity and identification are not the central focus of theorization but rather a basis of ethnographic engagement. Thus, the chapters are concerned with interpellation, intersubjectivity, appropriations of identity categories, and incommensurability across categories as they emerge and unfold in the field. Likewise, there is a shift from a focus on sexual identity categories toward an emphasis on erotic practices (such as polyamory and sadomasochism), as well as intimacies; reflexivity extends beyond the personal, for example, by considering the institutional possibilities (such as IRB s and credentialing trajectories) that shape the becoming of an anthropologist and the production of anthropological knowledge.
More specifically, the chapters push beyond a focus on the erotic subjectivity of the anthropologist. The lessons of the “reflexive” turn have been absorbed—contributors to this volume of course acknowledge and reflect on their situation as subjects, erotic and
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otherwise. But what’s important about these texts is that those assertions of positionality no longer constitute a primary focus of theorization and analysis. Rather, in these chapters, reflexivity about the self becomes a precondition for thinking about other issues concerning sex, sexuality, ethnography, and theory building. These issues include: reflexivity about institutions and their role on shaping the conditions of possibility for research and writing in anthropology; a shift from identity to interpellation as a foundation for taking seriously the idea of encounter; a shift from thinking pre- and proscriptively about sex in the field to homing in on the various kinds of intimacy erotic engagement (or disengagement) in fieldwork can and does produce; an expansion from field encounters to cautious generalizations about culture, and strategies of grappling with various moments of incommensurabilty in the field.
It is worth noting that one key way the world has changed since is the relevance of technological mediation, especially following the advent of the internet and its increasingly widespread usage since the mid 1990s and the introduction of smart phones and their attendant apps a decade later. Such media make appearances throughout these chapters, if often obliquely. But, rather than pursue internet-based ethnography, these chapters highlight “encounter-based fieldwork” in its embodied, experiential depth and complexity (Borneman and Hammoudi 2009). This choice is strategic: our volume emphasizes in-person ethnographic encounter, and the salience of sex for producing ethnographic knowledge through corporeal engagement; our use of classic field methods highlights how it is in and through traditional fieldwork that these insights are developed and sustained. That said, technologically mediated forms of eroticism and intimacy are increasingly prevalent, and are—as William Leap notes in his Guide to Further Reading—a key area for further reflection.
Organization of chapters
Institutions
The chapters in this first section focus on problems of researching and writing about sex ethnographically with respect to the institutional frameworks that shape possibilities of knowledge production. Timothy McCajor Hall focuses on IRB s, considering how certain kinds of data—those that convey “the qualia of erotic experience”—become difficult, sometimes impossible, to collect and analyze. He takes issue with the appropriation of biomedical models for ethnographic research as well as a priori positioning the researcher as occupying a zone of structural privilege at the expense of recognizing informants’ agency. Drawing on encounters ranging from his fieldwork in Prague to his experience taking PrEP, he shows how intimate encounters make it possible to draw important ethnographic insights. He thus argues for embracing an “impure ethnography.”
While Hall uses the metaphor of impurity, Sebastian Mohr offers that of “indulgence,” reclaiming this concept often lodged against those who write up personal experience. Mohr takes on a different aspect of academic institutions, that of the writing process— from the graduate thesis to professional publication—characterized as a rite of passage for young ethnographers. Mohr critiques the Cartesian framework for imagining the
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academic writer as a disembodied mind: in this paradigm, the informant has a body but not a mind, the anthropologist has a mind but not a body. Mohr highlights the importance of “embodied experience” in the ethnographic encounter, and his fieldwork accounts highlight the importance of learning how to listen to the ways in which “bodies talk.” The body speaks without words, in its own way, and adequate attention to bodily encounters, he argues, is essential to the ethnographic enterprise: “no fieldwork, no participant observation, no interview without bodies,” he writes. Collectively, Hall and Mohr remind us of how institutions are crucial sites through which knowledge production becomes recognizable as such: sex is not just a problem of encounters in the field, but one of encounters with the apparatuses that make fieldwork possible.
In the third chapter, Heath Cabot makes the case for the broader necessity of deep thinking about desire, sex, and sexuality in ethnographic research—beyond the typical subfield domains to which this thinking is often confined. While such discussions, she notes, have increasingly appeared in anthropology, they are often confined to classes with a topical focus on gender and sexuality. Cabot’s research on refugees at an NGO in Greece would not be a locus where such topics would seem to be relevant in training on methods and ethics, and yet, she shows, they were. “I came to understand,” she writes, “through somatic and affective modes of experience, how globally and structurally shaped aspects of desire and attraction emerge in the felt intimacies of intersubjective encounters.” Indeed, a key aspect of Cabot’s contribution is the insight that issues of desire and erotic encounter are central to ethnographic topics that might, on the surface, seem to have little to do with sex or sexuality: “desire is, in fact, at the center of many questions about law, ethics, protection, and support that I had been exploring in my research, as well as ethnographic work more broadly.” Thus, Cabot’s chapter builds on the work in the first two, exemplifying the productivity of inhabiting the impurities and indulgences of which Hall and Mohr respectively speak. Cabot closes the chapter, and the section, by calling for anthropologists “to inhabit this unruliness with a certain kind of grace.”
Interpellations
The second section takes up issues of reflexivity, pushing the conversation past a focus on erotic subjectivity. Beyond the anthropologist’s professed identity, these chapters show how identities are appropriated and negotiated intersubjectively.
Gregory Mitchell calls for rethinking the role of reflexivity most explicitly, displacing the idea of confession with that of interpellation. He writes: “it’s imperative that we ethnographers fret less about how we feel about our own sexuality in the field and focus instead on how our interlocutors experience and perceive our sexual subjectivity.”
Drawing on his experiences being interpellated during his fieldwork on prostitution in Brazil, Mitchell shows how he was taken not just as a potential client but as a certain kind of client, in ways that illuminated aspects of the culture of the sauna that otherwise may have remained obscured. Mitchell highlights some of the untapped potential of a refocused reflexivity.
Similarly, Richard Martin calls for a shift from a paradigm of “disclosure” to one of “exposure.” He takes up the issue of clothing—what one wears in the field—which was especially significant in his fieldwork in the BDSM scene, where “appropriate” attire
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was required as a condition of access to field sites. Though Martin identified himself as an outsider to the scene verbally, his clothing often gave off a different impression, and visits to the field by his partner, who participated with him at certain events, complicated informants’ understandings further still. Martin shows how the self-understanding of the anthropologist cannot and should not be taken for granted, but should rather be located in terms of the intersubjective negotiations that unfold in the field. A “more reciprocal unsettling,” he argues, nuance understandings of both BDSM and the enterprise of ethnography.
While Mitchell and Martin both focus on the unintended ways that informants interpellate the anthropologist, Diana Budur highlights how appropriations of identity can be deliberate and all the more difficult to navigate in terms of methods and ethics. Drawing on her fieldwork among Roma in Brazil, Budur discusses how her position during fieldwork depended on her then significant other, the internationally-known musician Eugene Hütz. Budur discusses Hütz’s appropriation of Gypsy identity, and her attempt, through him (and her own ambiguous ancestry), to position herself as inhabiting gendered norms in her field site. For example, Budur agreed to an asymmetrical relationship in which her fidelity was expected but his was not as a way to understand firsthand the cultural norms of her interlocutors. These appropriations, she notes, enabled her to ask different questions and prompted her informants to confide in her, even as the ethics of appropriation remain fraught.
Collectively, these chapters highlight how ethnographic encounter is a dialogical negotiation. Interpellation is a much-needed counterpoint and corrective to a focus on subjectivity as emanating from the anthropologist in a unidirectional fashion. Exposure offers a way to conceptualize this two-way dynamic. And appropriation highlights how anthropologists and informants alike make use, in ways that are sometimes strategic and ethically ambiguous, of variously accessible cultural frames.
Intimacies
Institutions shape the possibilities of fieldwork; interpellations pervade intersubjective encounters in the field. The next set of chapters takes up intimacies that emerge through such encounters. Intimacy is a product of long-term fieldwork, and fieldwork that focuses on deeply personal, erotic, and sexual topics unsettles boundaries both conceptual and corporeal.
Adlina Maulod, a transmasculine anthropologist working with the Malay ethnic minority in Singapore, discusses being literally in bed with informants. Such intimacies are “at once pleasurable and perilous.” Maulod portrays intimate ethnographic encounters as a dance in which “one’s move depends on how the other moves,” and shows how the mutuality that emerges out of such erotic encounters can “challenge the monolith of the ethnographic gaze,” democratizing knowledge production and bridging methodological distance. Here, intimacy becomes an antidote to institutional inequalities, requiring the anthropologist to grapple with “reception,” which generates ethnographic unsettling as well as understanding.
Conversely, Susan Harper’s chapter highlights the limits of associating sexuality with liberation. Harper’s study of a NeoPagan community in Texas shows how sex-
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positive discourses and practices of polyamory and bisexuality can be appropriated to enable, under a seemingly progressive guise, the perpetuation of “heterosexist and patriarchal dynamics still at work.” Her chapter navigates the complexities of analyzing and representing informants’ ideas when the uses to which sexuality is put are at odds with the discourses used to express them. Harper’s chapter also shows how her fieldwork enabled her to develop new insights about her personal relationships, even as her own relationship dynamics enabled her to see new insights about her fieldwork.
Similarly, Hans Reihling’s chapter on masculinity and HIV in South Africa highlights the importance of intimacy in generating fieldwork insights. His interpellation as a sexual subject taught him much about local ideas about the invulnerability of male bodies and the “heterosexual geographies of risk perception.” Reihling traces the ways in which informants reacted to a failed relationship in the field, and what these reactions reveal about gendered understandings of risk, vulnerability, and sexual subjectivity. In particular, his intimate encounters led to deeper understandings of his field material, in which he shows how the “moral language of romantic love” is at odds with “public health risk discourse.” Importantly, it is intimacy that produces these realizations, which in turn have implications for rethinking the efficacy of interventions at the level of policy.
But intimacy is not synonymous with erotic encounter. As Andrea LuithleHardenberg shows, intimate moments can be especially poignant even in contexts of chastity and abstention (erotic and otherwise). This point is made most explicitly in her comparison of celibacy and vegetarianism, drawing parallels between the two. Through her long-term fieldwork with ascetics in India, Luithle-Hardenberg highlights powerful intimate encounters in the field. From describing interactions in which her husband negotiates on her behalf, literally speaking for her, to having her bags inspected by male ascetics for impermissible food items, to making her menstruation public through visible and ritualized seclusion, she shows how intimacy is implicated in powerful fieldwork experiences. In this sense, her chapter makes most explicit that “intimacy” is not meant as a euphemism for sex with informants, but is rather a way to understand the potential of mutual vulnerability, exposure, and close connection that ethnographic encounters make possible and even necessary. Embracing intimacy is thus, in all these chapters, a way to push past the epistemological limits of methodological distance.
Incommensurabilities
Variegated forms of intimacy enable us to push, experientially and analytically, beyond discourses of identity in productive ways. Just as the chapters in the “interpellations” section push us to decenter self-professed identity and erotic subjectivity, and those in the “intimacies” section unsettle distinctions between observer and observed, the chapters in this section show how such decentering and unsettling enables us to push through the impasses of incommensurability, even as incommensurability remains a problem with which anthropologists and informants alike continue to grapple.
Dieter Haller’s chapter, based on fieldwork in Morocco, pushes beyond the Foucauldian paradigm of confession. Understandings of “the inner self” may appear to make adherence to certain religious identities incompatible with certain expressions
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of sexuality. Haller shows how Germans and Moroccans experience this incommensurability differently, highlighting how, for the Moroccan Nadir, a model of discretion makes homosexual encounters possible and, in a certain sense, compatible with fulfilling cultural obligations (heterosexual marriage, fatherhood). Here, it is not about expressing the truth of the self as it is learning to be discreet about enacting desires. Discretion is not a mode of silence, to which confession is opposed, but rather itself a mode of enactment.
Similarly, Samuel Williams takes on the Foucauldian opposition between confession and silence. Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul, he shows how discourses of a “double life” do not do justice to the ways in which his informants navigate religious and sexual practices: “the way he carefully partitions his relationships into two domains is not regarded as a moral compromise but as a moral achievement.” Williams show how access to plural and unsettled discourses enables people to make sense of their lives in the “gaps” or “interstices” and opens up these ideas as key sites for ethnographic inquiry and attention.
Conversely, Robert Phillips offers a poignant counterpoint: even as incommensurability becomes navigable, it can very much remain a problem for anthropologists and informants alike. Phillips draws on his experience trying to reconcile two potentially incompatible aspects of his identity, as a gay man and an Orthodox Jew. Drawing on his academic trajectory, from work on gay Singapore to studies of pornography and gay Orthodox men in Jerusalem, Phillips shows how different kinds of research necessitate grappling with subjectivity in different ways. In/ coherent research programs and in/coherent selfhood become provocatively intertwined. Phillips narrates the heartbreaking death of Shira Banki, which becomes “a very tangible representation of the im/possibility of reconciling my sexual and religious subjectivities. It is almost as if that incident represents one part of my subjectivity, my fervently Orthodox Jewish self, attempting to kill my other, gay self.” If, as Williams writes, pushing beyond incommensurability is a “moral achievement,” Phillips’s piece shows how such achievements are often incomplete. Making sense of lives is an urgently ongoing work.
The chapters in this volume seek to contribute to the project of making sense in the domains of sex, sexuality, and erotic subjectivity, but in ways that extend beyond them with implications for all who take ethnographic encounter seriously. A key emphasis throughout these chapters is to take reflexivity beyond a focus on the self, to show how the self is situated in ways that unsettle methodological individualism and make intersubjective encounter a fundamental basis of being in the field and the world. Such engagements are epistemological, methodological, and ethical, shaped by the institutions of research and writing as the contexts of knowledge production and reception. Such engagements depend less on professed identity and more on various forms of interpellation, exposure, and appropriation. Such engagements result in the production of various forms of intimacy. And such engagements can both produce and push beyond the impasses of incommensurability. These are our core contributions to the conversation, as well as points of departure for future research.
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