SEX AND SOCIETY: THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EROS

Posted by admin on April 6, 2009 under Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction | Be the First to Comment

Anthropological awareness has not always been well served by precedents set by our intellectual ancestors. From Lewis Henry Morgan we received the option of studying family form instead of sexuality. Modern anthropologists can elect this option, even though they no longer subscribe to the unilinear evolutionary argument that the first is a transformed form of the second.

From Malinowski came a perspective which introduces into anthropology the notion that sexuality is equivalent to instinctual biological drive. Even though Malinowski ostensibly argued against a Freudian position which would give primacy to psychological over cultural systems, he accepted the Freudian view of sexuality. Consequently, Malinowski focused on cultural institutions which mediate between biological structure and sexual behavior; he did not consider sexuality as part of the symbolic structure of culture.

Similarly, Lowie’s theorizing allowed the popular anthropological alternative to which economic and political considerations take precedence over erotic considerations in understanding cultural systems. Lowie’s work emphasized these social elements of cultural form, without realizing that erotic considerations are inherently social and can, indeed must, contribute to investigations of cultural systems.

All together, Morgan’s transformation of sexuality, Malinowski’s institutionalization of sexuality, and Lowie’s analytic substitution for sexuality, have contributed to a trend in anthropology away from the study of ideas about sexuality as they operate in larger cultural systems.

Despite this trend, there is a growing body of ethnography which takes a cultural approach to sexuality. The ethnological goal becomes one of comparing entire cultural systems, rather than behavioral facts regarding sexuality. This requires more than documenting the richness of sexual life in certain societies (although such documentation was a necessary contribution to anthropology in its infancy); it requires analysis of cultural systems which alternatively do and do not delineate sexuality as an organizing construct of independent status. One hopes that anthropological accounts will be consulted in the future, by anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike, not only for their wealth in accurate and detailed accounts of sexual behavior, but also because they advance our knowledge of people, including ourselves, as cultural thinkers and actors.

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