Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality

Abstract

Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality. By Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Pp. 419. $60.00/£45.95 cloth; $29.95/£22.95 paper. Africanist scholars often rely heavily upon anthropologists for evidence about cultural practices, especially around topics like sexuality and gender relations. Many of us admire (and increasingly try to emulate) anthropologists' personal courage, dedication to fieldwork, and linguistic skills. But are we always appropriately careful in separating anthropologists' ostensibly scientific methodologies and observations from their personal subjectivity and political views? The sad example of the psychologist Phillipe Rushton, among many others, suggests otherwise, and also suggests where lack of due care can lead. Rushton notoriously argued that there was a direct correlation between supposedly large penis size, high promiscuity, and low intelligence among "Africans" (presumably this did not include African women).1 Writing in the 1990s, he based his theory in part on "evidence" naively drawn from a piece of virtual pornography published nearly a century earlier (Jacobus X, Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, 1898). Andrew and Harriet Lyons have drawn on over two decades of study in and about Africa to craft this impressive, thought-provoking book. They analyze numerous examples of the sometimes shockingly shoddy scholarship that was used to make (but also sometimes to refute) racist, misogynist, and homophobic arguments about sexuality to North American and British audiences. Irregular Connections should help gird us non-anthropologists with a more rigorously critical understanding of their (and by extension, our) disciplines. The aims are, first, to analyze moral snares and methodological pitfalls that influenced the study and representation of sexuality in anthropology as a professional field of study, and second, to reflect on what we can learn from this history in order to make future scholarship on sexuality less problematic. A central argument quickly emerges. From the very beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century, European and then American anthropologists "conscripted" select, sometimes completely fabricated evidence about various "natives" and "primitives" in order to advance their specific ideals and preferences against the prevailing wisdom of the day in their own societies. These included greater sexual freedom for white women, companionate marriage, eugenics, tolerance of homosexuality, the proper role of masturbation and prostitution, and much more. This is a persuasive argument, pioneered, I would say, by Rudi Bleys in his Geography of Perversion (a book to which the Lyons do not give much attention or credit). It closely follows the careers of some of the most prominent anthropologists in history right up to the present, linking their scholarship to struggles that were taking place in their personal lives, to struggles within the academy, and to wider developments in society. Apparently the great Malinowski was privately tormented by guilt and loneliness and lusted after his subjects, whom he called "niggers" and "little animals." Margaret Mead was bisexual, Havelock Ellis's wife a lesbian, and so on. In more recent times we now have it confirmed that several renowned researchers conducted horizontal field research. There were also periods of considerable professional insecurity that likely resulted in self-censorship. Probably the most famous case was that of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who sat on his findings of same-sex sexual relationships among the Azande for over forty years before he published them.2 The Lyons note the enduring centrality of Africa to "racialized discourses about sex and sexualized discourses about race" (pp. 7-8). They ask where exactly these discourses came from and why they are so enduring (indeed, they are enjoying new life through racists like Rushton and various AIDS experts like the Caldwells). …