The Dictionary of Homophobia (15 page)

Certainly, anthropology has not always excluded these realities, but it has locked them into an idea of social order that remains quite inferior to the observable facts within contemporary society, especially with regard to the analysis of sexuality. As underlined by Laurent Bazin, Rommel Mendès-Leite, and Catherine Quiminal, “If anthropology has always considered immediate and extended family as its preferred theme, the construction of an issue around sexuality, which is effectively situated at its epicenter without being locked in, runs up against a definite skepticism despite precedents of great notoriety, such as the works of Malinkowski, Mead, Godelier or even Herdt.”

Thus, evoking a “political economy of sexuality,” Bazin et al emphasize that it “is always and everywhere conceived as a central issue within the most diverse interactions that occur on the micro and macro-social scales.” Thus, the study of sexuality, when it does not remain locked away by the constraints of prevention (specifically,
AIDS
prevention) or activism (notably that which has developed within AIDS prevention groups), is a favored subject for the understanding of political expressions of socio-sexual differences. As Mendès-Leite has stated, it is not a question of underestimating the interest of the work conducted for useful purposes, nor the work conducted from a militant perspective, but to preserve the vast horizon of possibilities that sexuality can offer as a complete subject of inquiry, and by that fact, the qualitative research on sexuality has been quickly confronted by the necessity to elaborate upon often bold field methodologies that ask essential questions.

From a strictly etymological point of view, anthropology is the discipline that studies man within society. Though man has never stopped questioning himself about himself, the composition of scientific knowledge which studies humanity appears quite late on the social-philosophical scene. Thus, anthropological thought is contemporary to the expansion of commercial capitalism and the exploitation of the New World. Its first confrontation with otherness, even if it refers to cultural difference, cannot be understood outside the context of this colonial exploration. If the Renaissance sought to know the definition of man through the diversity of human societies, this Other is often nothing more than an object/pretext. Blinded by their need to civilize, to catechize, and to acquire riches, the Conquistadors often asked themselves, “Do Indians have a soul?” and “What should be done about these sodomite practices?”

It is in this context, and in particular with the tales of travel to America, that anthropological science took its first steps; as a result, new and unnerving figures of otherness, such as sodomites, Amazonians, and hermaphrodites, began to populate the pages of travel stories. Today, according to Guy Poirier, these tales can be read as revealers of image hang-ups, insofar as they offer “the keystone to European anxiety-provoking networks.” In their casting of otherness, these texts represent a key moment in the history, or pre-history, of anthropology. Certain travelers, such as Jean de Léry (considered by Lévi-Strauss to be the first ethnologist), briefly mention this “abominable sin,” while others, like the Spaniard Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca who, after his exploration of Florida, are more specific: “During the time I was among these people, I saw a diabolical thing: a man married to another man.” Similarly, in his 1533
Chronicles of Peru
, Cieza de Léon wrote: “In each temple or important place of worship, they have one or two men, if not more, dressed as women since childhood, and who speak like them and imitate their habits, their dress and all. The men—and the chiefs in particular—have immoral carnal relations with them on feast or holy days, as if it were a rite or a ceremony. I know because I punished two of them.” In Mexico, all the elements of future tragedies were already in place: In his July 10, 1519 letter to Charles Quint, Cortez said that the Indians “are sodomites and practice the abominable sin.” In this regard, in their writings, the great travelers express their fascination for this New World as well as their horror for the crime of sodomy, which appears to be widespread on the continent. In this context, nascent anthropology is largely supportive of colonialist aims, religious proselytism, and homophobic thought.

However, this argument against sodomy goes well beyond the Amerindian context. The descriptions of Eastern morals gave place to incredibly homophobic descriptions and fantasies. Thus, as far as Christianity was concerned, Muslims were the enemy
par excellence
of the time. Travelers never ceased to be scandalized by the unnatural morals, the harems, and the universal lustfulness of the region.
The Travels of Seigneur de Villamont
, first published in 1595, expresses the author’s dismay regarding adolescents whom the sultans “guard more jealously that their own wives.” The reality of the practices described is not necessarily false, but the moral judgment of them is often reproachful. From that time, the medieval confusion by which sodomy became a form of
heresy
, a heresy in love, is revived within this Muslim context. Sixteenth-century French geographer Nicolas de Nicolay insists that after the capture of Constantinople, religious buildings were transformed into “stables and bordellos for bardascia (effeminate young males) and whores,” demonstrating the link between religious profanation and sexual profanation. As for Bartholomeus Georgiewitz, who was enslaved by the Turks, he conjures up a terrifying image of the fate awaited by victims: “All night long you will hear the wails and the screams of the youth of all ages, whom they abuse. Not even a child of six or seven will the miserable sodomites spare of their villainy, and they will carry out their abominable and unnatural intentions.”

In all, whether the Americas, the Orient, Africa, or Oceania, every group has been perceived, with reason or not, as a center of unnatural relations. These observations, or fantasies, have often been determining factors at the center of social imagination where xenophobic impulses, religious fanaticism, and economic lust have contributed to the elaboration of a long-lived homophobic doxa: homosexuality is a foreign
vice
. Obviously, this argument does not constitute real anthropological knowledge, but represents a form of prehistory of anthropology whose characteristics weigh heavily on the history of the discipline, which sometimes has great difficulty freeing itself from its old demons.

Thus, this idea of foreign vice, conveyed by a rather primitive anthropology, was taken up and reflected by a more knowledgeable, though no less homophobic, anthropology, as demonstrated by the works of anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta. In 1938, Kenyatta, who later became the first president of an independent Kenya, published a book prefaced by famed Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, titled
Facing Mount Kenya
, in which he strived to prove that homosexual relationships were foreign to the Kenyan Gikuyu culture and, more generally, to African culture. Since then, this idea, which, as can be imagined, has been well received in
Africa
, has given rise to many other works and arguments that claim homosexuality to be a European vice, a White vice, in short … a foreign vice. Today, these themes are propagated across Africa and are used to justify homophobic violence, as ancestral black cultures are, “naturally,” exempt of this decadent perversion.

In short, the role of anthropology in the establishment of homophobic
rhetoric
is not new. But what does twentieth-century social and cultural anthropology (from the travel story to formal research) finally teach us about homosexuality and homophobia? Firstly, that most non-Western societies have types of “homosexuality,” but they do not correspond to the definition we give homosexuality in the West. Most often, the category of “homosexual” does not exist. And it is rare to find sexual relations (or unions) between persons of the same social gender or even of the same generation, as is presently most often the case in the West. By simplifying, we can say that these societies have two large forms of homosexual practices. The first is based on a gender differentiation (i.e. one partner has a social gender that is different from his biological gender), and the second is based on generational differentiation; sometimes both forms are combined (Dynes and Donaldson, 1992). Thus, far from being repressed, the forms of homosexuality that we encounter in many non-Western societies often have a limited, but accepted place in those societies. For example, it is not rare for these individuals to be in charge of religious or spiritual matters, or that
marriages
between same-sex couples or their adoption of children to be accepted. What anthropology finally teaches us is that many societies function by dispensing with homophobia; that it is not a social inevitability. However, until the recent appearance of gay and lesbian studies, anthropology has never bothered to really develop an in-depth, methodical knowledge of the way certain societies ignore homophobia. This is why anthropologist Walter L. Williams, who has focused on the study of homosexual subcultures, was in favor of a commitment by researchers to the study of “non-homophobic” societies (i.e. societies that reserve an equal place to homosexuals), “before they disappear.”

If we take into consideration what anthropology teaches with regard to the social recognition of homosexuality in various cultures or societies, we would find it paradoxical that the inegalitarian social and legal treatment of homosexuals in France was justified by certain “experts” who opposed equal rights in the name of “
symbolic order
” and “laws” allegedly based on anthropological constants. These arguments were used by sociologist Irène Théry, and repeated by many others after her, in her endless fight against complete legal recognition of same-sex couples. On the other hand, many researchers, such as Eric Fassin, Jeanne Favret-Saada, and Marie-Elisabeth Handman, have demonstrated the partial and instrumental logic of such arguments, by reaffirming the high malleability of cultural, social, or symbolic limits that those resistant to legal advances insist are immutable. But, in conforming with anthropology’s long silence on homosexuality, the great majority of anthropologists has remained silent, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss (Fassin, 1999), or Françoise Héritier, who categorically refuses to integrate the homosexual question into her texts, even when it would seem inevitable (Héritier, 2002).
¹

Thus, no situation seems more favorable to the evaluation of contemporary anthropology’s normative dimension than the debate surrounding same-sex unions and gay families. In fact, generally speaking, anthropology in France and elsewhere has assumed a normative role in response to a political demand. It has been recuperated and exploited by researchers who have succumbed to the “charm of
a priori
expertise,” forgetting, as sociologist Eric Fassin said, that “politicians look to the experts in order to justify their refusals.” Fassin also underlines that in this democratic debate, there is no use in saying that sexual differences are the “impassible impediments of thought” or in setting limits to what is considered in the “neutrality of knowledge.” If it is not conceived through the process of acknowledging the context of the production and reception of its knowledge of the social world it will always be restricted to the normative dimension.

In this sense, setting up themes within taboos reinforces its normative dimension, prevents the expression of the critical dimension that should be its own, and betrays the homophobia that Anthropology disclaims. Consequently, anthropology would benefit from reexamining the works of Michel Foucault which, as much by his criticism of
essentialism
and of the reifying character of social sciences as by his proposal of a “history of problematics,” would no doubt pave the way for the development of scientific knowledge that is neither condemning nor totalitarian.
—
Christophe Broqua and Alexandra Fleming Câmara Vale

1
All the while Héritier was taking an
anti-PaCS
stand by co-signing an article that appeared in
Le Monde
, titled “Ne laissons pas la critique du PaCS à la droite!” (Let’s not leave the criticism of PaCS to the right!), written by sociologist Nathalie Heinich and published a few days before the famous demonstration organized by Christine Boutin.

Blackwood, Evelyn, ed.
Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior
. New York: The Haworth Press, 1986.

Bleys, Rudi C.
The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination
,
1750–1918
. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1995.

Borrillo, Daniel, Eric Fassin, and Marcela Iacub, eds.
Au-delà du PACS: l’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.

Dynes, Wayne R., and Stephen Donaldson, eds.
Ethnographic Studies of Homosexuality
. New York: Garland, 1992.

Eliacheff, Caroline, Antoine Garapon, Nathalie Heinich, Françoise Héritier, Aldo Naouri, Paul Veyne, and Heinz Wismann. “Ne laissons pas la critique du PaCS à la droite!”
Le Monde
, (January 27, 1999).

Evans-Pritchard, Edward. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande,”
American Anthropologist
, no. 72 (1970).

Fassin, Eric. “L’Illusion anthropologique: homosexualité et filiation,”
Témoin
, no. 12 (May–June 1998).

———. “Le Savant, l’expert et le politique,”
Genèses
, no. 32 (1998).

———. “Usages de la science et science des usages: à propos des familles homoparentales,”
L’Homme
, no. 154–155 (2000).

Favret-Saada, Jeanne. “La-Pensée-Lévi-Strauss,”
Journal des anthropologies
, no. 82–83 (2000).

Godard, Didier.
L’Autre Faust: l’homosexualité masculine pendant la Renaissance
. Montblanc: H & O Editions, 2001.

Goldberg, Jonathan. “Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New,”
Social Text
, no. 9 (1991).

Handman, Marie-Elisabeth. “Sexualité et famille: approche anthropologique.” In
Au-delà du PACS: l’expertise familiale à l’épreuve de l’homosexualité
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999.