Attitudes, practices, and beliefs regarding sex, sexuality, and gender – indeed, the very categories on which these ideas and behaviors are based – vary across cultures.
Readers might be prepared to learn, then, that not all cultures share the notion of two and only two sexes or genders at all. In fact, Thomas Laqueur (1990) has suggested that the idea of two sexes/genders is actually recent in Western cultures;
he asserts that until the eighteenth century there was only onesex – male – and that females were regarded as incomplete or damaged males (Freud’s theories echo this sentiment, with his “penis envy” view). On the other hand, a story told in Plato’s Symposiumrelates that in the beginning there were three sexes, each dual – one androgynous (male/female), one male/male, and one female/female – which were split in half by the gods, sending each person in search of his or her “other half”
(which might be the “opposite” sex or the “same” sex).
Be that as it may, in more than a few cultures there are categories of third or even fourth genders – and even sexes – based on beliefs and concepts that may not exist in other cultures. A few examples of such identities include the following.
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1.. BBeerrddaacchhee. In many Native American societies there is or was a tradition of males who adopted certain female roles and traits. In fact, Roscoe (1994) indicates that almost a hundred and fifty societies had the third gender, and almost half of those had a fourth gender for women playing more masculine roles. Early Western observers deemed them “transvestites” or “homosexuals,” partly judgmentally and partly because those were the only categories the observers possessed. However, within the societies, berdaches were members of a distinct and often highly regarded gender. Some were assigned to the category based on physical features, particularly hermaphrodite genitals. Others chose the role. One of the best cases of a berdache institution is the Navajo nadleehe, or “one who changes continuously.” Like the Zuni, they believed that sex or gender was not entirely fixed, nor was it always related to external/bodily traits. The Navajo nadleehewas greatly respected, often given control of the family’s wealth and active as a religious specialist. They performed female economic roles and might dress as males, females, or neither. The Mohave alyhaand the Lakotah winkteare two of the better known examples (see Roscoe (1998: 213–47) for a more complete listing). Commonly, berdache status was not believed to be about bodies at all but about spirit – about having “two spirits,” both male and female, in one body.
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2.. EEuunnuucchh. The common image of eunuchs is castrated males in ancient and medieval societies who were assigned specific roles and tasks, most famously guarding the harems of polygamist leaders. However, eunuchs were not always castrated;
they might be sterile or celibate or simply lacking in sexual desire. The defining feature of the eunuch status was not absence of male parts but absence of “manliness,”
based on their non-generativity (i.e., they would or could not have children).
Ringrose (1994) indicates that they were a legitimate third gender, neither male nor female, and that they performed functions that neither males nor females could do.
Laqueur, Thomas. 1990.
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Eunuch
A gender category involving non-sexual individuals (usually men), who may be castrated or merely celibate, sterile, or lacking sexual desire.
Berdache
A gender concept in some Native American societies for biological males who adopt certain behavioral and personality characteristics of females.
Interestingly, these jobs often involved positions of mediation and transaction across boundaries, such as doorkeepers, guards, messengers, servants, secretaries, and masters of ceremonies – suggesting that their own anomalous circumstances made them fit for dealing with anomalous boundary-crossing circumstances.
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3.. HHiijjrraa. In northern India, a virtual subsociety of individuals regarded as “neither man nor woman” – but also “man plus woman” – exists and participates in the greater society (Nanda 1999). Hijrasmay be born with male or hermaphroditic body parts;
either way, they share the quality of impotence. The ultimate mark of a true hijra, though, is to have the male genitals removed completely (in a ritual called nirvana), so that the person truly is neither man nor woman but a third distinct type. Hijras typically live in their own communal groups under the leadership of a guru or teacher, forming a surrogate kinship system. Local groups are organized into “houses”
(of which there are seven with names and histories and rules); each house has a regional leader or naik, and the regional leaders occasionally meet at the national level. Hijrasare most known for their musical performances at weddings and births.
Ironically to Westerners, hijrasas non-sexual beings and ascetics are associated in Hindu tradition with fertility and procreation. They are sexually ambiguous, but in a culturally specific way: the god Shiva possesses androgynous traits and is ascetic, blurring the Western lines not only between male and female but between sexuality and asceticism.
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4.. TTrraavveessttii. In Brazil, there is a type of effeminate male who actively attempts to achieve more female-like physical features and often works as a male prostitute. They are not transsexuals and do not claim to be women; rather, they say that they want to be “feminine” or “like women” (Kulick 1997). To that end, they take female hor- mones and undergo surgery to modify their bodies to a more culturally appropriate
Hijra
A gender concept in India for biological males who regard themselves as neither male nor female; they often play a social role at weddings and childbirths.
PLATE 5.3 Hijrasin India often sing and dance at weddings and childbirths Nanda, Serena. 1999.
Neither Man nor Woman:
The Hijras of India(2nd edn). Belmont, CA:
Wadsworth Publishing Company.
Travesti
An alternate gender role in Brazil, in which males take on certain physical traits and sexual behaviors typically associated with females.
female shape. They are often appreciated for their beauty, by female standards. They do not, however, undergo sex-change operations, since they do not want to be women or to lose their male genitals. Sexually, they act as receivers of anal sex with men but never as penetrators. Kulick argues that travestido not constitute a third gender but rather represent the Brazilian dualistic view of gender identity – two genders, “men” and “not-men” (including women and travestis), based not on bodies but on behavior. In this case, the behavior is partly the role in sexual intercourse (men penetrate, non-men are penetrated) and partly on more general qualities of dress, manner, and so on. A “real man” could have sex with a travestiand remain a real man, so long as he was the penetrator. In fact, travestisthought it would be offensive to have sex with each other, since they were the “same kind.”
There are a few documented cases of “cross-gender” female institutions in various cultures. Schwimmer (1984) mentions female transvestism in four Melanesian societies. A number of Native American societies had female correlates of the male berdache status, including the Mohave hwamerole. According to Grémaux (1994), there was a custom by which women could become “social males” in the Balkans.
One process involved a biological female who renounced her femaleness in adult- hood, often via a vow of abstention from sex and marriage. A second process involved the decision of the parents to raise a baby girl as a son, giving her access to property and inheritance and even training her as a soldier (especially when the family had no sons). However, around the world, “alternate” or “third” genders tend to be institutions for what the West would consider “biological males,” although not all societies, as we have seen, make the same assessment of that fact as do Western societies. Ultimately, the main difference between Western cultures and others that permit and value gender alternatives may be the latter’s toleration of ambivalence, ambiguity, and even contradiction in sex, identity, and other factors.
Finally and not surprisingly, modernization and globalization have left impres- sions on cultural conceptions of sex and gender. In the “transcultural junctures created by science, modernization, and development programs” (Pigg and Adams 2005: 21), foreign, especially Western, notions of sex and gender have circulated around the globe. The media for these cultural notions and images have included of course movies and music but also political discourse about human rights and even scientific discourse about contraception, abortion, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, and other “sexual health” issues. This supposedly neutral “medi- calization” of sexuality has affected local concepts and practices in disparate ways.
Readers may recall that the President of Iran recently denied that homosexuality even exists in Iran. Meanwhile, according to Cohen (2005), the Western or “cosmopolitan”
category of “gay” has been introduced into India, vying with traditional categories like hijraor kothi. According to Nguyen, the “new version of the ‘facts of life’” is reorganizing male–female and male–male relationships in the Ivory Coast (2005:
245), and ideas of women’s rights and practices like birth control are sparking reconstructions of the role of women, the nature of marriage, and the understanding of “morality” from Russia and India to China and Africa – and the West as well.
One point of convergence between gender and psychological concepts is the issue of “gender deviance.”
Proof of this claim is that the American Psychiatric Association only removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in 1973 (Naphy 2004: 208). The term “homosexual” had only been introduced in 1848 by Karoly Maria Benkert, who opined that it represented “a direct horror of the opposite sex” (quoted 206). Homosexuals and other “deviants” were subjected to medical and surgical “therapies” including castration and lobotomy: Norway reportedly lobotomized 2,500 patients, Sweden 3,300, and Denmark 3,500, including its last case in 1981 (209). Homosexuality was a literal crime in most of the U.S.A. into the 1970s. Meanwhile, women in the U.S.A. in the 1940s and 1950s who did not conform to conventional roles of housewife and mother were condemned as bad or sick. Failure to have children was regarded as a “quasi-perversion,” and women “who had trouble adjusting” to the life of a housewife and mother were labeled “neurotic, perverted, or schizophrenic” (Coontz 1992: 32). Maladjusted women were given drugs and electroshock treatment. Gender and sexual nonconformists are still stigmatized and discriminated against in many societies. What do you think?
BOX 5.3 CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL CONTROVERSIES: GENDER AND MENTAL ILLNESS
Coontz, Stephanie. 1992.
The Way We Never Were:
American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York:
Basic Books.
SUMMARY
Human beings are individuals, but they must and do learn to be particular kinds of individuals, and this occurs under the influence of culture.
Psychological anthropology or culture and personality bridges the gap between the poles of “nature” and “nurture” – humans have an individual and a species nature which is nurtured in specific ways to achieve specific outcomes.
■ Enculturation is the process that links the individual to his or her society and its expected and desired psychological and behavioral characteristics.
■ Personality is the individual product or precipitate of a person’s expe- rience in a social context, based on more or less explicit and intentional practices aimed at raising the proper kind(s) of people.
■ Modal personality is the cumulative or statistical result, the most common personality traits in a society, where personality traits may or will be distributed according to factors such as age, sex, class, and so on.
In the final analysis every society contains a unique cultural ontology or theory/system of what kinds of entities and beings – human and otherwise – exist, what their natures are, and how society should respond to them.
■ Some societies, but not necessarily all, posit a “self” that distinguishes the individual.
■ Humans may not be the only species capable of “self”-awareness, any more than we are the only species capable of “language” or “culture.”
Part of a society’s ontology includes its sex/gender system. A society may:
■ identify two sexes or genders based on physical traits
■ identify two sexes or genders based on other than physical traits
■ identify three or more sexes or genders based on physical or other than physical traits.
That is, human individuals come with particular physical/bodily configura- tions, but how society interprets and values – culturizes – those physical facts is relative.
Key Terms
Basic personality Berdache
Childrearing practices Cultural ontology Culture and personality Dowry death
Eunuch
Female circumcision (FGM or female genital mutilation)
Female infanticide Foot-binding Gender
Hijra Honor killing Modal personality National character Personality Primitive mentality Psychic unity of humanity Psychological anthropology Purdah
Sati
Sexual dimorphism Travesti
IIn nd diiv viid du ua allss a an nd d IId de en nttiittiie ess:: R Ra acce e a
an nd d E Etth hn niicciitty y
In the interior of Suriname, one of three small countries on the north coast of South America, live six “black tribes” sometimes called collectively “Maroons” – the Ndyuka, the Matawai, the Saamaka, the Aluku, the Pamaka, and the Kwinti (van Velzen and van Wetering 2004). Numbering more than 100,000 people in total, they are clearly not “native” to Suriname; that is, there were traditionally no black tribes in South America. The ancestors of the Maroon societies were brought to South America from Africa as slaves by the Dutch, to labor in the new Dutch colony.
Predictably, many African slaves escaped into the southern jungle, often welcomed or aided by local native South American peoples. By the early 1700s, independent named black societies were established inland, and in 1760 the Ndyuka even signed a treaty with the colonial administration. Over the years, each Maroon tribe devel- oped its own unique culture, reflecting a combination of influences including but not limited to European, African, and Native American. And the Maroon peoples are only part of a much more complex multicultural Suriname which is also home to Asian Indians, Javanese, Creoles, and Native Americans. Interestingly, Suriname’s neighbor, Guyana, “never evolved black tribes” (2004: 8).
Human beings belong to a single species. However, it is an incredibly diverse species, behaviorally and physically – a “polytypic species,” one that comes in a variety of different forms. Long before anthropology existed, people were trying to make sense of this diversity, and one enduring concept invented by Western societies
122THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RACE
128THE MODERN ANTHROPOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF RACE
132THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ETHNICITY
137RACIAL AND ETHNIC GROUPS AND RELATIONS IN CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE 147SUMMARY
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to categorize and explain human diversity is race. More recently, observers suggested the concept of “ethnic group” to refer to the same, or sometimes quite different, human variables. Both terms, but especially race, have a troubled history, fraught with confusion and abuse. Both terms, like gender, are also ways to classify humans and, even more importantly, to assign value and tasks to humans. In other words, like gender, race and ethnicity are examples of an ontology or a taxonomy, a classification and evaluation system. As anthropologists, we are indeed interested in human dif- ference – the characteristics of distinct human groups – but we are equally if not more interested in the systems by which those groups are conceived, the relations between those groups, and the social practices by which, and the social purposes for which, those groups and relations are created, perpetuated, contested, or changed.