Alice Dreger has a short piece up at The Atlantic entitled “Where Masturbation and Homosexuality Do Not Exist.” I personally find the title to be misleading, but the article itself is a fascinating highlight of a study done by Washington State University anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett into the sexual practices of two distinct central African tribe societies, the Aka and Ngandu people. The article focuses on interviews the Hewletts conducted into the sexual practices and behavior of the two tribes – focusing on the seeming non-existence of homosexuality and masturbation (auto eroticism) at the conceptual level for these peoples.
Dreger notes at one point in the article that “the Aka and Ngandu speak of sex as ‘searching for children.’” And that they associate sexual activity not only with conception, but also with the health of unborn fetuses, and that these views play a role in the cultural understanding of intercourse as the “work of the night” through which children are created and unborn children nurtured. She suggests that the absence of homosexuality and masturbation could have something to do with this view of sexuality:
…while the individuals the Hewletts interviewed — like the song — made it clear that sex is pleasurable for these folks, and something that brings couples closer, they also made clear that babies are the goal of sex. Said one Aka woman, “It is fun to have sex, but it is to look for a child.” Meanwhile, a Ngandu woman confessed, “after losing so many infants I lost courage to have sex.”
Is the strong cultural focus on sex as a reproductive tool the reason masturbation and homosexual practices seem to be virtually unknown among the Aka and Ngandu? That isn’t clear. But the Hewletts did find that their informants — whom they knew well from years of field work — “were not aware of these practices, did not have terms for them,” and, in the case of the Aka, had a hard time even understanding about what the researchers were asking when they asked about homosexual behaviors.
The article goes on to discuss how sexuality as a genetic and socially conditioned trait can lead to societies where expressions of homosexuality are almost non-existent. It is noted that the absence of homosexual behavior and identity are not the same as the absence of same-sex attractions and desires, just that the society does not have a developed conceptual language to describe these desires or their behavioral manifestations, nor does it appear that same-sex attracted individuals in these cultures have conduits to express their desires in a meaningful way through behavior:
When I put this [question about the existence of homosexual desire] to the Hewletts, they replied that indeed, the desire may exist in some individuals in these groups, but we simply do not know. They added that although the Aka and Ngandu live in small groups, “They travel extensively and our studies suggest each person knows about 400-500 individuals,” which means that, theoretically, a person with homosexual desires might find another person with the same. But in a culture in which the general idea of a desire doesn’t exist, such a desire might remain unarticulated, even if two people who share it find each other.
The absence of masturbation is harder to explain. It is noted that it is not a forbidden, socially taboo behavior that individual tribe members might conceal out of shame or fear, but rather the very concept of auto eroticism is alien. This is a striking finding, and one that raises questions. Dreger suggests that the mysterious absence of masturbation, something most westerners assume is a nearly universal sexual activity, might be due to the fact that it is not certain that masturbation is actually a universal sexual activity:
This finding recalls a much-discussed 2010 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper called “The WEIRDest people in the world?” in which the authors argued that far too many sweeping claims about “human nature” are drawn exclusively from samples of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.
Studies of small-scale, rural, non-Western cultures like the Aka and Ngandu paint a more complicated picture of human variation. The Hewletts remark that, “the Western cultural emphasis on recreational sex has … led some researchers to suggest that human sexuality is similar to bonobo apes because they have frequent non-reproductive sex, engage in sex throughout the female cycle, and use sex to reduce social tensions.” But, the Hewletts suggest, “The bonobo view may apply to Euro-Americans (plural), but from an Aka or Ngandu viewpoint, sex is linked to reproduction and building a family.” Where sex is work, sex may just work differently.
Does this thesis, that a “more complicated picture of human variation” is at play than generally western biased sociology suggests resonate with anyone? I’d love to know your thoughts on the role of WEIRD biases in sociology.
I am also curious to hear reactions to this article generally; especially the sections that speculate on the genetic and sociological aspects of sexuality and sexual formation. I was struck by, and remain curious about the idea that individuals experiencing same-sex attraction in a society with no concept of homosexuality would never integrate those attractions and desires into their personal conceptions of their identity, even if they never acted out their attractions as behaviors. That seemed unrealistic to me – I can imagine a person with no formal theoretical understanding of homosexuality still internally understanding “these attractions a part of who I am, and make different from many (or all) of my neighbors.” It seems like any self aware individual would necessarily integrate this into their identity, even if they thought it was an odd personal quirk which didn’t relate to their sexual expression. I wonder if anyone has ever studied issues of sexual identity in depth for people living in these cultures, or if the Hewletts are right when they note that it is something we simply can’t know because the vocabulary doesn’t exist to ask probing questions. I’d love to know your thoughts.
h/t to Michael Hannon at Fordham Univ., a link he posted led me to this article.
Categories: General
How ‘bout economics? See Karl Polyani, The Great Transformation (1944), Chapter IV, “SOCIETIES AND ECONOMIC SYSTEMS” (pp 43 – 55), challenging the Western assumption that all people naturally pursue self-interest through entrepreneurial trade.
Polyani cites historical and anthropological studies for the proposition that 1) people’s economic behavior is overwhelmingly governed by culture, not autonomous self-interest, 2) entrepreneurial trade is not a natural activity but rather merely one more parochial manifestation of Western culture that Westerners project onto other peoples, and 3) even within the West, entrepreneurial “free” trade was pretty exceptional prior to the Renaissance. It may be that people everywhere pursue status within a group, but we can’t assume that people everywhere choose to promote their status through trading to acquire wealth.
The absence of proof is not the proof of absence. Yet, the researchers (or the author of the article) then go on to build a whole theory out of it.
The next big issue I see is that children’s song and how they seem to ignore the implications of its content. The song is all about what kind of lover the woman wants (the size and length of the penis, specifically), but sex is only for recreation?
Having been born in the Soviet Union, we also did not have sex for “recreational” purposes. Allegedly. Does that mean that no one was having it for recreational purposes? Of course not. And Soviet Union was about one-sixth of the Earth’s landmass and 293 million at the time of break-up. A group that is incomparably smaller population and territory-wise, that can not rely on the certainty of protection of the government, a group like that is not going to start admitting to something that may seem wrong, inappropriate, unacceptable in their neighborhood.
Victor,
I think you make a good point. They don’t really give the context of heterosexual sexual behavior among tribe members (are we talking about sex between married couples? Monogamous pairings? Or are tribe members engaging sexually with multiple partners over their lifetimes?). They suggest one tribe is more egalitarian than the other in work-roles, but don’t really give us any indication about how social structure plays out in the sexual interactions of members of each tribe.
They do say, in reference to the song, that the pleasures of sex are important and play into the decision calculus of a female in choosing her mate – but it seemed implied that this is secondary to the “searching for children” or “work of the night” aspects that, if I read it properly, are interwoven into the very meaning the tribe gives to the word sex. Without more evidence I tend to agree with you that we can’t say recreational sex isn’t happening, but it does seem that sex in these cultures is endowed with a procreative meaning as its telos.
I find it interesting that the Hewletts note that views of masturbation and homosexuality are not viewed as taboo, they simply aren’t conceptualized at all. So I am not sure that they would see such acts as wrong, inappropriate, or unacceptable…so much as alien. It seems hard to fathom that there are cultures where these practices are non-existent, but I assume the Hewletts know enough to make the assertions they make.
Again though, the tribe’s views on recreational sex aren’t specifically discussed, so I am hesitant to wager a guess about how they’d feel about it. Hopefully in the full study the Hewletts delve a little deeper.
Matthew,
I take all the articles like these in popular periodicals with a salt of grain on the basis of my experience with the way they often miscommunicate what the researchers themselves actually intend to say.
But there are greater issues. On one hand, researchers are credited as saying that there’s no taboo. But if you do a google search using the name of the country and “lgbt”, lgbt in the Central African Republic, according to the first article, do actually experience prejudice. This information is very ambiguous. and the author of the article is not helping.
She writes this: “The Ngandu “were familiar with the concept” of homosexual behavior, “but no word existed for it and they said they did not know of any such relationships in or around the village. Men who had traveled to the capital, Bangui, said it existed in the city and was called ‘PD’ (French for par derriere or from behind).”" – So, they actually do have a concept of it and the name for it, albeit the word does not come from their own language.
Had my grandmother been alive, I’d love for the interviewers to try and ask her any questions about sex, and see what kind of response they would get
My basic reaction is skepticism. I have a friend who lived in a country where someone asked him why Westerners had invented homosexuality. Nevertheless, there were homosexual behaviors going on there!
No masturbation seems very surprising to me. I suppose there might not be any privacy.
Victor,
Just for clarity sake it is not clear if these tribes are located in the CAR, or further south in the Congo, or how isolated they are from other groups or urbanized sections of the region. This part of Africa has very little physical infrastructure (especially in the Congo basin), so it is possible for some cultures to have survived without much direct influence from the west, or westernized parts of Africa.
I don’t doubt that you are correct that it is difficult for LGBT individuals in central Africa, and even in these isolated groups. I imagine that LGBT individuals in these communities are more than likely to struggle with feelings of confusion because their societies don’t have a way of acknowledging their experience, or are forced to use colonial slang to do so…which would be very existentially dehumanizing. And I suspect that what conceptualizations they borrow from outside influences are more than likely negative (coming from either fundamentalist Christian or Muslim views more common in the urban areas).
I suspect if my grandmother was alive, and asked about all this, she’d have smacked the anthropolgist for being fresh…
Um, they live in the jungle. Or were you joking? I’m really not sure if you were being serious or not.
Matt, I don’t disagree with you, but I think we should be careful in using western terms to describe people WE might call LGBT individuals. I think Diane M inadvertantly hit it on the head when she said, “I have a friend who lived in a country where someone asked him why Westerners had invented homosexuality. Nevertheless, there were homosexual behaviors going on there!” Maybe that nameless “someone” is not a naif and knows that some men have sex with other men, but that those instances don’t comport with a western notion of homosexuality. It is possible for a westerner and a non-westerner to see the same thing, to understand the same western concept, and to disagree on the labeling. Now, I’m not a cultural relativist, so I’ll agree with you that sometimes tribal slang needs to be changed or modified to support the dignity of every person, but even so, the modification itself will be culturally constructed and not western, at least not in the short-term.
I’m not sure about the French for “from behind.” Insulting French slang for homosexuals is pede, pronounced like P.D. if you are using the French words for the letters.
Bregaland – I wasn’t joking, but I wasn’t thinking of people living in a forest. I was thinking that in many cultures people live on top of each other and don’t have privacy the way we do. Everyone sleeps together. You don’t have a room of your own.
I guess the question would be, do they go off on their own in the forest to hunt, or do people stick together pretty much all the time?
the married couple of anthropologists from Washington State University “decided to systematically study sexual behavior after several campfire discussions with married middle-aged Aka men who mentioned in passing that they had sex three or four times during the night. At first [they] thought it was just men telling their stories, but we talked to women and they verified the men’s assertions.”
Perhaps people are just too tired to engage in any other sexual behaviors. And since they see this as something they should be doing for survival and to produce babies, they focus on male-female intercourse.
“In both cultures, men and women view sexual intercourse as a kind of “work of the night.” The purpose of this work is the production of children — a critical matter in an area with a very high infant mortality rate. Semen is understood by the Aka and Ngandu to be necessary not only to conception, but also to fetal development. A woman who is already pregnant will see having intercourse as contributing to the health of her fetus.”
I believe that the Aka do not masturbate in the same way that I believe that 16% of the respondents to the Regnerus study was telling the truth when they said that they had never masturbated. I.e., not at all.
@Billy – Kinsey found that 62% of women he interviewed had masturbated. I think he was mostly looking at college students.
I find it believable that 16% of a group of young women might have never masturbated.
One doesn’t necessarily need privacy, in the Western “only person in the room” sense, to have partnered sex OR solitary sex (the colloquial definition of “masturbation”). In crowded living situations, people learn how not to see or hear what other people are doing as a way of granting privacy — or it simply isn’t a cultural taboo to witness someone else’s sexual activity.
Given that “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” as we construct it in the modern Western psycho-biological sense has only been around for about one hundred years (though same-sex sexual activity has, obviously, existed in many forms in many places), I’m not that shocked by the idea that there might be a culture that didn’t have a similar concept. Rather than framing such an anthropological study in terms of what culture X does NOT have which we in the West take for granted, I’d be more interested in learning how culture X organizes sexual desires and activities — what their cosmology of sexuality is, so to speak.
Perhaps some people are threatened by the notion that sexual activity, expression, or identity Z isn’t the universal constant they thought it was? But I frankly don’t think that has much bearing on my here-and-now. I find it fascinating, as someone who’s a sex nerd and historian, to think about other ways of organizing sexuality. But I’m also comfortable in the schema I have to organize my own sexuality, since it works for me (and my wife) in building a life worth living.
annajcook,
I think I may have come off as defensive. My position is actually very similar to yours. I agree with everything you’ve said on the issue. I just see holes in the article – quite likely created by the reporter, not the two researchers. The problem is that without reading the researchers’ own writing on the topic, all we are left with is this article and the choice of the focus as well as – even more basically – the choice of wording of the reporter.
Oh, come on. Mahmoud Amedinejad claimed, as recently as a couple years ago, that there are no homosexuals in Iran.
@Victor – I wasn’t actually directing my “perhaps some people are threatened” comment at you, so please don’t feel the need to apologize or explain your skepticism on my account! I agree with you that the study seems weak at points. My final paragraph was a more general observation about our desire to locate sexual behavior in biology or evolutionary roots, and the way that anthropological studies often get harnessed to “prove” that sexuality X or sexual behavior Y is or isn’t “natural” or “hard wired.”
I’m wondering if thinking of sex as closely linked to reproduction means that the people in these societies have fewer affairs and/or wait until they are in a committed relationship to have sex.