Same-Sex Relations in Anthropological Research: A Christian Perspective
By Robert J. Priest
Presentation Delivered at Indiana Wesleyan University, Oct 8, 2014
(Send feedback to rpriest@tiu.edu)
As an anthropologist I will briefly summarize some
of what is known about same-sex sexuality in other cultures.
I will suggest ways in which contemporary American takenfor-granted assumptions about same-sex relations turn out to
be problematic. I will summarize a theoretical approach that
can help us understand sexual patterns not only in the US
but around the world, and will suggest that this approach
lends itself to a Christian engagement with such realities.
Anthropologists have studied sexuality around the
world. One common and well-established pattern
(throughout indigenous North and South America and places
like the Philippines) where two biological males have sex
with each other, is for one and only one of the two to be
transgender or gender transformed, to take on the identity,
dress and role of female. Sometimes, but not always, this
includes sexual relations and/or even marriage with males.
Old sexual scripts in these societies diverge from
contemporary gay scripts in a couple of ways. First only the
transgendered person is thought to have a nature and identity
different from other biological males. Males who have sex
with transgendered persons in such societies typically also
have sex with females as opportunities allow, with their
sexual scripts focusing on being the penetrator, not on
whether it is a male or female body being penetrated.
Furthermore in most such societies these sexual relations
were asymmetrical, in that the transgendered person was
penetrated and/or facilitated the other person’s orgasm while
they themselves were not being brought to orgasm.
A variant on this cultural pattern involves an
individual adopting or being assigned a more specialized
role in society such as a shaman, but where the designated
role in that society involves transgender attributes. In India
for example, young biological males from lower castes join
the guild of hijras, where they adopt feminine dress and
manners, and where they play defined and remunerated
ceremonial roles in weddings and birth celebrations. The
ritual that makes them fully hijra involves cutting off their
penis and testicles – and by religious conception, as nirvans,
they are now supposed to be beyond such things as sexual
desire. But in practice most hijras serve as prostitutes
accepting male lovers, which is largely how they make their
living. Again, the nature of the sexual relations are
asymmetrical in terms of who actually achieves sexual
orgasm (necessarily so in the case of nirvans).
A third common pattern involves age-graded samesex relations, a pattern present in Ancient Greece, but also in
about 20% of the societies of New Guinea. Consider the
pattern as exemplified among the Sambia. At around the age
of 8 boys go through rituals designed to start them on the
path to becoming adult men and warriors. At this time they
learn they must consume semen in order to grow into
masculinity, and so they are required to perform fellatio for
teen-aged boys, and to swallow the semen. Then after
puberty males move into the role of having younger boys
perform fellatio on them. 100% of boys do this. No one
says, sorry I can’t perform sexually with males. But the
culture’s sexual script has told them the eventual end of sex
will be with a woman when they marry. And eventually
100% of men take a wife, have sex with her, and have a
family – at which time they are expected to stop having sex
with boys. No one says, sorry, I can’t do this with a woman.
Old Sambia men routinely scolded the gay anthropologist
Gilbert Herdt as he got older because he was stuck in the
adolescent phase of still only having sex with males, and
should now be mature enough to have a wife and children.
Notice the contrasts. Under one system, only when
one person is coded as feminine and one as masculine, do
same-sex relations occur. But in the age-graded system,
same-sex relations are associated with masculinity for both
parties, not with femininity. When a missionary asked an
older Sambia man, do you mean you did this when you were
a boy, the old man answered, “I have a beard, don’t I? Of
course I did.” These practices make you more masculine, not
less. Age-graded same-sex patterns, unlike transgender
same-sex patterns, framed all participants as masculine, and
co-existed comfortably with everyone eventually
transitioning to heterosexual marriage. All over North and
South America indigenous societies had transgender persons
who had sex with others that were biologically of the same
sex. But while New Guinea has been a place of choice for
gay anthropologists studying same sex relations, transgender
patterns appear to be completely absent from New Guinea.
In the majority of societies studied by anthropologists, if one
pattern is present, the other is absent. Of course neither
pattern corresponds to the contemporary US pattern where
gay identity is based on having a generalized sexual desire
only for members of one’s own sex, where such
directionality of desire in terms of object focus is thought to
be naturally occurring because biologically based, and
where same-sex relations are ideally egalitarian and
reciprocal. One conclusion that many anthropologists have
reached through studying the variable nature of these crosscultural realities is that these sexual patterns are socially
formed and
determined.
culturally
contingent,
not
biologically
But of course this contradicts a cultural belief in
America that these patterns are biologically determined. The
modern idea that some people have a permanent
biologically-determined
naturally-occurring
same-sex
orientation, while others have a biologically-based naturallyoccurring opposite sex orientation is an idea completely
lacking not only in Bible times but, according to some
anthropologists, lacking historically in all older societies
around the world. It is a modern idea. And it is an idea that,
according to anthropologists such as Gilbert Herdt, fails
empirically to correspond to actual known patterns of sexual
desires and behaviors, including same-sex behaviors, in
traditional cultures. It makes no sense to ask who, in Sambia
culture, has a permanent same-sex orientation, to ask who is
gay, who is homosexual, and who is heterosexual. This is
simply not the way sexual behavior and desire work in this
culture – according to Herdt.
So, if the modern American biological folk model
ethnocentrically fails to correspond to realities outside the
modern west, then what models would an anthropologist
point to as more cross-culturally valid? Let me summarize
one theoretical approach that many anthropologists find
helpful to their own work, the sexual script approach of the
sociologists of sexuality, Simon and Gagnon.
But first a brief story, when my wife Kersten was
offered a large beetle larva to eat by a pastor in the Amazon,
her body did not intuitively recognize that this grub was
filled with precisely the mix of amino acids her pregnant
body needed, and indeed she sensed that unless she averted
her gaze her body would have caused her to vomit. Why?
Because of her own cultural scripts as to what counted as
food, scripts powerful enough to trigger bodily autonomic
disgust arousal. Our children Paul and Shelly however, only
a couple years old, not yet fully socialized to rigid cultural
scripts, noticed everyone else eating, and so devoured the
grubs like they were French fries. Simon and Gagnon’s
approach denies the human body has in-born wisdom in
object choices, whether for food or sex. Rather humans
engage the world, including the sexual world, through
socially acquired meanings and scripts related to gender,
sex, dress, body parts, body language, etc. From the moment
an infant is named Robert or Susan and dressed in blue or
pink they are being incorporated into pre-existent identity
roles within cultural scripts. A cartoon in the New Yorker
featured a boy and girl staring at a painting of a naked Adam
and Eve. The boy asks, “which one is the boy and which is
the girl.” The girl answered, “I can’t tell. They don’t have
any clothes on.” A silly story that captures a truth – boys and
girls are not socialized to the interactional world of males
and females by inspecting each other’s genitals, but by
attending to culturally shaped and variable patterns
involving dress, hair, body language, names, voice
intonation, etc. And even when glimpsed body parts are
thought erotic, this is variable culturally. In one culture the
back of a woman’s neck is erotic, in another her ankle, in yet
others her thighs, and in others her breasts. In many
traditional African societies, bare breasts are omnipresent
and not central to sexual scripts, while bare thighs are highly
erotic. When African villagers encounter western bathing
suits that cover the breasts while flagrantly uncovering the
thighs these suits make no sense in terms of the logic of
sexual arousal and modesty. Even in earlier European
history artists routinely painted the virgin Mary with bare
breast, but when Murillo painted her with bare feet, the
display of this body part merited a visit from the Inquisition.
Or consider the culture of the Ayatollah Khomeini who
claimed that science had proven that women’s hair emits
particles that bambard men, chemically triggering intense
sexual desire, and that this is why women’s hair must be
covered.
Simon and Gagnon describe the way meanings are
involved through the metaphor of sexual scripts. A sexual
script defines the meaning of a situation as sexual and
defines the meaning of the various elements included in the
situation. Even nudity is not necessarily understood as
sexual unless some script so defines it. A script also
identifies the categories of actors that fit within the script,
defining who the individuals are within larger ideal
categories of sex and gender, and it plots the interactional
display patterns and behaviors the specified actors perform.
Individuals then dress and interact within frameworks of
larger scripts and the actor roles provided by those larger
scripts.
Simon and Gagnon identify three different levels of
sexual scripts. First there are cultural scenarios that
publically are modeled and articulated. In many societies
such scripts feature marriage and family as the normative
place for sexuality. But as we saw with the Sambia, such
cultural scenarios sometimes also include same-sex
behaviors.
But unlike most other arenas of social action, the
sexual involves private dimensions, which means that
normally a great deal of sexual learning and interaction
comes not from parental guidance, not from pastors, not in
public forums, not from the older generation, but in a wide
variety of more private, interpersonal and negotiated arenas.
Interpersonal scripts involve actual efforts to accomplish
romantic and sexual ends interpersonally, with actors
improvisationally drawing from their culture’s available
stock of meanings to write and rewrite scripts, while
responding to the script-based interactions of others, and
intended to accomplish emotionally, romantically, and
sexually satisfying ends.
Interpersonal scripts that actually achieve intended
desired social, emotional, and sexual ends will get used
again and again gaining fixity. Scripts that fail at desired
ends get abandoned.
Finally, intrapsychic sexual scripts are those scripts
that individuals run in their mental and fantasy lives
(drawing from prior experiences, from film, novels,
pornography, etc.) sometimes while physically manipulating
their own bodies to achieve orgasm. Here the scripts are cut
free from any need to have them be congruent with the script
of some actual human partner – with one’s mind going
wherever fantasies produce greatest excitement and arousal.
Of course when an individual habitually achieves solitary
sexual orgasm using such fantasies, this often creates
problems later on when two married individuals need to cocreate a script that is sexually satisfying and successful for
both parties.
According to Simon and Gagnon, these three levels
of scripts are often highly congruent in traditional societies,
but discontinuous in modern complex societies. Consider the
Siriono Indians of Bolivia with whom I grew up. By the
time one is biologically mature, one knows pretty much
everything one needs to know about hunting and gathering,
and is therefore ready for marriage. And everyone marries -young. There is no large pool of biologically mature
unmarried adults like we have in America who must go to
school for another ten years, and who must then get suitably
launched on a career before being able to consider entering
the economic order of marriage and family. In such
traditional societies romance novels, pornography, erotic
film, etc. are nonexistent, and masturbation itself
uncommon.
By contrast in America the cultural scripts
articulated by many parents and pastors featuring normative
sex only within marriage require 10 to 15 years of deferred
gratification after becoming biologically mature, and such
scripts are completely discontinuous from other sexual
scripts of the culture that flourish and proliferate in the
world of peer interactions, market advertising, dating sites,
grindr, film, fiction, drama, pornography etc. Furthermore
the cultural scripts articulated by pastors and parents are
extremely limited in content and are only a small proportion
of the sexual scripts that even their own children are
exposed to.
Unlike some approaches, sexual script theory does
not assume heterosexual sex is somehow less mysterious
than homosexual sex and therefore that our sole task is to
explain homosexuality based on some supposed single
explanatory variable (such as having a certain sort of mother
and father, or having been sexually abused as a child). While
parents do play key roles in script formation, as do early
experiences with sexual abuse, these constitute only possible
elements within the wider world of experiences and
interactions influencing sexual script formation. The sexual
script approach, based as it is on social learning and
meaning, is intended as a way to understand all of sexuality,
not only same-sex relations. It is an approach that
anthropologists have found extremely helpful when studying
sexuality cross-culturally. The approach does not assume
heterosexual relations are any more biologically determined
than homosexual relations, or any less mysterious, but that
all such meaning-based patterns emerge and are sustained
through complex social processes – with no expectation that
a singular event or variable fully determines homosexuality
or heterosexuality.
Sexual script theory proposes that meanings
interconnected with sexually salient social experiences of all
sorts contribute to the sexual beings we become. Scriptbased interactional experiences that adversely affect positive
social, emotional, and sexual outcomes or that create
negative experiences of humiliation, hurt, or alienation
(especially when such experiences are recurrent or extreme)
will naturally contribute to avoidance, even aversion, to that
script – in some cases a complete inability to respond
sexually within such a script. Any script-based interactional
experience that positively achieves a social, emotional, and
or sexual peak experience, will naturally tend to be recycled
in the next round. And through repetition (even if only in the
intrapsychic realm), such scripts become deeply habitual and
ingrained – difficult to change.
If indeed sexuality emerges and is shaped through
social learning and meaning, and if Scripture itself provides
us with God-given salient meanings, and calls on parents
and churches to encourage social learning and behavior
congruent with biblical meanings, then the very content of
the biblical faith may provide the very resources needed in
our contemporary sexually disoriented world. But unless
Christians cultivate deep understandings of how sexuality
actually works across cultures, we will be poorly positioned
to draw on resources given in Scripture. Currently the
evangelical world of higher education has failed to mobilize
the intentional vision, energy and resources needed to forge
deep understandings of the sexual. I hope and pray that some
in this very room will help us turn the corner on forging
deep understandings of this important part of human lives,
and help us wisely relate biblical understandings to both
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