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Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field. Gilbert Herdt. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999. 327 pp.
Sex had a great start in anthropology, being identified early as a central and legitimate means to understand the human condition. So much so, that in 1932 Malinowski admitted he had to plead guilty to a surfeit of sex: four books on the subject, including two with the word in the title, and one with an introduction written by progressive British sexologist Havelock Ellis. Despite such a salubrious start, in following decades much ethnographic writing on sex was either ethnopornographic (titillating but offering little of theoretical substance) or was marginalized, maligned, or just plain missing. It was not until the early-to-mid 1980s that sophisticated book-length ethnographies of sexual behavior emerged. A primer in this regard was Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity (McGraw Hill, 1981 ), in which Gilbert Herdt addressed Sambian sexual behavior and meanings, especially those surrounding what he initially labeled "ritualized homosexuality" and now terms more specifically "boy-inseminating rites." This was one of the first ethnographic...