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Gilbert Herdt, Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays from the Field, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999, xi + 327 pages.
Reviewer: Andrew P. Lyons
Wilfrid Laurier University
Twenty years have now passed since the publication of Guardians of the Flutes which was arguably the best ethnographic examination of sexuality since Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages. Gilbert Herdt returned to New Guinea several times until 1993 when a nearly fatal bout of malaria led him to curtail his visits. This volume draws on those later field trips. Herdt re-examines and develops themes which he first discussed in Guardians. He also discusses the significance of his work not only for social anthropology but also for the Gay Liberation Movement. All of the nine essays in the volume originally appeared elsewhere and most readers will have read a few of them already. However, they fit very well together, and the author has contributed an excellent theoretical introduction. Readers unacquainted with Herdt's ethnography should note that it describes a population which prescribed homoerotic fellatio as a necessary part of male social development. There was no sexual play in the period prior to initiation. Prepubertal youths in the first stages of initiation were fellators; adolescents in the third stage of initiation were fellated by the younger boys. Marriage to females occured at the end of the initiation cycle. These customs reflected a system of thought in which mature male sexuality was tenuously achieved and always threatened by feminine, specifically menstrual pollution. An adequate supply of sperm was stored in the growing boy as a result of fellation. The receipt of sperm in heterosexual intercourse enabled women to produce breast milk.
The notes on the book cover describe Herdt as a "renowned" anthropologist, a description which may provoke some jealousy but which does attest to his achievement. Until 1980 the anthropology of sexuality occupied a marginal place in our discipline. This was partly because sexuality was excluded by existing paradigms such as structural-functionalism and cultural ecology, and, more surprisingly, by later developments in psychological anthropology. In large measure this was because there was little middle ground between sociological approaches which regarded sexuality as too "natural," too universal (see p. 4) and too threatening to sociological method to be worthy of...