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Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality. By Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Pp. 419. $60.00/£45.95 cloth; $29.95/£22.95 paper.
Africanist scholars often rely heavily upon anthropologists for evidence about cultural practices, especially around topics like sexuality and gender relations. Many of us admire (and increasingly try to emulate) anthropologists' personal courage, dedication to fieldwork, and linguistic skills. But are we always appropriately careful in separating anthropologists' ostensibly scientific methodologies and observations from their personal subjectivity and political views? The sad example of the psychologist Phillipe Rushton, among many others, suggests otherwise, and also suggests where lack of due care can lead. Rushton notoriously argued that there was a direct correlation between supposedly large penis size, high promiscuity, and low intelligence among "Africans" (presumably this did not include African women).1 Writing in the 1990s, he based his theory in part on "evidence" naively drawn from a piece of virtual pornography published nearly a century earlier (Jacobus X, Untrodden Fields of Anthropology, 1898).
Andrew and Harriet Lyons have drawn on over two decades of study in and about Africa to craft this impressive, thought-provoking book. They analyze numerous examples of the sometimes shockingly shoddy scholarship that was used to make (but also sometimes to refute) racist, misogynist, and homophobic arguments about sexuality to North American and British audiences. Irregular Connections should help gird us non-anthropologists with a more rigorously critical understanding of their (and by extension, our) disciplines. The aims are, first, to analyze moral snares and methodological pitfalls that influenced the study and representation of sexuality in anthropology as a professional field of study, and second, to reflect on what we can learn from this history in order to make future scholarship on sexuality less problematic.
A central argument quickly emerges. From the...