Abstract
This edited collection expands anthropological scholarship on sexuality as an aspect of the complexity of conducting ethnography. It is a rich, compelling collection. The 13 chapters focus on diverse inquiries around the world that surface nuanced aspects of intimacy shaping field encounters. The fieldwork ranges from the sexual economies of Brazil, to gendered power dynamics in a NeoPagan community in the United States, to connections between celibacy and vegetarianism in a religious pilgrimage in India. The contributors, most of whom are anthropologists, explore how intimacy is informed by culture, local and global forces, structures, relationships, and individual agency (xiii). Whether sexuality is central to the research, such as BDSM subcultures in Paris (Chapter 5) or the research animates sexual contours of studies with other foci, such as an NGO in Greece (Chapter 3), the essays collectively convey that sexuality is a vital experiential and analytic site through which to explore socio-cultural processes. The robust analyses advance ethnographic theorizing and practice.
The text consists of four sections with alliterative titles—Institutions, Interpellations, Intimacies, Incommensurabilities—that reflect thematic traffic across essays. The first section, “Institutions,” provides a fitting opening to the text through analyzing how disciplinary norms for generating knowledge can seriously constrain the productivity of sexuality as a site for meaning making. Hall (Chapter 1) critiques governing discourses that stubbornly cast researchers’ sexual activities as risky, even potentially exploitative (9) in the field. Similarly, Mohr (Chapter 2) argues that anthropology maintains a steadfast “underlying bias against erotic knowledge” (19) by neither preparing nor encouraging researchers to attend to “body talk” in the field or in writing up their research. He urges researchers to take the “sensual-sexual body seriously” (21) as a “legitimate” vehicle for ethnographic knowledge (19). In fact, for Cabot (Chapter 3), downplaying sexuality can interfere with recognizing socio-cultural processes salient to the inquiry.
The second section, “Interpellation,” productively shifts to how researchers’ bodies, actions, and identities are ‘called into being’ as subjects, or interpellated, in the field. This is an important theoretical offering. Mitchell’s (Chapter 4) work among prostitutes in the sexual economies of Brazil surfaced their nuanced local categories for cultural actors, including the researcher, that shape interactions and meaning. Similarly, Martin (Chapter 5) found that shifting signifiers of clothing, materials, spaces, and partners communicated specific meanings in the sexual field of Paris’s BDSM subcultures that shaped how researchers/informants alike were interpellated. Budur (Chapter 6), in fact, draws from her study on Brazilian Romani women to detail how researchers sometimes appropriate other cultures and intentionally foster forms of interpellation to gain community access.
Part three explores researcher’s “Intimacies” in subcultures in Singapore, Texas, South Africa, and India. Maloud (Chapter 7) explored shifting gendered/racial/ethnic/class identities, desires, and relationships as he moved among working-class Malay Muslim sexual minorities. In the only U.S. fieldwork in the collection, Harper (Chapter 8), too, learned from her intimate encounters, drawing insights from her marriage to uncover the gender inequity central to the idealized practice of women’s bisexuality in a Texas NeoPagan community to which she belonged. Reihling’s (Chapter 9) intimate fieldwork in Capetown, South Africa revealed how a culture of woman blaming, romance, and masculine “invulnerability” (22) interfered with public health interventions in HIV/AIDS transmission. Luithle-Hardenberg (Chapter 10) found her body surveilled by religious community members who watched her clothing, diet, and menstrual patterns to ensure she was adhering to spiritual norms deemed crucial for sacred pilgrimage.
The last section, Incommensurabilities, addresses tensions in navigating cultural, religious, and sexual subjectivities within varied “ontological regimes” (147) in Morocco, Turkey, and Jerusalem. Haller (Chapter 11) and Williams (Chapter 12) analyze how men sustain same-sex relationships while honoring family, religion, and culture, and Phillips (Chapter 3) poignantly discusses the “im/possibilities” of “juggling” various selves in the field (174).
This text enriches sexuality research and the ethnographic craft. Through detailing sensory encounters, relations, and readings of the body in various contexts (dates, dance floors, marches, saunas, parties, beds), researchers take sexuality seriously as a cultural and epistemological resource. With nine chapters attending to minoritized sexualities, the book deepens queer approaches in anthropology. Also informative are the four women authors’ discussions of how celibacy and heterosexual partnerships can propel cultural insights. The framing chapters helpfully situate the collection in the broader scholarly terrain of sexuality and anthropology.
One need not study sexuality or anthropology to benefit from the book’s methodological insights. The robust theorizing underscores how disciplinary training can constrain one’s gaze in the field; how analyzing interpellation enhances fieldwork and interpretation; how sexuality propels cultural insights; and how researcher-informant positioning is always fluid, relational, and contextual, rather than reflecting only “concrete codifications of a singular vertical relationship” (65). Maulod usefully notes that interlocutors’ scrutiny of the researcher’s body in a sexualized field has “democratic” potential to unsettle the power of the ethnographic gaze baked into anthropology. Researchers’ partners also emerge from the shadows as influential, fueling access to field sites, dynamics within it, and interpretations afterwards. Fieldwork, in turn, affects researchers’ relationships. Displacing the “individual researcher” as the sole force in inquiry, these examples demonstrate how paired subjectivity, interpellation, and their varied effects beckon further methodological theorizing.
Importantly, the text underscores how sexuality saturates the field, however nuanced, situational, or practiced. Researchers’ embodied insights and relationships are complex aspects of inquiries that merit—like all ethnographic work—careful and situated exploration.
