6 April 2009SEXUALITY OF MEN AND WOMEN IN CONTEXTS AND CULTURE
Freeman’s observation of a Castilian hamlet superficially seems to address a basic division between farmers and shepherds. However, in sexual matters and capacity, the shepherd is far more feared than the farmer, as Freeman reports:
The shepherd is forced, by definition, out of the ken of the community which depends upon physical presence for social control. The farmer, on the other hand, continues to live in the bosom of that community. The sexual morality of the bachelor farmer is not subject to the same implicit doubt as that of the bachelor herder who may be his brother. Because the farmer is in constant view of his neighbors, keeping the same schedule that they keep, his movements are known. More important, because he lives continually among others, even though celibate, he is not thought to suffer from lack of sexual satisfaction. Here emerges the notion that strong sexual needs grow out of a life of isolation and are not the necessary product of bachelorhood. The single person who lives among others is thought not to experience sexual desire to the same degree as the person who lives in isolation. Thus the shepherd’s sexuality is more exaggerated also than that of the priest and constitutes the greater threat —hence the peculiar apprehension with which herders and other migrants are regarded when they pass through town.
Freeman correctly identifies the important symbolic dimension of this interaction. Briefly, she finds an important inside/outside relationship between the farmer and the shepherd. This makes good sense, because farmers are generally of and from the community, but shepherds are more frequently marginal. Shepherding excludes people from the village who may not have been excluded formerly. The farmer is thought to be social in his orientation to others, but interactions with the shepherd are feared as primarily sexual. Here we have a polarization of a sexual and hazardous presence on the outside, contrasted with a social and controllable one on the inside. One does not need to inquire into the sexual behavior of farmers or shepherds to appreciate the symbolic message. Sexual drive (at least for men) grows out of isolated living conditions; sociality and sociability are substitutes for sexuality, which is important to these people in marking the difference between inside and outside.
Although sociality and sexuality are defined as different by the hamlet dwellers, they address the same issues. Certainly sexuality will be pertinent to many issues of definition and development for villagers, such as male/female, young/old, kinsmen/non-kinsmen, and good/ bad. The investigation of how sexuality participates in these larger cultural constructions is the anthropological contribution to the study of sexuality and society.
Because of this orientation to cultural constructions, one might wonder about the place of behavioral analysis in cultural sex research. Although the anthropologist is interested in behavior, he or she is not interested in the behavior per se but rather, in a cultural system of symbols and meanings. Gagnon and Simon state:
The physical sexual activity of two males when one of them is defined as berdache among the Western Plains Indians is identical with the sexual activity of two men in ancient Greece or in a modern Western society; but the meanings attached to the behavior and its functions for the society are so disattached to the behavior and its functions for the society are so disparate in these cases that seeing them as aspects of the same phenomena except in the most superficial way is to vitiate all we know about social analysis.
In fact, not all anthropologists agree with Gagnon and Simon, and some would prefer to treat homosexuality, for example, as a unit of or category of behavior that can be analyzed as a phenomenon across cultures.
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