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7 The American Game of "Smear the Queer" and the Homosexual Component of Male Competitive Sport and Warfare One of the principal methodological difficulties in applying psychoanalytic theory to anthropological data concerns validation. How does one know that a prospective insight gained from interpreting an element of a particular culture psychoanalytically is valid? Far too often, readers are simply asked to accept on faith that a given interpretation is sound. Presumably if the reader shares the psychoanalytic bias of the initial interpreter, he will agree with the interpretation; if he does not, he will disagree. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs. Surely if a psychoanalytic perspective does yield new insights in the study of culture, it ought to be possible to demonstrate the authenticity and accuracy of such insights-even to individuals who may be unfamiliar with psychoanalytic theory or who may be downright hostile to it. The methodological issue in question is a serious one and so long as it is avoided, the reputation of psychoanalytic anthropology among mainstream social scientists will continue to be low. Here is where the materials of folklore offer the psychoanalytic anthropologist an unrivalled opportunity to confront the validation problem. Folklore as a form of autobiographical ethnography provides an emic as opposed to etic set of symbolic equivalences. (See chapter 6.) Freud himself drew attention to the remarkable nature of folkloristic data in the tenth lecture, 178 The American Game of "Smear the Queer" 179 "Symbolism in Dreams," in his A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis: How do we profess to arrive at the meaning of these dreamsymbols , about which the dreamer himself can give us little or no information? My answer is that we derive our knowledge from widely different sources: from fairy tales and myths, jokes and witticisms, from folklore, i.e., from what we know of the manners and customs, sayings and songs, of different peoples, and from poetic and colloquial usage of language. (1953:166) Freud actually demonstrated how to use folkloristic data to illuminate symbolic equivalents in a paper jointly written with Viennese classicist D. E. Oppenheim in 1911. In this important essay, Freud shows how symbolic equations as reported or explicated in dreams which occur in folktales correspond exactly to the "Freudian" interpretations of everyday dreams. In other words, much of Freud's interpretation of dream symbols upon examination turns out to articulate symbolic equations already in some sense "known" by the folk. One apt summary of this view claims "Freud's contribution as far as symbols are concerned is to be regarded as rediscovery laboriously acquired through intellectual analysis, of something which previously was-and in other cultures still is-given knowledge" (Vanggaard 1972:14). One could, of course, argue that both Freudian interpretations and folk symbolic equations are "wrong," but the striking congruence of analytic and folk constructions remains to be explained. Dozens of explicit or overt symbolic equations in folklore are readily available. One such illustrative instance is the alleged phallic symbolism of snakes. Pioneer psychoanalytic anthropologist Weston La Barre devoted some three chapters of his superb study of snake-handling cults in the United States to serpent symbolism in Africa, the Near East, and elsewhere (1962:53109 ). His analytic accounts of the genital and phallic significance of the snake in a variety of cultural contexts are certainly persua- 180 The American Game of "Smear the Queer" sive, but scholars with a strong bias against psychoanalytic theory could try to ignore La Barre's erudite arguments. It might not be so easy to ignore the following versions of a folk cartoon which has been circulated in the United States for many decades. I shall present more than one version of the item to demonstrate that it is indeed traditional inasmuch as it appears in multiple and variant form. (The first version was collected in 1974 in Oakland . The second one comes from the Kinsey Institute for Sexual Research at Indiana University with no date indicated. The third version, as its caption suggests, was collected in Tennessee in 1977. The fourth version comes from the Kinsey Institute and is dated 1964, and the fifth version was collected in San Francisco and bears no date.) Regardless of any effect a flute might really have on a snake's behavior, the occurrence of the flute in the cartoon may itself have symbolic meaning. In American folk speech, "to play the skin flute" refers to male masturbation. Thus playing the flute to arouse a "snake" is not a...

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