Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist (review)

Sex, Sexuality, and the Anthropologist. Edited by Fran Markowitz and Michael Ashkenazi. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. viii + 230 pp., introduction, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

This collection examines the role of the anthropologist’s sexuality and gender in the field setting. To different degrees, the contributors are at one in challenging the old view that those factors should be suppressed in that setting, but the best pieces present both the positive and the negative factors at play when the sexed anthropologist enters his or her field and openly betrays his or her gender, sex, or sexuality.

An overview of the contributions in this volume provide some idea of the forces at work in producing such a collection. After Fran Markowitz’s and Michael Ashkenazi’s helpful introduction, which lays out the problems created by the traditional anthropological norm, Rose Jones describes how during her stay on Saint Lucia in the West Indies, presumably to study sexually transmitted diseases, the islanders tried to “fix up” this married, if alone, woman scholar with partners both male and female. Jacob Climo, studying a quasi-Jewish sect in Mexico, tells how he discovered the nature of his own relationship to his father through contact with these spiritualists. Frank A. Salamone tells all about his past sexual life both in Nigeria and among his own graduate students. Michael Winkelman, also working in Mexico, describes his relationship with two local women who wished, through him, to escape their own constricted surroundings. Ashkenazi and Robert Rotenburg, as “naked anthropologists,” continue by describing and excellently analyzing their experiences in the bathhouses of Austria and Japan. Thomas Fitzgerald follows with a description of his early 1980s experiences in Scandinavian countries, where his fieldwork dealt with suicide among gays. Fitzgerald found that despite a common sexual orientation, these young men as often as not rejected his advances because of class and age differences.

Easily the most impressive work in this book is the contribution by Y. Antonia Chao, a Taiwanese scholar trained in the United States, who lucidly describes the role structures of butch bars in Taiwan. Her article is so imposing because she is able to describe herself at work, representing her bar-self with a remarkably cool scientific objectivity that makes us believe the behavior of those attracted to her. In a warmhearted, humane piece Eva V. Huseby-Darvas asks what a female anthropologist is to do while in a sexually hypocritical Calvinist Hungarian village. Markowitz answers in a fashion, arguing that her ultimate decision to “get sexed” in her fieldwork with Soviet Jews who had immigrated to Jerusalem was all to the good, although she insists that she remains “uncomfortable and ambivalent about that problem” (168). In the penultimate contribution Wim Lunsing describes his various homosexual liaisons in Japan, but alas his piece—like that of the heterosexual Salamone—is so openly exhibitionist as to lack any scholarly gravity.

The book concludes with what at first appears to be Karla Poewe’s summary of the preceding pieces, but on rereading, it emerges as a powerful, penetrating poetic insight and reflection on her own experiences, both in the field and in her own upbringing by her mother and teachers. Even Augustine of Hippo finds a place in her lucubrations. Her assessments are on the mark. This collection, she says, “tells stories about one, often the first, fieldwork encounter” (205), and they do in fact at times resemble narratives of first love. These stories are often only “tangentially” related to field experience, she continues, despite (I should add) the introducers’ advertisements to the contrary. Finally, Poewe asks, does “the ethnographer’s sexuality have the intellectual ground-breaking importance here described?” Speaking for herself, Poewe says as much as “no,” though she too fell in love during her first field experience, with profound results for her own recollection of her German childhood and homeland. But in Luapula, Zambia, Poewe writes, she “married not a man but [her] history.” It was...