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2.The Ethnography of African Straightness
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2 w The Ethnography of African Straightness Anthropologists played a central role in documenting the diversity of human sexuality as it is understood and expressed in different cultures around the world. Scholars in many other disciplines, including my own of history, are often heavily dependent on their research. However, as Lyons and Lyons (2004), among others, have persuasively demonstrated, anthropologists at times “conscripted” select evidence and even fabricated “facts” about the people they studied in order to advance ideals and preferences concerning gender and sexuality in their own societies. By conjuring idealized or exoticized Natives, Primitives, and other Others, they helped to create an understanding of “normal” and “modern” by way of contrast and edification. In the process they created a body of purportedly empirical or scientific data that in retrospect we can see as deeply flawed and morally normative. In some cases the scholarship was complicit, indeed enthusiastically so, in the construction and maintenance of oppressive colonial structures. Among those structures were reified “tribes” with borders and chiefs, and policed male migrant labor systems that tore African families apart. Forms of indirect rule and native law or indigenat to police these systems froze patriarchal interpretations of custom into institutionalized law convenient to white settlers and capital. To one African critic, the ethnography of African cultures generated by European and North American anthropologists to establish the baseline of so-called traditional was so corrupted by its proximity to colonial power and consequently so “useless” in empirical terms that its only real value is for the light it sheds on how colonial structures were built and could function for so long (Owusu 1978). Villia Jefremovas (2002) goes even further by linking the 34 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. ethnography of Rwanda to the consolidation of oppressive gender, ethnic, and class relations that ultimately led to genocide in that country.1 Owusu was much too harsh in his sweeping judgment, and even in the case of Rwanda there is much to respect in the work of anthropologists who pioneered in often extremely demanding circumstances. On the topic of sexuality , however, the critique is warranted to a significant degree. Most of the blame falls on lazy and exaggerated descriptions of exotic heterosexual rituals and attitudes (as pointed out by Bibeau 1991 and Fassin 1999, for example). In this chapter, however, I want to focus on the heterosexism of the ethnography . Specifically, the commonplace assumption or assertion as an unquali- fied fact that Africans south of the Sahara did not practice same-sex sexuality derived at least as much from a set of normative beliefs as from the cool scienti fic observation that many anthropologists claimed. From the vast generalizations of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers to current studies of sexually transmitted diseases, sexuality, prisons, street children, masculinities, and more, the great weight of the ethnography expresses an opinion of what African sexuality should be like, rather than what it really is. It creates the impression that Africans are virtually unique in the world in the absence of, ignorance about, or intolerance toward exceptions to the heterosexual norm. It provides a scientific-sounding canon that gives authority to contemporary claims about the narrowness of what is traditional, authentic, and indigenous on the one hand, and what is deviant, nonexistent, modern, or exotic on the other. Because so many other disciplines rely on anthropology for their research starting point, this canon then gets amplified into all kinds of unexpected places and policy or research prescriptions. A reference to one or two scattered anthropological studies from around the continent is often all that is needed to justify noninterest or outright hostility to research on same-sex sexualities in Africa.2 But how trustworthy is that canon? Dynes (1983) first flagged homosexuality —and Aina (1991), bisexuality—in Africa as potentially important research questions hidden within the tacit consensus about African sexuality.3 Murray and Roscoe (1998) then provided the first substantive corrective to the dominant view. They demonstrated key discrepancies in the documentary record dating as far back as the eighteenth century and right up to the present-day testimony of African gays and women who have sex with women. Their evidence did not propose a timeless, archetypal gay or lesbian in opposition to the older stereotype. Rather...