8. Missing Ancestors and Missing Narratives

This paper evaluates Sir Richard Burton's claim to be an intellectual progenitor of a discipline which abhors his values and ignores his work. Burton's reputation recently underwent a paradoxical revival, particularly in some gay circles, although he was overtly homophobic, racist, sexist and anti-Semitic. His links to critics of Victorian censorship and sexual orthodoxy (as well as to the pornographic imaginary) are examined along with his writings on African, European, Indian, Mormon, and Semitic sexuality and marriage. His career may be compared with that of other, rarely acknowledged disciplinary ancestors such as Verrier Elwin, Edward Carpenter, and Havelock Ellis, all of whom discussed sexuality (see below; see also Lyons and Lyons 2004:100–130, 231–238). In general terms we ask why some names, careers, and narratives are included in or excluded from histories of anthropology. These processes obviously influence our choices as to which books we shall read and which messages we shall heed, whether we are anthropologists, historians of anthropology, ethnohistorians, students or lay people. A decision to omit someone from a historical survey may be overdetermined by many disciplinary and political traditions.

Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) was vice president of the Anthropological Society of London—one of the two parents of the Royal Anthropological Institute—and briefly president of the London Anthropological Society, although he took part in few meetings because he was continually abroad. He served as a soldier in India in the 1840s and took part briefly in the Crimean War. He served as a somewhat undiplomatic diplomat in Fernando Po, Brazil, Damascus, and Trieste. He explored Arabia, Somalia, Ethiopia, and the area near Lake Tanganyika. His acrid dispute with John Hanning Speke over the source of the Nile led to the latter's (presumed) suicide. Burton spent three months in Dahomey and visited the Yoruba. He traveled through the North American Plains and visited Utah. Most notably, he visited Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. He translated the Kama Sutra, The Perfumed Garden, the erotic poetry of Catullus, and produced a multi-volume edited translation of The Arabian Nights. He spoke twenty-five languages or dialects. He was a pioneer in the anthropological study of sex and a savage critic of Victorian sexual orthodoxy ("Mrs. Grundy"). He developed the first anthropological theory of homosexuality. He also edited a collection of West African proverbs, and wrote about Plains Indian sign language. We shall document many reasons why he should be included in histories of anthropology.

Burton has been the subject of many major biographies. These include the works of Byron Farwell (1963), Fawn Brodie (1967), Edward Rice (1990), Frank McLynn (1990), Mary Lovell (2000) and Dane Kennedy (2005). McLynn and Kennedy (particularly) have quite a bit to say about Burton's anthropology. Other scholars who have written about Burton include Stephen O. Murray (1997), Patrick Brantlinger (1988) and Mary Louise Pratt (1992). To the late Edward Said (1979:194–197) Burton was the least intolerable of the major nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars: "He was preternaturally knowledgeable about the degree to which human life in society was governed by rules and codes" (1979:195). Because of his reputation as a swashbuckling explorer Burton is the subject of TV documentaries from time to time and he was also the subject of a popular film, Mountains of the Moon. Because of his terminal essay (in volume 10 of The Thousand Nights and a Night) and his unpublished (and perhaps nonexistent) report to Napier about male brothels in Karachi, the ostensibly homophobic Burton has become an avatar of gay liberation. He was revived from the dead in order to reappear in 1990s Toronto as a curator of an exhibit about AIDS who is dissuaded from his homophobic obsession with Patient Zero when he falls in love with another male protagonist in the film musical Zero Patience. However, he was not revived in the pages of Robert Lowie, T. Penniman, Marvin Harris, John Honigmann, or Alan Barnard. He makes a brief and derisory appearance in Stocking's Victorian Anthropology (1987:253) and in After Tylor (1995:28)—significantly enough in a footnote in which the author...