A Function of Desire? The Sexual Motivations of Indigenes

The above examples are highly functionalist arguments. They claim that what may appear to be an innate, individualized sexual desire or gender identity is in fact a consciously instrumental action that has its end elsewhere, in a need to access land or to minimize conflict.

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While comparably instrumental explanations of homosexual behavior arising from changing social circumstances have been proposed for European contexts, the focus on individual sexual desire and its role in determining sexual identity has remained paramount for researchers working on modern, Western societies. It is perhaps curious, then, that social researchers have not typically cultivated a similar interest in the individual erotic inclinations of the subjects whom they observe engaging in such behaviors outside the West.

Explanations in this vein run the risk of denying sexual subjectivity to non-European subjects and returning anthropological study of sexuality to its earlier foregone conclusions about human behavior rooted in geography and in race. Perhaps more fundamentally, in their assertion that "homosexual" and "transgender" behavior is principally about maintenance of "natural," complementary gender differences, scholars who advance such explanations have failed to challenge the pervasive gender inequality that renders women (and those persons with an ascribed female status) subordinate to men in virtually every society on the planet.

Yet discourses that have attempted to align "indigenous" homosexualities and transgenderisms with European (and increasingly global) ones without any kind of qualification--stating unequivocally, for example, that the Sambia boy-inseminators are "gay," that the Indian hijra and the Albanian sworn virgins are "transgendered"--serve to efface cultural specificity even as they advance a political end.

Recognizing the differences between these persons is necessary in order to advance understanding of the myriad ways in which human gender and sexual relations are constructed worldwide, to understand the interrelation of gender and sexual relations, as well as to avoid stripping or warping a cultural legacy in order to cultivate a beneficial sexual politics.

A very misleading yet widely held belief is that and are all but absent in societies with legitimately "indigenous" homosexual or transgender roles. Not only is this belief frequently untrue, but it also presumes that discrimination against sexual minorities in Western contexts is somehow justified because an "indigenous" homosexual role does not exist in the West.

Yet we should remember that societies with European origins are no less "indigenous" than any others. While the origin and function of such roles may be disputed, European societies also have social roles that encompass and accommodate same-sex sexual behavior and gender role nonconformity, even if they do not always achieve this accommodation in ways that are appealing, humane, or politically aware.

With reports from hundreds of sub-Saharan African locales of male-male sexual relations and from about fifty of female-female sexual relations, it is clear that same-sex sexual relations existed in traditional African societies, though varying in forms and in the degree of public acceptance

The treatment of same-sex relationships in African literatures has been influenced by the traditional belief systems of various African societies, the imported views of Christianity and Islam, and the political and legal legacies of European colonialism.

Anthropology, the first of the social science disciplines to take sexuality--and particularly homosexuality--seriously as a field of intellectual inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has achieved a new impetus in the post-Stonewall era.

A growing body of scholarly and other work on Cultural Identities challenges the "naturalness," and even the political necessity, of a unitary gay and lesbian identity.

Ethnography, the description of indigenous non-European peoples by Euro-Americans, has been a safe way for writers to discuss homosexuality as a normal, non-pathological behavior.

Beginning in the 1960s increasing numbers of ethnographers have conducted research on glbtq issues, spurred by the premise that studies of diverse sexualities are crucial to understanding human behavior and culture.

The earliest etiologies--or theories of causation--of homosexuality date from European antiquity, but the search for a universal etiology has intensified as homosexual behavior has come under the scrutiny of science.

The term "homosexuality," coined in 1869, with "heterosexuality" as its opposite, has led to a binary concept that oversimplifies the complexity of human sexual behavior.

Indian thought towards same-sex eroticism and gender variance was more tolerant in the past than it is today.

A great range of non-normative sexualities and genders can be found in the Indonesian archipelago, but the concepts gay and lesbi are Western terms that have been transformed in the Indonesian context.

A social role for individuals who crossed or mixed male and female characteristics was one of the most widely distributed institutions of native North America.

Sexual and gender diversity is widespread throughout the three zones of the Pacific Islands.

"Transgender" has become an umbrella term representing a political alliance between all gender variant people who do not conform to social norms for typical men and women and who suffer political oppression as a result.

Both male and female berdaches (or two-spirit persons), common among Native American tribal cultures, were characterized by gender variation sanctioned by supernatural dreams and visions.

The Hijras--men who dress and act like women--have been a presence in India for generations, maintaining a third-gender role that has become institutionalized through tradition.

Although there is some question as to whether travel writer, explorer, photographer, and cult figure Sir Wilfred Thesiger can be labeled as homosexual, his most powerful emotional ties were with the young male companions of his famous journeys.