Sex, culture and the anthropologist

The apocalyptic threat of AIDS, combined with recent ethnological developments, is promoting an anthropological "rediscovery of sex". If this rediscovery is to have important and lasting effects on the development of theory, a stock-taking is in order--one which examines anthropology's historical, methodological, and practical relationship to the study of sexual behavior. Parallel theoretical directions taken in both American and British anthropology, starting in the late 1920's, resulted in a disciplinary departure from the study of sexuality, as such; sexual behavior became shielded from analytic view by a more abstract, propositional approach to society and culture. In addition to reviewing these historical trends, the paper considers elements of personal privacy and intrasocietal variation in the anthropology of sex and, with illustrations taken from the Ilahita Arapesh of northeastern Papua New Guinea, proposes that the locus of sexual behavior and experience lies in the interaction of cultural ideas and psychobiological impulses.sexual behavior history of anthropology culture theory Papua New Guinea