1st Edition
Sex Ethnographic Encounters
Focusing on the unacknowledged, personal and often unconscious dimension, Sex explores the intersection between sex and ethnography. Anthropological writing tends to focus on the influence of status markers such as position, gender, ethnicity, and age on fieldwork. By contrast, far less attention has been paid to how sex, sexuality, eroticism, desire, attraction, and rejection affect ethnographic research. In the book, anthropologists reflect on their own encounters with sex during fieldwork, revealing how attraction and desire influence the choice of fieldwork subjects, field sites and friendships. They also examine the resulting impact on fieldwork findings and the generation of knowledge. Based on fieldwork in Germany, Denmark, Greece, the USA, Brazil, South Africa, Singapore, Turkey, Israel, Morocco, and India, the contributors go beyond the common heterosexuality/homosexuality divide to address topics which include celibacy, polyamory and sadomasochism. This long overdue text provides perspectives from a new generation of anthropologists and brings the debate into the 21st century. Examining challenging and controversial issues in contemporary fieldwork, this is essential reading for students in anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, sociology, research methods, and ethics courses.
Biography
Richard Joseph Martin is Preceptor in Expository Writing at Harvard University, USA. Dieter Haller is Professor of Social Anthropology at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
"At last, a comprehensive volume on sex that crosses oceans and brings ethnographers from across the globe into conversation with one another. Work in this field has too long been ghettoized in narrow domains, either topically or geographically, and this rich collection overcomes longstanding barriers and lays a foundation for new forms of comparison and theoretical innovation, expanding the boundaries of what we all thought we meant by “sex.” - Ellen Lewin, University of Iowa, USA Taking us from Brazilian saunas to a refugee NGO in Greece, from queer Malay Muslims in Singapore to NeoPagans in Texas, these thirteen essays reveal how sex unsettles fieldwork. Contributors reflect on how bodily intimacies, kindlings of lust or longing, and moments of recognition or crossed signals generate fresh ethnographic insight. This is a candid, vulnerable, and thought-provoking volume on sex and ethnography today. - Margot Weiss, Wesleyan University, USA More than 20 years after “Taboo” (Kulick/Wilson, 1995) and “Out in the field” (Lewin/Leap, 1996), these encounters in the field give fresh and ground-breaking insights into the social experience of sex in various ways. Enclosing a wide range of locations, practices and desires, the well-reflected reports of embodied fieldwork show the diversity of “doing relations” with and through sex and intimacy. Overall, this anthology will strengthen the links between queer studies and anthropology. - Beate Binder, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany"
