IS FARTING SEXY? IS VOMIT SACRED? ARE PHOTOS OF NAKED CHILDREN NECESSARILY PORNOGRAPHIC?
Why there's no such thing as politically correct anthropology.
Hey Folks,
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of anthropology, which involves reading ethnographies.
If you didn’t know, an ethnography is an account of a society written by someone who has lived amongst members of that society, usually for a year or two.
If you’re iffy on what the word ethnography means, exactly, I suggest watching this handy two-minute explainer video.
The reason that I’m studying anthropology is because it contains a vast repository of tried-and-true political ideas. Along the way, however, I come across all kinds of fun facts, some of which I’d like to share with you.
One of the fun parts about reading anthropology is finding out how different cultures assign meaning to different things in very different ways. This can be surprising, and entertaining.
One would think, for instance, that vomit would be universally associated with the emotion of disgust.
Apparently, this is not so. According to an ethnography written of the Kwakiutl people of Vancouver Island, vomit was imbued with surprising significance within their system of meaning.
According to a 1981 essay by Stanley Walens:
For the Kwakiutl, vomit is not a substance of filth. Vomit is to a culture with oral metaphors what semen is to a culture with sexual metaphors: an important category of material existence, a symbol of undifferentiated matter with no identifying features and a total potential for becoming. All the power of vomit is potential, not realized. Vomit is the first stage of causality, the state of existence that precedes order and purpose. All things about to begin the process of becoming—fetuses, corpses, the universe before Transformer changed it—are symbolized by vomit. The act of vomiting is not an act of rejection but a positive act of creation, a necessary step in the process of transformation.
Vomit is the transformed identity of the most precious of spirit gifts— food. All food, even though it may not be regurgitated, becomes vomit at one stage in the digestive process. Food and vomit are complementary aspects of single substance: the bodies of animals transformed into, respectively, cultural and spiritual forms. Vomit is thus the symbol of transformed substance: and the cycle of ingestion, digestion, and regurgitation is a metaphor for the cycle of death, metempsychosis, and rebirth.
Isn’t that fascinating? It really makes you think, doesn’t it? If you happened to be born into Kwakiutl society 200 years ago, you would not necessarily be disgusted by vomit. You might, in fact, think it quite natural to believe that the universe might have been created through the act of vomiting. Nor would such a metaphor necessarily be distasteful to you. Isn’t that a mindfuck?
Part of the fun of reading ethnography is attempting to see one’s own culture through new eyes, to identify aspects of our own culture which could be seen as entirely bizarre when viewed from an outsider’s perspective.
As much as we might feel that our thoughts and desires are our own, we are shaped by our culture in ways that are imperceptible to us.
This is certainly true when it comes to the sexual mores which happen to be current within any given culture at any moment in time.
Many have noted that different European cultures have different characteristic kinks. The English seem to have a predilection for bondage, spanking, and stern discipline. The French seem to take special pleasure in eroticizing Catholic religious tropes. American men love cheerleaders; American women love cowboys. As for the Germans… no comment.
One thing that I never imagined is that there would be an entire culture that would eroticize flatulence, but according to one credible source, there is.
What you are about to read is an excerpt from an ethnography of a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers in Bolivia called Nomads of the Long Bow. It was written in the 1940s, so please pardon the politically incorrect language.
Oh yeah, and so long as I’m talking about political correctness, I thought I’d throw in a picture of some naked children just to make a point.
I grew up reading National Geographic, which would often feature pictures of naked or semi-naked indigenous people, and I don’t remember anyone having a problem with that. Do you?
Now, however, I’m actually not sure if it’s even legal for me to post this picture of Siriono tribespeople. This goes to show how quickly attitudes can change.
Nowadays, internet pornography is ubiquitous and is silently wreaking havoc on society. Sexual imagery is everywhere, yet we are deep in the midst of the Great Sex Drought.
In many ways, we have much more sexual freedom than our grandparents or great-grandparents did, but do we live in a truly sex-positive society? Are our attitudes towards sex truly healthy? Are people more sexually fulfilled than they were before the internet revolutionized our imaginations?
Personally, I doubt it. What I see is the commodification of sexual imagery serving the interests of a great marketing machine. For most people, sexual liberation remains as elusive as ever.
Fewer and fewer people are having sex. Fewer people are falling in love, forming long-term intimate relationship, or getting married. More marriages are ending in divorce.
Behold, the great irony of the Great Plastic Age - in an age where we have greater sexual freedom than ever before, we are having less sex than ever before.
What is to be done about this? I don’t claim to know. But one thing that we will have to acknowledge at some point is this:
WE ARE NOT NORMAL.
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