Hastings Donnan and Fiona Magowan. The Anthropology of Sex. New York: Berg, 2010. 224 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN-13 978-1845201135. Gary Greenberg. Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. 448 pp. $27.00 (cloth). ISBN 1416569790. Richard J. McNally. What Is Mental Illness? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 288 pp. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN-13 978-0674046498. Philip Rieder. La Figure du Patient au XVIIIe Siècle. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2010. 592 pp. $60.00 (paper). ISBN-13 978-2600014229. Wilhelm Stekel. Sadism and Masochism: The Psychopathology of Sexual Cruelty. Washington, DC.: Solar Books, 2010. 320 pp. $19.95 (paper). ISBN-13 978-0982046456
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2011
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 40 KB
- Volume
- 47
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0022-5061
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This book, described as the first work to provide a critical synthesis of over a century of comparative expertise, knowledge, and understanding of diverse sexual forms, clearly does so in an entertaining way. With chapters entitled "Sexual Advances," "Beautiful Bodies," "Dancing Desires," "Erotic Economies," "Foreign Affairs," "Forbidden Frontiers," "Sex Crimes," and "Intimate Cultures," and such headings as "Teasing Out an Anthropology of Sex," it suggests a light-hearted approach to the serious study of "how sex acts, sensuousness and sexual experiences are variously narrated and embodied across cultures." Donnan and Magowan, anthropologists at Queen's University Belfast, aim to highlight the perspectives of those whose sex lives have been described and theorized in ethnographic studies, often with the result that the participants' own views of their experiences are "buried" (p. 1). The authors use detailed ethnographic case studies to address theoretical issues and "bring together the divergent faces of sex through the interrelationship of economic, political, ritual, social and performative lenses cross-culturally" (p. 22).
While the authors' focus is not primarily historical, they devote the first chapter, "Sexual Advances," to an overview of the historical background of sex research to give "a sense of how anthropological studies of sex have changed," with particular attention to theoretical shifts that have taken place over the last 20 years. In this volume, they examine themes and ideas from "the anthropology of aesthetics, senses, performance, borders, emotions, transgressions, rights, and political economies" to show that "sex has no natural basis that is outside of culture and history" (p. 21).