STUDIES OF EXTRAMARITAL SEXUALITY
Because of anthropology’s emphasis on marriage and social control, there has been a general de-emphasis on the study of extramarital sexuality. Also lost in the shuffle is the view of sexuality as a component of culture, since it has been assumed to be a component of marriage. Despite this obvious and continuing orientation to sexuality only as it prevails in marriage, some anthropologists have recently begun to report on extramarital relations, mostly in Africa, native South America, Polynesia, and New Guinea.
Wagley, for one, had no choice but to recognize sexual activity outside of marriage, for Tapirap? Indian men take six- or seven-year-old girls as wives, a custom they refer to as “raising your own wife”. These men have to find sexual satisfaction surreptitiously; their marriages are, at least initially, asexual. After doing field work among the Fulani, a pastoral people of Upper Volta, Riesman offered this important critique of the standard anthropological understanding of marriage and sexual control:
It is a commonplace in anthropology to say that marriage, as an institution, channels man’s sexual impulses so that they contribute to the maintenance of social structures rather than their subversion. But in reality, in the case of the Fulani at least, the effect of marriage is much more complicated than that. On the one hand, instead of channeling sexual impulses, so that they flower within limits defined as legitimate, marriage, in its beginnings, makes this flowering very difficult. Instead of being a honeymoon, in which the young people can satisfy their passion and begin to become a unit which will present a common front to others, this period in Fulani marriage prevents the couple from being together and, especially, prevents them from becoming a unit. On the other hand, the ease of divorce and the possibility of polygamy are a positive encouragement to men to be interested in other women. In the same way, this interest on the part of men is an encouragement to women to remain in a way available, whatever their matrimonial situation at the present.
Riesman criticizes the “sexual channeling” function of marriage identified and emphasized by Malinowski. Malinowski assumed a universal function in marriage, based on his Trobriand data, which in effect focuses emotional and sexual feelings and behavior in one direction, on one person (in monogamous unions). Riesman also cites a statement made by Bohannan, that “marriage and the resultant family is, everywhere, one of the main modes by which sexual activity within the society is controlled”. Bohannan is aware, however, of periods of relative sexual freedom in various societies and of the non-familial institutionalization of sex, prostitution being the obvious example in our own society.
Work such as Riesman’s indicates the mistake of studying sexuality exclusively within the context of marriage and the family for the Fulani case and it warns against similar assumptions and oversights in work on other societies. Riesman may be aware, however, that Malinowski’s focusing effect in marriage may still operate for Fulani women, if not the men. “Being available” and being free to have additional and various sexual partners are different.
*136/187/5*
Related Posts:
Posted in Men's Health-Erectile DysfunctionTags: Men’s Health
Leave a comment
You need to log in to comment.