ABSTRACT
To examine the nexus between sexuality, health and rights in the foundations of anthropology requires a historical review of the emergence of the ‘culture’ concept and cultural relativism in studies of sexuality, allowing a perspective on how ethnographic work, over the period from approximately 1920 to 2000, created a new way of thinking about sexual meanings and practices. During this time, older theoretical approaches evolved and died out, new voices emerged and the colonial history of anthropology ended, leading to a call for a different and more interdisciplinary vision of sexual, gender and reproductive rights and health in research, policy and advocacy. In the social sciences in the USA, anthropology and sociology played pivotal roles in the twentieth-century reaction to evolutionary and social Darwinist approaches (Harris 2001; D’Emilio and Freedman 1988) in medicine and sexology. By the beginning of modern anthropology around the time of the First World War, these discourses on sexuality were so heavily influenced by the language of pathology that the label ‘medicalised’ in respect to such work seems apt (Irvine 2000). Creation of a unified concept of ‘culture’ (defined here as a system of meanings and social practices) during this period, and the rise of the epistemology of ‘cultural relativism’ (the world view that all cultures have equally good knowledge sets) was foundational to this reaction and subsequent social learning and environmental or ecological perspectives on sexuality, sexual meanings, roles and scripts (Bell et al. 2001; Gagnon 2004; Herdt 1997; Laumann et al. 1994; Rubin 2002). Anthropology’s critical role in the invention of functionalism, too, and then structural-functionalism in theory and methodology, allied with sexuality study early on, was paradoxical, however, in that the work of the early pioneers was all but forgotten until decades later, an hiatus that led anthropology to ‘rediscover’ sexuality after the advent of Foucault, explained below (Vance 1999; Herdt 2004; Herdt and Stoller 1990). Activism in anthropology has always been complicated and with regard to sexuality, this long silence on sex created a formidable barrier, even in the fight against AIDS and HIV.
