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Book Review: Sambia Sexual Culture: Essays From the Field. By Gilbert Herdt. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 1999, 327 pp., $20.00.
One culture whose sexual practices have received much attention in both the social anthropological and sexological literature is the Sambia tribe of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The fieldwork on the Sambia sexual culture was carried out by Herdt in the 1970s and later presented by him in a series of essays. These essays, in slightly revised form and with a new introduction, have at last been brought together in this volume. Despite the fact that the book is a collection of essays, they fit well together and the book reads much like a single work.
The aspect of Sambia sexual culture on which Herdt focuses, and the one that has generated the most interest, is the culturally prescribed period of male homosexuality that takes place prior to the Sambia male's heterosexual marriage. Although culturally prescribed homosexuality has long been studied in the various other cultures of Melanesia (Davenport, 1965, 1977; Deacon, 1934; van Baal, 1966), Sambia sexual culture has received special attention because Herdt argues that the sexual behavior of the Sambia shows how profoundly Sambia sexual desires-and thus, by implication, sexual desires in any culture-are conditioned by historical and cultural influences. Herdt's view is in contrast to those of many of the earlier Melanesian ethnographers, who saw such homosexual activity as being merely "institutionalized" or "ritualized" and thus not as being indicative of the par-ticipant's actual sexual desires. Herdt, however, argues that the Sambia who engage in the prescribed homosexual activities are not merely doing so because it is ritually prescribed, but are rather doing so because of genuine homosexual desires that their culture has, through "deep scripting," implanted in them. As Sambia boys become young men, their culture then, through similar scripting, gets them to give up their homosexual desires and acquire heterosexual ones. But why does Herdt think all this? To find out, let us have a close look at Sambia-prescribed homosexuality.
This homosexuality involves young boys performing fellatio on older adolescent boys and takes place in a complex web of beliefs concerning female pollution and the masculinizing properties of semen. Sambia, whose culture contains a high...