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This is an exceptional book in the psychoanalytic study of sexuality, a ground-breaking book in the anthropological study of sexuality and a unique book in the literature of both psychoanalysis and anthropology. It is also an essay (in the root sense of 'attempt') to use the intimate study of sexuality as a particular angle from which to view culture. Herdt, a distinguished young anthropologist, has studied, since 1974, a pre-literate New Guinea tribe, whose pseudonym is 'the Sambia'; a society, like so many in Melanesia, characterized by homosexual male initiation rites. After several periods of field work with this tribe, Herdt went to UCLA to study with Stoller, a prominent and original psychoanalytic investigator of sexuality. One of the fruits of their larger collaboration is this book, at the core of which are transcripts of interviews with seven Sambians, two of which were conducted during a period of some ten days in 1979 when Stoller visited Herdt in New Guinea.
A major goal of their book is to foster the development of a new type of investigator they call a 'clinical ethnographer'. While there is by now a long and complex history of collaboration between psychoanalysts and anthropologists (including those very few individuals such as Kroeber, Roheim and Devereux who were both), this collaboration around the detailed study of sexuality is unique.
The history within anthropology of the study of sexuality is long and venerable—it's certainly not the case that the field has ignored sexuality. Rather the history is of starts and stops, beginnings and hesitations, advances and retreats. Malinowski's Sex and Repression in Savage Society(1927) and The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanesia(1929) are among the pioneering works in these areas. Certainly the fantasy life of the early explorers and missionaries was wildly stimulated by what they imagined and what they saw among the 'savages'. Savages were wild and unrestrained, perversions and immora