Notes about Sexuality and Religion

AskSocialScience

According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses it cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. The process, says the author, is irreversible: “The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15707651-sex-and-culture

The general idea is :

In Sex and Culture (1934), the ethnologist and social anthropologist J. D. Unwin studied 80 primitive tribes and 6 known civilizations through 5,000 years of history and found a positive correlation between the cultural achievement of a people and the sexual restraint they observe. According to Unwin, after a nation becomes prosperous it becomes increasingly liberal with regard to sexual morality and as a result loses it cohesion, its impetus and its purpose. The process, says the author, is irreversible: “The whole of human history does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it has been absolutely monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.”

Did the book age well?

Is there any up to date research on the relationship between sexual customs and culture that validate or invalidate this thesis?

Snugglerific
I haven’t read this book, but the quote is really an incoherent question in today’s terms. It’s a restatement of the flawed social evolutionist model where societies move on a line from “primitive” to “civilized.” The problem is civilized is really just a way to say “more like us” and primitive “less like us.” Nevertheless, Patrick Clarkin has written a good series of posts on this subject, and the answer is “it’s way more complicated than you think.”

[Name deleted]

1- I read the link on social evolutionsim. Indeed Social evolutionism is flawed as it is ethnocentric and has impertinent definitions of what constitutes a “civilized” society.

However, I am certain that if you read the book, you would agree with me that Unwin is not AT ALL a social evolutionist (I mean, he wrote this book half a century after the leading figures of scial evolutionism were dead), rather closer to Neoevolutionist .

He does not judge cultures based on how similar to 19th century European society looks like, but rather favors more objective criteria like stability, prosperity and energy output by members for the collective good.

2- As for the series of posts in the second link, they were an interesting read, but did not really satisfy my curiosity.

The author is more interested in documenting past sexual customs, relating them to human nature and other mammals, and noting the great diversity and plasticity of human sexual behaviour.

What I want to know is which model, which customs, make for a more stable and harmonious society.

He goes into this a little bit in one chapter of his [last article] (https://kevishere.com/2015/05/06/sex-really-is-dangerous-and-other-adjectives/) but isn’t very conclusive , and prefers to state that ” societies have come up with different formulas to regulate the individual variation in sexual desires and behaviors, all of which come with trade-offs. ” without really going into which trade offs make for the best outcomes in which conditions.

yodatsracist

As /u/snugglerific mentions, anthropology has generally gone the opposite direction from this book, particularly after the 1960’s and 1970’s.

There are, however, some anthropologists who are willing to do both critical work and explicitly cross cultural comparative work. They often use a set sample of cultures (most commonly the Human Relations Area Files, but others exist). This sort of work is very marginal to contemporary anthropology, but it exists; used an HRAF-based paper to answer the question “Is the romantic kiss universal?” here and here, for instance.

If you’re asking about whether that finding is true, it appears to be. From a 1987 Annual Review of Anthropology article:

Many cross-cultural studies have sought to define the local norms of sexual practice and discuss the cultural means by which normative behavior is maintained. Anthropologists continue to identify patte s of sexual behavior in terms of permissive and res ictive sex rules (89, 114). Frayser (132) uses HRAF data to argue that the nature of sex rules in any society is directly related to the extent to which sexual and reproductive relations overlap. Using the same data, Reiss (329) suggests that cultural scripts for high and low permissiveness stem from a linkage of marital sexuality, power relations, and an innate human tendency towards jealousy. Broude (57), however,questions the assumption that cultures can be categorized as either permissive or restrictive in their overall orientation. Less comprehensive discussions of norms and the regulation of sexual behavior tend to fall into four categories: marriage and sexuality, socialization, initiations and ceremonies, and aging.

A large number of HRAF studies on premarital sexual practice exist (148, 259, 334, 389). Broude (56) has critically reviewed these and apparently agrees with Murdock’s (282) conclusion that the more complex a society, the more restrictions are likely to be found involving premarital sexuality. However the details of the relationship remain unclear.

Also note this (Unwin is source number 376 in this review):

Earlier cross-cultural sex research was undertaken for two widely disparate reasons. One perspective,which focused on problems of cultural evolution, suggested that early human society was typified by sexual promiscuity and group marriage (20,136,262,276,315,376). Malinowski (250,252,275) and Westermarck (390) argued against this view and the evidence for it. Other early writers perpetuated a long-standing tradition of anthropological po og­ raphy,in which cross-cultural data on sexual practice is presented to titillate a Weste audience. Titles or publishing houses may even contain “anthropolo­ gy,” “ethnography, ” or “ethnopo ography ” in their names (11,52,61-63, 71, 198, 324,326, 355, 363). Some texts may have begun as serious works but were adulterated through many subsequent editions (e.g. 318,383).

Even if Unwin’s empirical finding might be right (and it’s debated, as mentioned above), I think most anthropologists would argue his analysis of that finding is way off because of the assumptions he makes about cultural evolution. Also, some of his interpretations seem grossly off: was the Chinese empire (with its complex concubine system that lasted until the Communist take-over) not “civilized”? Or, since these were not marriages but concubinages, does that still count as “civilized”? What is and isn’t monogamy, and what effect monogamy has or hasn’t had, is its own bag of worms.

Davis and Whitten end their Annual Review piece:

This review began with the comment that anthropologists have rarely studied human sexuality. The number of sources cited may seem to belie this apprais­ al. However, the literature is widely scattered over time and among cultures. Few serious attempts have been made to bring the literature together or even to follow up on previous studies (97, 99). Typically a researcher makes a single specialized contribution to the field. Regional and topical summaries and analyses are rare. Human sexuality is not yet a coherent subspeciality of anthropology. There is need for further open discussion of human sexuality and for the development of uniquely anthropological theories of the relevant phenomena. With its cross-cultural, holistic, and relativistic approach, an­ thropology is in a singular position to attempt such analyses. Wo hy in their own right, such discussions would also serve to improve the public and professional understanding of human sexuality in general.

Though some parts of the literature have received a large amount of attention (e.g. cross-cultural views of homosexuality), but, as far as I know, there has been no successful attempt to bring the literature together since then (there are small additions, like a 1997 review in the Annual Review of Sex Research called “Sexuality, Culture, and Political Economy: Recent Developments in Anthropological and Cross-Cultural Sex Research”).

If you’re interested in cross-cultural sex research, the best that I currently know is Gwen Broude’s work. It’s unfortunately all articles, all from the 1970’s and 80’s, none of it collated into a book (I believe it was based on her dissertation). I think she used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample instead of HRAF (the SCCS was supplemented by HRAF in her research), but you can think of them as roughly equivalent. One of the problems, though, is that because sex often isn’t explicitly looked at by anthropologists (as opposed to, say, kinship), you get a lot of missing data. There are 186 societies in the SCCS, but Broude was only about to code 40-80 societies for a lot of them because there just wasn’t sufficient ethnographic data on the other hundred or so for many of the questions (some questions, like the value of female virginity, could be coded for almost all groups in the sample). If you don’t have access to an academic library, you can read an ungated version of one her articles here. This article is all about coding, not correlations between the codes and other things (she explores that in other articles and book chapters), but it lets you minimally see the diversity of human behavior.

I think this is as much of as summary of her quantitative, cross-cultural research as Broude has ever written. It’s a book chapter, very readable even to the non-specialist. I’m not sure exactly in what context it was prepared, when, or if any significant part of her research agenda is left out, but it’s something that may interest you. (The SCCS, I believe, largely omits industrialized societies, so if you’re interested in sexuality in industrialized societies, this is not necessarily the end of your search, but I thinking through her patterns, they mostly seem to continue into industrial societies.) Anyway, Broude connects things like the restrictions around pre-martial sex to customs around the transfer of property at marriage (e.g. if brides come with a large bride price, women will be discouraged from having sex with men) and the connection between kinship and social identity (e.g. if who your father is important in a culture, then there will be heavier restrictions around pre-marital sex). It’s well worth your time to read. One thing to note is that she takes an evolutionary perspective at the end, while I think most other anthropologists might tend to incline towards a social constructionist or materialist explanation (she uses both types of explanations earlier in the article, particularly materialist explanations). She discusses the three perspectives more in the encyclopedia article that starts on page 177 here, where she calls them the biological (evolutionary), learning (social constructionist), and “systematically related to other aspects of culture and behavior” (materialist) perspectives.

[deleted]

Thanks for all the material! Im quite sad that there isn’t more research on this topic tho.

I think most anthropologists would argue his analysis of that finding is way off because of the assumptions he makes about cultural evolution.

Which assumptions exactly are you referring to here?