Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns, pp. 134-39 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston).
160
cummings, e. e. (1963) Complete Poems 1913-1962, p. 556 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich).
161
Dawson, W. L. (1923) The Birds of California, pp. 1090-91 (San Diego: South Moulton Co.); Jehl, J. R., Jr. (1987) “A Historical Explanation for Polyandry in Wilson’s Phalarope,” Auk 104:555-56. Likewise, an even more “innocuous” phenomenon—the existence of female choice in mating among a wide variety of organisms—was considered “controversial” less than 20 years ago (Eberhard, Female Control, pp. 420-21), owing to the widespread belief among biologists that females are merely passive participants or “receptacles” in mating activities. Unfortunately, this idea still persists among many biologists today (cf. Gowaty, “Principles of Females’ Perspectives in Avian Behavioral Ecology”). Similarly, de Waal (1997:76) suggests that cultural biases and sexism may have contributed to scientists’ denial, until 1992, of the occurrence of female dominance in Bonobos. Indeed, he points out that if any scientists had proposed this thirty years ago—along with the full set of traits now known to be a part of Bonobo life (including a richly elaborated nonreproductive sexuality)—they would simply have been “laughed out of the halls of academe” (ibid., p. 160).
Chapter 6. A New Paradigm: Biological Exuberance
1
Boswell, J. (1980) Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, pp. 48–49 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Carse, J. P. (1986) Finite and Infinite Games, pp. 75, 159 (New York: Ballantine Books).
2
Homosexuality and transgender of various types have also been reported from numerous indigenous cultures of South America, Asia, Africa, the Pacific islands, and Australia, and many of these cultures deserve further investigation in terms of how they perceive systems of gender and sexuality in animals. Two potentially rich sources of knowledge about animal homosexuality/transgender are the many aboriginal cultures of Africa and South America. The Mongandu people of Congo (Zaire), for example, have long known of the sexual activity (genito- genital rubbing) between female Bonobos, which they call hoka-hoka. Among the Hausa of Nigeria, transgendered men known as ’yan daudu (who are effeminate, usually married to women, and also sometimes have homosexual relations) are culturally linked to Cattle Egrets, a species in which heterosexually paired males do sometimes copulate with other males (Wrangham, R., and D. Peterson [1996] Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, p. 209 [New York: Houghton Mifflin]; Gaudio, R. P. [1997] “Not Talking Straight in Hausa,” p. 420-22, in A. Livia and K. Hall, eds., Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, pp. 416–29 [New York: Oxford University Press]). In South America, the U’wa people of Columbia have a myth involving copulation between a male fox and a male opossum, as well as various forms of gender mixing such as pregnancy in the male fox and transformation into a woman by the male opossum (Osborn, A. [1990] “Eat and Be Eaten: Animals in U‘wa [Tunebo] Oral Tradition,” pp. 152–53, in R. Wills, ed., Signifying Animals: Human Meaning in the Natural World, pp. 140-–58 [London: Unwin Hyman]). The creation myth cycle of the Mundurucu people of the Amazon includes images of birds as symbols of anal birth and a male homosexual reproductive capacity, and the male tapir as a creature with symbolically female sexual organs, undergoing anal penetration and being sexually attracted to a man disguised as a woman (Nadelson, L. [1981] “Pigs, Women, and the Men’s House in Amazonia: An Analysis of Six Mundurucu Myths,” pp. 250, 254, 260–61, 270, in S. B. Ortner and H. Whitehead, eds., Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, pp. 240–72 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press]). And among the Waiwai and other cultures, the scent gland on the backs of both male and female peccaries is considered to have androgynous sexual functions (Morton, J. [1984] “The Domestication of the Savage Pig: The Role of Peccaries in Tropical South and Central America and Their Relevance for the Understanding of Pig Domestication in Melanesia,” pp. 43–44, 63, Canberra Anthropology 7:20–70). Undoubtedly many other similar examples remain to be discovered and studied, even within the culture areas surveyed here (New Guinea, Siberia/Arctic, and indigenous North America), since this topic has yet to be systematically investigated in the anthropological literature.
3
Of course these four themes are not discrete or mutually exclusive, since they often overlap or interconnect in a particular culture, nor are they uniform either between or within cultures. They are used here simply as a way of organizing and discussing a wide range of beliefs and practices, thereby highlighting a number of their salient features. Throughout this section the “ethnographic present tense” is used, i.e., indigenous beliefs and practices are described as ongoing, contemporary occurrences even though some have been (or are being) actively suppressed and/or eradicated by colonizer and majority cultures and their legacy of homophobic attitudes (particularly in North America and Siberia). In spite of severe declines and disappearances in the face of nearly insurmountable obstacles, however, many of these traditions continue in altered form or are undergoing wholesale cultural revival; they should be considered neither “dead” nor “lost.”
4
For more information on Native American two-spirit, see, for example, Callender, C., and L. M. Kochems (1983) “The North American Berdache,” Current Anthropology 24:443–70; Williams, W. L. (1986) The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (Boston: Beacon Press); Allen, P. G. (1986) “Hwame, Koshkalaka, and the Rest: Lesbians in American Indian Cultures,” in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, pp. 245–61 (Boston: Beacon Press); Gay American Indians (GAI) and W. Roscoe, coordinating ed., (1988) Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology (New York: St. Martin’s Press); Jacobs, S.-E., W. Thomas, and S. Lang, eds., (1997) Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press); Roscoe, W. (1998) Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America (New York: St. Martin’s Press).
5
Whitman, W. (1937) The Oto, pp. 22, 29, 30, 50 (New York: Columbia University Press); Callender and Kochems, “The North American Berdache,” p. 452.
6
Cushing, F. H. (1896) “Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths,” pp. 401–2, Bureau of American Ethnology Annual Report 13:321–447; Parsons, E. C. (1916) “The Zuni La’mana,” p. 524, American Anthropologist 18:521–28.
7
Boas, F. (1898) “The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians,” Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History 2(2):38–40 (reprinted in GAI and Roscoe, Living the Spirit, pp. 81–84); McIlwraith, T. F. (1948) The Bella Coola Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press); Gifford, E. W. (1931) “The Kamia of Imperial Valley,” pp. 79–80, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 97:1–94. The names of two other birds encountered by the Kamia two-spirit are also mentioned in this story (tokwil and kusaul), but Gifford does not identify which species these are.
8
Haile, B., I. W. Goossen, and K. W. Luckert (1978) Love-Magic and Butterfly People: The Slim Curly Version of the Ajilee and Mothway Myths, pp. 82-90, 161. American Tribal Religions, vol. 2 (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press); Luckert, K. W. (1975) The Navajo Hunter Tradition, pp. 176-77 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press); Levy, J. E., R. Neutra, and D. Parker (1987) Hand Trembling, Frenzy Witchcraft, and Moth Madness: A Study of Navajo Seizure Disorders, p. 46 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press).
9
