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Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora Kracaw Kroeber were pioneering
anthropologists largely responsible for the establishment and growth of
the Department of Anthropology at the University of California. In 1939
Alfred Kroeber published a landmark essay in which he called his fellow
anthropologists to task for their reluctance to study the American
Indian berdache tradition because of its close link to homosexuality.
The berdaches occupied a position of respect among many tribes, serving
an almost shamanistic function in tribal culture. They were usually men
who cross-dressed as women, and took on many of the tasks and skills
associated with the women of the tribe. They also actively engaged in
sexual relations with other men, and since it was unavoidable to discuss
the berdaches without making reference to homosexuality, most
anthropologists chose to turn a blind eye to the practice. For Kroeber,
the enlightened treatment of male-male sexuality among “primitive”
peoples provided a model from which more “advanced” societies had much
to learn.
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Psychosis or Social Sanction
[Excerpt]
To put it in another form, certain of what one calls psychotic
phenomena are socially channeled by primitives — standardized,
recognized, approved, rewarded — but regarded as wholly outside the
approved channel by ourselves.
Homosexuality
To this there is at least one parallel in the institutional field: the
transvestite, in American ethnology often called the berdache (French
from Arabic bardaj, “slave”). In most of primitive Northern Asia and
North America, men of homosexual trends adopted women’s dress, work, and
status, and were accepted as non-physiological, but institutionalized,
women. In Siberia the transformation was generally associated with
shamanistic power, control of spirits or possession by them; in America,
usually not. In both areas, choice of status was left to the
individual; if he decided to transform his sex, he was socially accepted
as a woman. How far invert erotic practice accompanied the status, is
not always clear from the data, and probably varied. It is conceivable
that in some cases there occurred a partial sublimation of specific
erotic urges into feminine occupation, dress, and association. The
berdaches are usually spoken of as willing as well as skilful and strong
workers at female tasks. At any rate, the North American Indian
attitude toward the berdache stresses not his erotic life but his social
status; born a male, he became accepted as a woman socially.
[Note: The time is ready for a synthetic work on this subject. The
cultural data are numerous. On the involved psychology the information
is less satisfactory. While the institution was in full bloom, the
Caucasian attitude was one of repugnance and condemnation. This
attitude quickly became communicated to the Indians, and made subsequent
personality inquiry difficult, the later berdaches leading repressed and
disguised lives. The fullest account is by G. Devereux,
Institutionalized homosexuality of the Mohave Indians, Human Biology,
1937, 9, 498-527. The Mohave are unusually uninhibited both in
sex activity and in speech about it. They even recognized women
inverts, active female homosexuals, who are rare elsewhere. I suspect
that many Indian men understood the phenomenon imperfectly, or
misunderstood it. An old Yokuts, born about 1840, who knew the social
functions of the transvestites quite well — they were corpse-handlers or
“undertakers” among his people — told me that in his opinion they were
men who took on female dress and occupation in order to have free
association with women and special opportunities for secret heterosexual
activity with them. While this may have occurred now and then, it is
obviously in the main a rationalized misconstruction by an
unimaginatively normal heterosexual.]
Here, accordingly, we have another set of psychiatric phenomena, those
of sexual inversion, which our culture regards as abnormal, asocial if
not antisocial, and in general views with considerable affect of
repugnance, but which certain primitives accept with equanimity and
provide a social channel for.
[Note: That the peoples who accept transvestism are essentially those of
Northern Asia and America, a continuous area, suggests that the
institution is a single historic growth. If it were something
characteristic of a certain “state of advancement” it ought to occur
much more scatteringly over the world. The ancient Near Eastern
development was different: it was associated with specific cults and
with mutilation. The pederasty which was more or less openly tolerated
in certain advanced civilizations — Greece, later Islam, China in
connection with the theater — is also not the same, the emphasis being
on sexual practice rather than on transvestite “sublimation,” and
scarcely leading to a lifelong status.]
The case is not wholly parallel to shamanism, but is definitely like it
in the point of socio-cultural acceptance instead of rejection.
Furthermore, in this matter of transvestitism it cannot be said that the
difference between the Indian and ourselves is one of greater
enlightenment on our part. It is only since eighteenth-century
enlightenment that homosexuality has begun to be regarded in the
Occidental civilization as somewhat less than the ultimate abomination
and offense. Our tolerance toward it has increased in proportion with
what we call our enlightenment. And certainly the American Indian
system seems to work well from the angle of human happiness: the invert
is free to work out his inner satisfactions as he can, without
persecution from without; and society does not feel itself injured or
endangered. A status adjustment is achieved instead of one of conflict
and tension.
At any rate, we have here a second case in which primitives meet a
condition stigmatized by us as psychologically pathological, with social
tolerance and acceptance if not rewards. Like ourselves, they regard
both conditions as not normal, in the sense of not being common,
everyday in character, or in line with the majority of experienced
events. But their social affects toward these conditions are positive
or neutral; ours are negative. This appears to be a better description
of the facts than to say that we have come to exceed them in intelligent
enlightenment. Undoubtedly we possess on the whole a far greater body
of knowledge, criticism, and understanding than the primitives. But it
is doubtful how far this increase is responsible for similarly
constituted individuals being accorded respect and influence among many
primitives and being classed as dements and social liabilities by
ourselves. Fundamentally the difference seems rather to lie in
institutions, which in turn express the emotional attitudes of society
toward its parts and itself.
From Character and Personality, volume 8 (Sept. 1939-June 1940),
p. 209-211.
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