(go to translated version in Spanish)

Gilbert Herdt, Ph.D. in Anthropology and especialist on human sexuality, has made ethnographic research with the Sambia, at New Guinea. Dr. Herdt has authored or edited more than 25 books and published more than 45 journal articles about homosexuality, ritual, gay culture, AIDS or gender. He is Director and Professor of the Human Sexuality Studies Program and Director of the National Sexuality Resource Center at San Francisco State University; where we interviewed him last month of August.

Q: Sexuality has traditionally been one of the main concerns for anthropologist, from the work of Malinowski or Mead. Do you think it has the place it deserves in our discipline nowadays to understand human cultures?
A: No, it doesn't have the place it deserves, primarily because for far too long anthropologists treated sexuality as a function of kinship and marriage. So there was very little emphasis upon sexual meanings, sexual practices and sexual behavior. To the extent that there was, it was more typically a function, a result of kinship and marriage and it is also because anthropologists tended to idealize what people in other cultures talked about in terms of the norms rather than their actual practices and now we know because of the epidemic that it is not sufficient to study the norms, because lots of people say they have a norm, but what they do in their private or secret sexual behavior can be totally the opposite and only very late did anthropology come to understand the difference. Nowadays, of course is much, much more common and we have more and more people working on sexuality as part of the pattern of culture and that includes actual practices rather than norms, but I still believe that anthropologists tend a little bit too much to emphasize the discursive, what people say, rather than what they do and of course part of the reason for that is the methodological conundrum that everyone talks about sexuality through what people say or report retrospectively, because of course, hardly anyone for ethical reasons ever observes someone actually doing sex, unless an anthropologist is involved directly with a person in another community but then, of course then it poses another problem which is ethical in nature.

You defend the idea of considering sexuality as a Human Right and, at the same time, you value cultural relativism. How can we then get over the argument of “the right to keep our own culture” being used by those countries which oppose considering sexuality as a Human Right in every international conference on the subject? I mean, for example, some Muslim and Christian countries.
It is almost a contradiction. There are different levels of description, and meaning and explanation in science also in the study of social policy. There is a level which is at the local community where there are practices and meanings that have their own importance. Then there is a higher level which may have to do with a region or even higher, a nation or a state such as France or Spain or Germany. But, then even higher lever now we recognize a new level since the end of the Cold War, which is the global level: globalization. And part of the problem in talking about the relationship between Human Rights and cultural relativism is to be aware of the difference in the levels of analysis and also to be aware that there are different kinds of cultural relativism. There is at least three major forms of relativism, that is to say there is descriptive relativism, in which you say what holds true for a local community is its own practices and meanings, and we try to be faithful to those patterns in that community. We understand that we cannot remove them from that community because then we have lost the holistic character. That's true. Then there is another level which has to do with philosophical relativism which is a general principle in which we say that all things being equal we hold as valuable the truths of all cultures as if the are equally good, equally important, equally understanding of human nature. Those are different levels of cultural relativism. And so for me human sexuality is a Human Right to me I recognize more and more as part of the human condition, which is really a level of global world, a global system if you like, just as the ecological system that we inhabit is one system and everything affects everything else. And therefore I value and cherish the idea of sexuality as Human Right, which I believe merits respect in all societies and all states. At the same time I also recognize that in local communities they organize their practices and meanings in such a way that is distinctive of their cultural world and they have rights in that cultural world to say what they agree to and don't agree to, but it is not an absolute agreement of right or wrong or black and white. Because they live now increasingly in a global system. But also the Global System doesn't have the absolute right to intervene under all circumstances, because that obviously could lead to fascism. And we would not want that. So there must be a recognition and respect for the importance of a global system of Human Rights and also for the integrity of local communities. Then where we work out the conflicts and disagreements it seems to me have to come on a case by case basis, on the particular issue that is in question. Whether it has to do for example with the recognition of sexual orientation, the recognition of a certain kind of reproductive practice or whatever it is and that is where I think the world is right now. We are in a kind of a fuzzy state or somewhat ambiguous state, but I think there is a trend. The trend is the increasing recognition around the world of sexuality as a Human Right which means that local cultures gradually will more and more have to understand and take into account in their own code, cultural code, what that Human Right is.

But sometimes we meet with religious boundaries, for example.
We do. In some cases we are dealing with religion, and religion introduces an all together completely different set of forces, because religion, religious voices, religious practices are their own set of principles, their own set of philosophy and in some cases, when we are talking about fundamentalism, fundamentalists then may see promoting a certain ideology which may or may not be faithful to the practice in a local community, it may go beyond and may be politicizing or idealizing and making it into an ideology beyond what was ever intended by the local practice. So I think that those efforts must be understood also as political movements, as political formations and can't in any sense be treated surely as a local culture that's far too naïve.

In your last book “Secrecy and Cultural Reality: Utopian Ideologies of the New Guinea Men's House” you deal with secrecy. How did secrecy become a tool for managing gender inequality and cultural overthrow?
I think that's a wonderful question and I've given it a lot of thought, and what I think is that in anthropology we recognize that historically there is a relatively simple relationship between being a society and having a political leadership in that society that is more or less accepted by that society without domination so that there is a social structure, there are political leaders, they are the elders, they are the priests, they are the elected officials whoever they are, maybe they are heads of the family. What I am saying is that we recognize that there is a relationship, we recognize historically the relatively simple relationship between power and the society. And, of course in the last couple of decades and partly through the importance of feminist, women's studies, gender studies and sexuality studies the code in particular, we now realize that the relationship of power to the society is much more complex. And, secrecy is one manifestation of this relationship which I think has always been misunderstood and has often I think been misrepresented by anthropologists in the past, although I will say in the last five years to the work of such recent anthropologists as Harvey Whitehouse, there are now what I think is a very, very intelligent and important rethinking about secrecy in cross cultural studies. But historically, if you prevail which was the folk view of our society, secrecy was a bad thing. The public was suspicious of secrecy and in the Cold War Period from the 40's to the early 90's, it reached it's apex in which secrecy was strongly disliked and also suspect by Western liberal democracy and during that time when anthropologists were doing field work, when they encountered secrecy in other cultures, I believe that they treated it largely in a cynical manner and particularly when it involved in the case that I studied in New Guinea ritual secrecy, I believe that it was treated in a way that was more in concern with the folk understanding in their own society rather than in the local cultures where they were.

Historically, if you prevail which was the folk view of our society, secrecy was a bad thing.

And I would remark that as I show in the first chapter of my book on Lewis Henry Morgan, the founder of American anthropology that secrecy in Morgan's time was totally different than it is in the Cold War society. And, Morgan himself regarded it in a very different way. It was part of his life. There was an appreciation for secrecy as a protective in creative area, but there was also a suspicion of secrecy as being antisocial and anti-democracy. That tension which existed in the nineteenth century was lost in the twentieth century when secrecy became all bad. It became identified with a kind of sickness of the soul, with a kind of disease of the state, most importantly associated with international espionage and spying, and then more lately with sexual abuse as a secret hidden in the family. So your question then, this is the context in New Guinea society, what I began to realize is the problem is people have a claim to power in public space, typically men in New Guinea society. They have that claim to power, but they are not able to rule. They do not have the means, the resources, particularly in private to make their claims real. Therefore, they resorted to secrecy as a means of managing gender relations where the other gender in the case of women making demands upon men, or women intruding upon men's power positions they use secrecy as another technology or force of power in order to protect their rule, in order to preserve their rule. But, in addition to that they also created in a sense of the larger political and social movements you might say, they created a hidden reality, an alternative reality to the one that was in public affairs. So that in the same society, there were two different cultural realities if you like, a public one and a secret one. And the secret one was the one that they used to manage gender relations, the one that they used to manage sexual relations, and it was also the one that they used to create solidarity between males in terms of their dealings with other tribes, and sometimes also with their wives who were perceived as being from other groups.

And finally, Do you have any comment or advice for scholars and researchers studying and researching human sexualities?
Well, first of all I am a great believer that people should study what interests them because that is where we have our real passion, our excitement. We should study what we think is important and also where we have experience, that's where we have the true and genuine interests and our true intuitions, our insights. Without those insights, we are cut off from the creative process that is the great engine that is motivating research. For that reason also, it is so important in doing ethnography today for the researcher to do a description of his or her own position in the project. Their positionality including their own subjectivity and even going further if you are studying sexuality and gender to do a description to some extent of the investigator's own sexual subjectivity which informs how we think about the world, the things we are interested in, our biases, our prejudices, because by telling those to the reader and to the public, we help it to become more scientific actually. It seems paradoxical that by through our subjectivity, we become more objective, but it's only when people understand the true mechanism of ethnography which is after all the individual personality of the ethnographer that we get to be part of revealing the way that the world is, part of the truth, part of what the story of the society is, and, therefore, the voice of different stories that a society has to tell us. Another thing to say about it is that anthropologists are storytellers. I believe what we do best in anthropology is we work at a level of local meanings and local practices, where we inform the great forces of our time: religion, power, politics, economy, globalization, we inform those great forces through the meanings and stories of local people, how they are experiencing them, how they are being impacted upon by them, what has it meant for their lives, for their freedom, for their suffering, and by doing that, we give a human face to these great and complex problems of human life. No other field does that. No other field gives the human face and also gives the story of ordinary people. And I think that's what anthropology should be for.