At some point the structure of marriage and how it fits into society is a matter only for the people of that society, not a matter for outsiders.
There are no outsiders. While you were away we found out that people from different cultures have been shagging all along and that we are all related (which should please mr incest at the bottom of the thread), and that all societies are deeply interconnected at every level. Thanks for worrying about the retirement plans of impoverished homosexuals though, without people like you making sure they behaved responsibly and bred, who knows where they might end up in later life.
One other point. I am not convinced by biological explanations of homosexuality. I don't think it's a choice anymore than some guy goes into a bar and sits down and decides what color of hair to prefer. The development of sexual identity is a complex thing and there are societies in the past where homosexual relationships have been a lot more common than they are at present.
For example, Plutarch characterizes pederastic relationships (probably circumscribed by all sorts of taboos in order to render them non-predatory) as forming the political backbone of Spartan society--- these relationships provided young male Spartan citizens the ability, he suggests, to make the sorts of political connections they needed to be successful later in life. If the surveys of Greek vase paintings are to be believed, it is likely that most Greek citizen women also engaged in some homosexual relationships within religious contexts in ancient Greece as well. Was this bad? I don't think so. These were all channelled into very pro-social frameworks if we believe folks like Aristotle, Plutarch, and the modern scholars who have studied vase paintings and the like.
Instead I think the "born that way" thesis is actually homophobic. Our society is very aggressively hetero-normal. You can find Barby and Ken playsets, but if there was an equivalent Barby and Kendra dyke playset, well... it would be seen as sexualized in a way that Barby and Ken are not. In this context, where our society says "straight is the way normal people are" in our toys, movies, bridal magazines, etc, the "born that way" thesis reduces to "well, there is a small minority that is just different and will never be like everyone else. You aren't one of them, are you?"
So in many ways perhaps even the gay rights movement entrenches obstacles to normalization of same sex relationships. I am not saying this is good or bad. I am just describing it how I think it is.
There is clear evidence for genetic and pre-birth factors in determining sexual orientation. Not all of the variance has been accounted for, but that doesn't mean that a substantial part of the variance has been solidly explained by biological factors. What exactly do you not agree with in the numerous studies that have been done?
Your last two paragraphs don't make sense. That our society is very aggressively hetero normal is not caused by gay rights movements or by homosexuality being determined at birth, on the contrary. It is however caused by people who argue that marriage is only for heterosexuals.
The problem is that trans-historically and cross-culturally the percentage of people who engage in significant same-sex relationships varies quite a bit. These range from approximately a hundred percent to a very tiny minority. We are on the lower-end of the spectrum, believe it or not.
All these studies show is that there may be biological reasons that aggressively acculturating kids into heterosexuality might not reach everyone. They don't suggest that heterosexuality and homosexuality are necessarily in-born. Indeed when you think about all the cognitive stuff that has to happen before we find someone attractive, they almost certainly cannot.
First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong.
I do agree with you that birth reasons do not determine the outcome. There are two separate issues: same sex attractions and calling oneself homosexual/bisexual and having homosexual relationships. It is obvious that culture has a larger effect on the latter than on the former. It's no surprise that there are fewer people who call themselves homosexual in cultures where people are killed for calling themselves homosexual. Yet studies indicate that pre-birth biological factors have a large influence on the latter. Sexual attractions are very hard to study, unfortunately, but would likely show even larger biological influence. Even so, I do think that culture has an effect on sexual attraction.
First of all, pederastic relationships are not at all the same as homosexual relationships between people of age. In ancient Greece, homosexuality between adult males was condemned. Your theory that the range is from 100% to nearly 0% is simply wrong.
I think we say this because we have stronger taboos against one than another. Keep in mind that women were considered to be at age of marriage at not much older, so... Also it is simply not true that homosexuality between adult males was condemned. At most homosexuality between adult male equals was condemned and the reason probably had to do with the association of anal sex with blurring gender lines (Greek pederastic relationships if we believe Aristotle, made penetrative sex strictly off-limits for this reason).
Keep in mind also that "adult" is another inherently cultural concept..... It happens at different ages in different societies. When does one become an adult? Age of 14? 16? 12? 18? 21? Something else? There is no biological line there either. Indeed we've known since van Gennep that puberty and adolescence are distinct and may not even overlap in any given culture for a specific individual.
But hey, if we take Plutarch's word for it wife-swapping in Sparta was the way adult male equals were supposed to... um... build connections.....
But it's not limited to Greece. When you look at cases where ritual male-male fellatio is practiced, some of these places have it going well into adult-hood rather than one-time becoming a man. I don't know that you can call ritual homosexual contact "not significant." I would certainly call it significant.
But even where we get to attraction, there are some basic problems which have to do with getting past the feeble nature of the senses.
We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female, what social class they belong to, what kind of personality they have. So we process social cues. We see someone from behind "nice long hair, skirt, must be an attractive woman." We walk by, check her out and are horrified to see it is a bearded hippie. Everyone has had some sort of experience like this, and in our culture it provokes immediate negative emotions.
Sometimes these emotions of shock and dismay (and even confusion) lead to tragedy. In one case in Denver not too long ago (see http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/19121127/detail.html) a man murdered his transgendered girlfriend after discovering she had previously been a man. She had given him a blowjob the day before, and evidently he couldn't deal with the confusion over whether he had been given a blowjob by a man or a woman. This is a purely cognitive process, not one based on biology. If it were based in biology, I suppose we could treat her as the perpetrator of non-consensual sex-acts by failing to disclose the inherent nature of the act.... but I don't think think that works.
So sexual attraction, and reactions to what social category someone is in (and this includes gender) are fundamentally based on cognitive processes. There is no way around this. Cognition and social instincts, rather than the inherent nature of the object of sexual desires, determines who we are attracted to.
At most biological underpinnings of sexual orientation in our society affect these social instincts and cognitive aspects. They simply can't reach the underlying nature of the, if you will, archetype of attraction. (Using "archetype" here to mean the image we have that we expect to resemble the person we are attracted to.)
This debate will not be productive. It is clear that pederastic relationships are not the same as modern day homosexual relationships. You can shroud the concept all you want by applying an overdose of cultural relativism, but that doesn't make them the same. For example even though what adulthood is may not be clear to you, evidently it was clear to the Greeks since relationships with boys were OK but relationships between adult men were not. I believe the Greeks themselves looked at the body of the boy: if the boy was getting bodily hair, then he was no longer fit for a socially acceptable pederastic relationship. Of course there is a gray line. Every concept has grey lines. That doesn't mean that the concept (like "adulthood") doesn't exist.
Gender is actually a good example to illustrate my point. You claim that gender is based on cognitive processes, and I agree. That doesn't mean that there are not extremely strong biological influences on gender. You focus only on outliers, and ignore the bulk evidence. Gender is clearly strongly bimodally distributed and highly correlated with biological factors.
But whether they are the same or not is not the question.
The question is the extent to which one is informative on the other, in cross-cultural and trans-historical studies.
If we ignore the rest, I suppose we could say that only in the US is homosexuality biologically determined but that would be silly wouldn't it?
Simply put, you can't talk about trans-historical and cross-cultural patterns if you limit the discussion to homosexual relationships in the form they exist in the US today. That's tautologically true. So if you limit it that way, it's a fancy way of avoiding any cross-cultural/trans-historical analysis that could be meaningful.
There is a Stanford lecture on Human Sexual Behavior that is related to the discussion of neurobiology of homosexuality http://youtu.be/LOY3QH_jOtE#t=1h13m27s (the relevant part starts at 1:13)
See my comments above. We can't directly sense whether someone is male or female. If we could, I am sure the world would be safer for transsexuals.
We have to process what we see, and make sense of what we see in other people before we can find them attractive. Attraction is thus necessarily built on cognition. All you can show with current studies is that there might be a biological reason why aggressively indoctrinating all children into heterosexuality might not in fact cause everybody to conform.
But there are outsiders. We all have social circles and societies of structures. My ancestors may have come over here from various places in Europe but I am still an outsider to where my ancestors may have been from. This is why I far prefer the company of anthropologists to human rights activists.
I suppose though we can take this further. There are aboriginal tribes in Polynesia which engage in rituals where boys (presumably in early adolescence) become men by giving tribal elders fellatio. After all, I suppose, you are what you eat. We don't have to prove that this is harmful, since we can just claim it's child abuse.
As far as your preference of company, I don't think that human rights activism and anthropology are particularly mutually exclusive.
But on your other point, it is one thing to dispassionately note the behaviours of others, however this does not preclude having an opinion or forming a personal moral judgement on those behaviours.
And if you have formed a moral judgement on a behaviour then it is perfectly ok to express your opinion, even if the people you are judging are far away or long dead.
Everyone judges everyone, all the time, and this is not a terrible imposition that should be stopped, but rather is the main mechanism of social evolution throughout history.
But on your other point, it is one thing to dispassionately note the behaviours of others, however this does not preclude having an opinion or forming a personal moral judgement on those behaviours.
I think it does preclude taking a very broad line though, and studying the constructs and how a culture fits together tends to make folks a lot less prone to advocacy. This doesn't mean that criticism of another culture is out of the question--- there is a lot of great cultural criticism that comes out of this. Examples that come readily to mind include criticisms of our (in the US) trust that Obstetrics is better than Midwifery (statistically, midwifery has better outcomes on the whole, and this is optimized when midwives are the primary care providers for all lower-risk pregnancies and childbirths), criticism of how the Morroccan henna first-marriage ceremonies entrench patriarchy, and more. But these are very detail-oriented criticisms which tend to address specific cultures, and look at them in ways which are very detail-oriented.
Even the anthropologists who have criticized things like female genital cutting in Sudan have tended to note carefully how it fits into culture, and tended to avoid the inflammatory activist rhetoric (and in many cases argued even more forcefully against being overly activist on the issue).
You will probably never see an anthropologist endorse a global campaign like this, because the sorts of thinking are very different.
So you are right, it doesn't preclude an opinion of the way a specific culture does things. But it does seem to preclude arguments based on natural rights.
BTW, great book on this topic, which over and over addresses questions of criticism of other cultures and its place in anthropology:
"Deeply Into the Bone: Re-Inventing Rites of Passage" by Ronald Grimes. To say it is inspired by van Gennep's classic anthropological work "The Rites of Passage" would be an understatement.
Edit: To the downvoters: One of the reasons why broad lines are usually avoided is that dynamics are rarely simple. For example, in Africa, you have long-standing patterns of European meddling in local cultures, and consequently large-scale activism from the West against female genital cutting more or less frames that practice as one of nationalist resistance.
I'll never understand why people say outsiders cannot judge or critique other culture's practices. Of course we can.
If society A and society B, who have never come across each other before, were to meet, two-way judgement would be going on immediately (not to mention intrigue, wonder, learning, questioning etc etc). It is just one among many things that would happen.
And it should. It is how we advance as a world and humanity in general.
Do you think there is an argument that can be made that justifies this (btw, if you say "yes", we have bigger issues so we can just stop now)? Of course not. We have an opinion, formed a judgement and deemed this action morally corrupt and no way justifiable, no matter the beliefs of the society.
Lastly, on the matter of right-wrong and opinions, I'll leave this quote from Richard Dawkins:
“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
― Richard Dawkins
However such a critique needs to take into account the totality of the other culture. It's not enough to say "everyone must recognize same-sex marriage." The critique needs to be bounded to the other culture and look specifically at it.
My comment was against global campaigns. If we want to talk about a specific culture we can do that.
There are huge dangers that come with the view that we can just remake the world in our cultural image. That's the view I am arguing against. If we are going to critique other cultures, we might at least make sure we are informed about them and understand exactly what we are critiquing first.
As to your Dawkins quote, I would respond with "and more often, they both are."
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Edit: Additionally... I would suggest that if we build our own society to be the most just one we can manage, then other cultures will adopt whatever they like from our society. If you look at Malaysia for example, despite the fact that it is a constitutional Islamic monarchy, the clear influence of the US constitution and structure in its founding is evident. It is in this way that the world is made better, not in remaking the world in our own image.
However such a critique needs to take into account the totality of the other culture.
Why?
Did we need to know all there was to know about Nazism to deem the holocaust "bad"? In the above link, do we necessarily have to understand every nuance of the society before we say killing someone to a cheering throng of people without a trial on hearsay of adultery is "wrong"? No, I don't think so. Those actions stand on their own and can be judged on their own.
Now, if you are suggesting that we must completely understand a culture before we pass judgement on the entire culture, that has some weight to it. Individual acts or cross-sections, however, can be judged on their own. It might help to understand them in the larger picture, though it isn't necessary.
As a last example, take lynchings in the south of the US. Easy to pass judgement on them as "wrong" for any outsider to the US without understanding the rest of the US culture.
Sometimes things are just bad and we shouldn't be afraid to tell it like it is.
Of course, not all "holocausts" are bad. The ones that were central to ancient Greek religion probably mostly would have pissed of PETA....
to would-be downvoters: "Holocaust" means essentially "to burn whole" and was originally a technical term in Greek religion for animal sacrifices(usually funerary) that weren't eaten but rather were burned whole. Later it takes on the connotation of total annihilation and disaster, and hence is applied particularly to ha'shoah as a rough translation (I think that means simply "the disaster" in Hebrew).
Fucking hell, you manage to talk a bigger pile of irrelevant horseshit in an attempt to win arguments at any cost than almost anyone outside the field of politics or law. Do you practice at this or does it just come naturally?
Did we need to know all there was to know about Nazism to deem the holocaust "bad"?
If all we need to know is that trying to exterminate another ethnic group is "bad" then I suppose not. However, I do think that something is missing in that analysis, and that is that when you start looking at the functions the holocaust fulfilled in the Nazi regime, it actually starts looking even worse. For example Himmler quite conspicuously used the death camps as places to expose possible dissenters (such as Fredrich B. Marby) to in order to try to secure their cooperation (Marby interestingly declined to cooperate and was left to make up his mind in Dachau, something he declined to do for the ten years in which he was imprisoned there, only to be liberated by allied troops and condemned again for his pre-war antisemitic writings--- I am not aware of any evidence he was antisemitic though post-imprisonment). Thus it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that the holocaust was a central part of the Nazi oppression of everywhere they conquered. It was, quite literally, how Himmler kept the nationalists in line.
But there is a more subtle danger there too, and this is the tendency to take on others' authority that some evils were really good.
The Holocaust was in its day a war crime. While Jewish residents of pre-1939 Germany could have been killed without implicating the Geneva Conventions, the GC's protected every civilian, Jewish or not, in every country the Nazis occupied. While the GC's might not have been sufficient to prosecute every death camp guard in every death camp, the vast majority could have been tied to serious crimes against the laws of war. The Nuremberg Tribunals could have imposed a rule of law based on the law at the time of the violations and dispensed real justice.
But that's not what they decided to do. There were two problems with imposing the rule of law. First a few people they wanted to imprison (Doenitz, Raeder) might actually be innocent. Secondly they wanted something stronger. So they made up two classifications of laws after the fact and applied them retrospectively--- crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.
Interesting Raeder was sentenced to life in prison for treaty violations. Doenitz was convicted of violating the GC's and anti-submarine treaty violations but these violations were set aside because Admiral Nimitz filed an affidavit saying that everything Doenitz did was legal in the view of the US Navy, and indeed standard operating procedure in his fleet. However, he was convicted of crimes against peace and sent to jail for 10 years largely for fighting on the losing side of the war.
The Nuremberg tribunals could have been what we typically think of them today-- an opportunity to dispense justice to real monsters, and in a very few cases they were (Gen. Keitel's conviction for GC violations is the best example--- he was the one who argued he wasn't responsible since he was just following orders). But in most cases they represented Soviet-style star-chambered justice and an evil in their own right.
In our domestic law we have a much higher standard. These crimes against humanity and crimes against peace would have been thrown out as ex post facto. Additionally the crimes against peace counts are bald-faced victors justice that would not survive a first year law student arguing that they were unconstitutionally vague and thus adopted the primary method the Soviet Union used to put folks they didn't like in jail.
That the Nuremberg Tribunals adopted the Stalinist model really has to be one of the great tragedies in the area of international law, peace, and justice.
You will probably never see an anthropologist endorse a global campaign like this, because the sorts of thinking are very different.
Given that the American Anthropological Association is quite happy to weigh in on exactly this subject politically, I am not entirely sure that you are correct.
the AAA Executive Board issued in 2004, the following statement in response to President Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage:
The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.
Their statement is correct, but that is hardly a global campaign of this sort is it? I mean I read that statement as basically saying that the arguments in favor of the change to our system of laws are anthropologically flawed.
I don't see that as taking a stand on the matter globally. I certainly don't see them saying that if the Hopi don't allow same-sex marriage that they are in violation of the human rights of the members of their society.
Of course as far as different family structures, these include polygamous families, and other things like the Greek model (heterosexual, monogamous marriage with heavily circumscribed homosexual relationships filling important social roles in parallel). Same sex marriage could be part of it but it doesn't have to be. They aren't saying "you must recognize SSM" just that it is misguided to pass a constitutional amendment against if that's the fear.
It could even include the wonderfully complex polygamy pattern portrayed in the Mahabharata, where the princess Drupadi has five husbands, each of which had at least one other wife.
I am not sure of your point that it doesn't count because it is discussing the US. Anthropology applies just as much on a street corner in Delaware as it does in the middle of the Amazon. But ok, here's some more, and two of them are global. Perhaps I am researching the wrong sort of anthropologists.
Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights
Committee for Human Rights
American Anthropological Association
...As a professional organization of anthropologists, the AAA has long been, and should continue to be, concerned whenever human difference is made the basis for a denial of basic human rights...
American Anthropological Association Statement on Laws and Policies Discriminating against Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Persons
...the American Anthropological Association will henceforth sign no contracts for any of its annual meetings in any state or local municipality which has such laws or policies discriminating against lesbian, gay or bisexual persons...
AAA letter to support the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
...we wish to express our grave concern for the status of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, in the ongoing effort to have it approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations...
I wasn't saying that the AAA couldn't issue specific lines protecting cultural diversity or addressing a specific policy in a specific time.
What I said is that they would not get involved in a global campaign of this sort. The question is particularity and whether one is actually understanding the culture affected.
One can have opinions of whether recognition of gay marriage is a good thing or not for the US, or whether discrimination against gays and lesbians are a problem in the US without making these into issues which homogenize the world.
Also it occurs to me, the question of human rights is kind of a funny one to bring into anthropology since on one hand ethnocentricity is inescapable, and on the other, there just is no solid epistemology to justify these on a cross-cultural basis. I can't help but think this is either somewhat overreaching or perhaps more likely a miscommunication.
For example, I could see an argument that human rights and human rights violations don't necessarily take a specific form, but rather are emergent properties of cultural systems. Perhaps there is a general right to dignity and not to be singled out for particularly harsh punishments by law, beyond that.... Can you really tell the !Kung tribesman that he has a right to marry a woman who has the same name as his sister? can you really tell the hunter-gatherer in the jungle that they must respect property rights of their co-tribesman? Can you tell the eskimo that he has the right to free speech and that taboos regarding speech should be removed? Can you tell the Sambian boy that he has a right not to be beat or forced into fellatio in coming of age ceremonies? Can you tell the Hopis they may not beat their children when initiating them into the religious community of the tribe?
One basic human right that I think most anthropologists would agree with is that of collective self-determination. I think the group to some extent has to define these issues for themselves. Hence the rights of "indigenous" peoples (although there is no consensus as to whether "indigenous" is any more than a political label--- the general trend in the articles I have read is to treat "indigenous" as only meaningful in political discussions).
There are no outsiders. While you were away we found out that people from different cultures have been shagging all along and that we are all related (which should please mr incest at the bottom of the thread), and that all societies are deeply interconnected at every level. Thanks for worrying about the retirement plans of impoverished homosexuals though, without people like you making sure they behaved responsibly and bred, who knows where they might end up in later life.