One difficulty in writing about sex in primitive society is that, for many observers, the “primitive” condition has been defined in considerable measure through a number of widespread (mis)conceptions about sexuality, while at the same time “natural” human sexuality has been imagined in terms of stereotypes of “primitives.” The images have changed over time, but accurate information is hard to come by, if indeed such information is even worth seeking in a milieu in which the concept of “sex” has come under increasing scrutiny and the “primitive” has been virtually banished from academic discourse—except as a misguided artifact of a racist and colonial past. Moreover, the actual conditions in which people in even the most remote places of the world live in the twenty-first century have become far more similar to those pertaining to urban centers than was the case in the past. However, the investigation of “primitive sexuality” was part of several important chapters in intellectual history, and there is much that contemporary students of sexuality can learn from examining this story.

“Primitive” societies have generally been defined in terms of small and intimate communities that subsisted through foraging or horticulture, with a simple technology. People assigned this status were generally nonwhite inhabitants of areas subject to European exploration and expansion, and they were assumed by many observers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to represent a natural and early human condition through which “civilized” people could learn about their past. Their sexuality has been variously viewed as undesirably licentious, admirably free, or underdeveloped and repressed. Even when these stereotypes began to fade in the twentieth century, primitive social structure was held to be centered largely around marriage and descent, subjects heavily intertwined with sexuality. Even interest in “primitive” religion was colored by inferences about sexuality, insofar as initiation into manhood and womanhood and rituals of fertility formed an important part of the subject matter.

At the time of the Enlightenment, some thinkers such as Rousseau conceived of a “state of nature” before the imposition of social rules—a state in which freedom, including freedom in sexual matters, prevailed. Although little was actually known about “primitive” societies, pure hypothesis was fed by travelers’ reports. The islands of the South Pacific acquired a particular reputation for female sexual availability through reports such as those of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, James Cook, and the survivors of the mutiny on HMS Bounty in 1789. By contrast, Native peoples of North America were sometimes seen as restrained, undersexed, or ambiguous in sexual matters, for a number of reasons—for instance the premium placed on female chastity among some nations, reports that groups such as the Iroquois did not rape war captives, or the presence in some communities of cross-dressed individuals, some of them married to individuals of their own biological sex. Figures of this type were named “berdaches” or “catamites” by the French and have remained a focus of considerable speculation and misunderstanding to the present day.

In the nineteenth century more information about “primitive” societies became available and attempts were made to use such evidence to construct schemes of social evolution grounded in empirical fact rather than in hypothesis, but such schemes remained largely speculative. Observations of societies that traced descent through mothers rather than fathers led to widespread theories that early humans had been too promiscuous to recognize physiological paternity and that matriarchy had universally preceded patriarchy, the latter being linked to the development of private property. Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels are names most famously associated with such theories. Morgan, a lawyer and a pioneer in kinship studies, had great admiration for the Iroquois of New York State, who traced descent through women and who were by no account promiscuous; but he and others hypothesized that other, more primitive groups practiced marriages between groups of brothers and groups of sisters and that even earlier groups no longer available for observation practiced indiscriminate, often incestuous matings. Other nineteenth-century theories about the evolution of sexuality involved ideas about the forcible abduction of women (John Ferguson McLennan; see McLennan 1970) and about patriarchy rather than matriarchy as the earliest form of the family (Sir Henry Maine).

The reasons for these varied speculations lay in the great diversity of the available information—both in content and quality—and in the fact that reported practices were largely discussed with little regard for their social contexts. A particular problem was the repeated misunderstanding of the rules governing marriage and sexuality among Australian aboriginal peoples, who allowed sexual access to some relatives of the primary spouse: this caused them to be held up as an example of primordial promiscuity. Twentieth-century anthropologists would later devote considerable effort to undoing the stereotypes of “primitive” sexuality and to documenting individual cases in depth. The overwhelming message that was to emerge was that human sexuality was highly diverse and did not lend itself to differentiation along “primitive”/“nonprimitive” lines.

At fin de siècle and during the early years of the twentieth century several works were published that questioned nineteenth-century images of primitive licentiousness. Edvard Westermarck suggested that “irregular connections” between the sexes had increased, rather than decreased with the progress of civilization. Ernest Crawley (1902) argued in The Mystic Rose that the plethora of rituals surrounding sexuality and fertility indicated that primitives were terrified of sex rather than overindulging in it. Bronislaw Malinowski, a major figure in twentieth-century anthropology, studied under Westermarck and in his doctoral thesis, published in 1913 as The Family among the Australian Aborigines (Malinowski 1963), disputed many of these stereotypes about aboriginal sexuality, arguing for the importance of marriage and family in aboriginal society despite a lack of awareness of physiological paternity.

Malinowski's thesis, like Westermarck's (1901) large volume on the history of marriage (first published in 1891) and Crawley's work, was based on evidence gathered by multiple other observers, though Westermarck did some field work in Morocco, a society that didn't really meet the definition of “primitive.” During World War I Malinowski undertook fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, a society that was significant for the understanding of “primitive” sexuality because it possessed two of the characteristics attributed to such communities by nineteenth-century thinkers: matrilineal descent and a period of permitted sexual experimentation before marriage. Malinowski (2002) also argued that Trobrianders were ignorant of the facts of physiological paternity, an assertion that has been frequently, if inconclusively, challenged. He argued that premarital sexual experimentation led to stable and fulfilling marriages, not to general promiscuity, and that fathers played important roles in their children's lives despite ignorance of the facts of conception. Moreover, matrilineal descent did not lead to matriarchy; Malinowski portrayed men as firmly in control of public life. He did not undertake comparative work on primitive sexuality. He used his in-depth work on a single society as a “negative instance,” to debunk earlier stereotypes, though he also gave the impression that the Trobriand model of the “primitive” might have broader applicability, not only in sex but in such matters as economics.

Unlike Malinowski, Margaret Mead worked in several cultures that had very different sexual regimes. In 1928 she published a best-selling book, Coming of Age in Samoa: a Psychological study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (Mead 1928), about a society in Polynesia—a culture area with a longstanding reputation for licentiousness. Like Malinowski, she described a society in which premarital sexual experience seemed to lead to stable marriage and lifelong sexual competence for both men and women. Unlike Trobrianders, however, Samoans placed a high value on premarital virginity for at least some girls, though there have have been subsequent debates as to whether this requirement was limited to the taupou, the ceremonial princess of chiefly families, or was more widespread than Mead realized. Penelope Schoeffel (2011) has found archival records that indicate that in pre-Christian Samoa commoner families may have made a gift of their daughters’ virginity to chiefs and that afterward such girls might honorably engage in sexual liaisons, particularly ones that brought their families desirable connections. In any case, by Mead's time the process of Christianization—with its accompanying changes in sexual morality—was underway, so that her book, like many twentieth-century works on “primitive” cultures, is the reconstruction of a vanishing or vanished past.

In 1930 Mead published Growing up in New Guinea (Mead 1968), about the Manus of the Admiralty Islands, whom she portrayed as highly repressive concerning sexuality. She argued that Manus women were raised to be frigid and men were encouraged, through fear of angry spirits, to transfer their sexual energy to the competitive accumulation and exchange of property, though she noted that in earlier times groups of men had shared captive enemy “prostitutes” for sexual relief. If Mead had held up Samoans as an example of healthy sexual adjustment, albeit one that displayed a regrettable lack of passion, she employed Manus as a warning of where “America” might go if it carried Puritanism and the capitalist ethic too far. Later work by others documented a fear of female pollution as an important aspect of sociosexual norms in many New Guinea societies.

Mead's and Malinowski's work, whatever else it did, made clear to readers that sexuality in “primitive” societies was closely tied to marriage, social structure, and economics; and this is how it was regarded by most anthropologists in the middle third of the twentieth century. This focus did not eliminate stereotypes. Indeed it entrenched at least one, which had been in existence for some time: the widely held belief that love was absent from primitive society. In an age when primitives were believed to be excessively sexual, the absence of love as a basis for sexual unions was assumed to be a corollary of extreme permissiveness. When Westermarck challenged the notion of primitive promiscuity, the absence of intense love was part of his image of sexually unimaginative primitives. Mead and Malinowski argued that the absence of romantic love was the price that Samoans and Trobrianders paid for their otherwise healthy sexual adjustment. In 1973 Robert Levy's The Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands reinforced these images of South Sea Islanders as sexually well functioning but emotionally low-keyed individuals. In mid-twentieth century anthropology, particularly British social anthropology, the economic and sociopolitical aspects of marriage in pastoral and village societies, especially in Africa, were stressed and the erotic and the emotional elements downplayed. Where love was discussed, it was often represented as a concomitant of colonization and social change, and more recent attempts to reopen this topic are often based upon fieldwork in urban centers and other highly acculturated communities.

Elsewhere work on wife capture and adultery among slash-and-burn horticulturalists in the Amazon rain forest tended to stress the economic exchanges, political game playing, and masculine posturing involved in these practices, though the anthropologist Thomas Gregor (1985) did attempt to investigate eroticism in an Amazonian society (albeit with strong ritual and economic overtones).

In the last 30 years of the twentieth century there was a growing interest within anthropology in same-sex sexuality across cultures. Much of this work was done in North America, Western Europe, or urban areas in other parts of the world, and therefore it does not refer to the kinds of societies under discussion in this article. Some work, often based on archival or oral histories of past practices, did appear about homosexualities (the term came to be used in the plural) in societies that would have been called “primitive” when this label was still in vogue.

Although same-sex eroticism in primitive cultures had been mentioned by some earlier scholars, it had not figured prominently in the literature. Malinowski believed that the heterosexual freedom enjoyed by Trobrianders made other outlets unnecessary. Mead thought that adolescent experimentation with homosexuality in Samoa was not continued in adulthood because of the ready availability of heterosexual gratification. She mentioned the Samoan institution of fafafine, male cross-dressers who performed some women's roles, but she didn't find much evidence of it in the community where she worked. In Levy's work in the 1970s, a similar institution, the mahu, was described for Tahiti.

With regard to precolonial Africa, it had been suggested by many authors that same-sex eroticism was rare or nonexistent; in part this was because of a stereotype of African males as more lustful than members of other races so far as women were concerned. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1970) published data on the defunct practice of warriors among the Azande in the Sudan taking “boy wives” during their period of military service; but he did not make it available to a broad anthropological audience until the 1970s, more than 30 years after his fieldwork, because of a desire to protect the reputations of his subjects. African nationalists and post-independence rulers have often insisted that homosexual encounters in sub-Saharan Africa were largely the result of colonialism. Recently the historian Marc Epprecht (2004) has documented situations in which same-sex sexuality was accepted in traditional Africa, for example in ritual or temporary situations like those Evans-Pritchard had described.

In 1981 Gilbert Herdt published Guardians of the Flutes, which dealt with initiation rituals in a New Guinea society in which young boys were required to ingest semen from older adolescents and young men in order to be provided with the strengthening fluid they would require in their later careers as warriors and impregnators of women. This led to interest in similar rituals elsewhere in Melanesia, some of which had been noted by earlier anthropologists, and to debates about the comparability of such rituals and “homosexual” practices in Euro-North America. There has also been a revival of interest in archival and oral historical sources on traditional cross-dressing in North America and Polynesia from scholars who are willing to look at these customs from both more positive and more erotic perspectives than was the case in the past. Insofar as these customs survive in modern Polynesia and North America, they have been influenced by international gay culture and other aspects of social change.

Contemporary anthropologists no longer look to (vanished) “primitive” cultures for clues to the past, nor do they—for the most part—seek some universally “normal” human sexuality. “Heterosexualities” as well as “homosexualities” are increasingly spoken of in the plural.

SEE ALSO: Anthropology and sexology; Homosexuality cross‐culturally; Inversion; Love; Marriage; Mead, Margaret (1901–1978); Repression, sexual; Sex research; Westermarck, Edvard Alexander (1862–1939)