Re-visioning Sex for Anthropological Use

Professor Robert Thornton, Department of Anthropology, University of Witswatersrand

Department of Anthropology and Sociology Seminar

Abstract: Why is it so difficult to see sex as a type of social action? Indeed, is it possible to see sex as social action when it is precisely not public, apparently not rational, or even cognitive, acts as a symbol but is not itself symbolic but experiental. To do so require an approach that is genuinely anthropological. A theory of sex should be able to answer the question: 'In an environment in which everyone knows that each new sexual partner has a 50% chance of being HIV positive, why would anyone choose to have unprotected sex?' In southern Africa, people make precisely this choice. Standard sociological and psychological theories have fallen short of providing fully adequate answers to this question and others like it. But why oppose an 'anthropological theory' to the psychological and sociological theories that in other respects seem to work so well? I argue that we must make an epistemological departure, not merely empirical discovery, and understand sex as relation, as knowledge and as value. This amounts to a re-visioning of sex for anthropological use.

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