Taboo looks at the ethnographer and sexuality in anthropological fieldwork and considers the many roles that erotic subjectivity plays in the production of anthropological knowledge and texts.

In this pioneering volume anthropologists discuss their own sexual and erotic experiences in the field, and use those experiences to reflect on problems with the way anthropology is thought about and practiced. How do the gender roles and sexual identities that anthropologists have in their ‘home’ societies affect the kinds of sexuality they can express in other cultures? How is the anthropologist’s sexuality perceived by the people with whom she or he does research? How common is sexual violence and intimidation in the field, and why is its existence virtually unmentioned in anthropology? These are just a few of the questions addressed by the contributions, which will set the agenda for a critical exploration of why and how sexuality and taboos against sex have affected the practice and production of anthropology.

A long-overdue text for all students and lecturers of anthropology and cultural studies, Taboo will also appeal to sociologists, feminist scholars and students of queer theory.

Don Kulick is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden.

Margaret Willson is a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at Western Washington University, USA.

Notes on contributors

Kate Altork is a practicing psychotherapist and cultural anthropologist. She recently completed her Ph.D. thesis, entitled Land Running Through the Bones: An Ethnography of Place (Union Institute, 1994). In 1992, she was awarded the Prize for Poetry from the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology. In 1993, she was awarded their Prize for Fiction. She is currently working on a series of essays addressing the intersection of person, place, and passionate attachment.

Evelyn Blackwood is assistant professor of women’s studies and anthropology at Purdue University, Indiana. Her previous publications include work on Native American female berdache/two-spirit people and lesbian relations cross-culturally. She is the editor of the volume The Many Faces Of Homosexuality: Anthropological Approaches to Homosexual Behavior (Harrington Park Press, 1986). She is currently working on a monograph about Minangkabau gender, kinship and identity.

Ralph Bolton is professor of anthropology at Pomona College, California, where he teaches courses on human sexuality and AIDS. He is the editor of The AIDS Pandemic: A Global Emergency (Gordon and Breach, 1989) and The Content of Culture (HRAF Press, 1989). He coedited the volumes Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Cultural Approaches (Gordon and Breach, 1992) and The Anthropology of AIDS: Syllabi and Other Teaching Resources (American Anthropological Association, 1992). His most recent articles have appeared in Human Organization,

GLQ: a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Jill Dubisch is professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She has served as Secretary of the Modern Greek Studies Association (1991–93) and President of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe (1992–94). During the past 25 years, she has studied rural-urban migration, gender, and religion in Greece, and is editor of the volume Gender and Power in Rural Greece (Princeton University Press, 1986), and author of In a Different Place: Gender, Politics, and Pilgrimage at a Greek Island Shrine (Princeton University Press, 1995). Her current research focuses on religion and national identity.

Jean Gearing completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled The Reproduction of Labor in a Migration Society: Gender, Kinship, and Household in St. Vincent, West Indies, in 1988, and spent several years after that as a sojourning scholar, holding temporary teaching positions in Alabama, Nevada, and Florida. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Division of Reproductive Health at the Centers for Disease Control, working with international family planning programmes. She is also an adjunct faculty member at Georgia State University. Jean lives in Atlanta with her son, who is now ten years old. Her former husband, E.C., is also still living in the U.S.

Andrew P.Killick is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington. His M.A. thesis at the University of Hawaii, ‘New Music for Korean Instruments: An Analytical Survey’ (1990), is the fruit of the field experiences described in the article in this volume. He is currently in Seoul carrying out research for his doctoral dissertation, ‘Ch’angguk: The Dramatization of Korean P’ansori Narratives’.

Don Kulick is associate professor of anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. He has edited two volumes in Swedish on crosscultural approaches to gender, sexuality and emotions: Från Kön Till Genus (‘From Sex to Gender’, Carlssons Bokförlag, 1987) and Att Begå Kärlek (‘To Commit Love’, Sesam Bokförlag, 1990), and is also the author of Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village (Cambridge University Press, 1992). He is currently researching language and the practice of gender among transgendered prostitutes in Brazil.

Eva Moreno (a pseudonym) is currently teaching and doing research at a Swedish University.

Helen Morton currently holds a Research Fellowship in the Gender Studies Research Unit in the Department of History, University of Melbourne, Australia. Her doctoral dissertation on child socialization in Tonga is being published by the University of Hawaii Press and is entitled Becoming Tongan: An Ethnography of Childhood. Her current research focuses on gender and cultural identity among Tongan migrants in Melbourne.

Margaret Willson is a visiting lecturer at Western Washington Uni-versity. She conducted her Ph.D. research among Chinese immigrants in Papua New Guinea and has done post-doctoral research in Papua New Guinea and Brazil. She has also worked extensively with ethnographic film, and recently finished directing a film on concepts of vision among the blind. Her current research is on race, class, and gender among Afro-Brazilian players of capoiera in northeastern Brazil.