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Culture, Nature, and History: The Case of Ancient Sexuality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2013

Kyle Harper
Kyle Harper*
Affiliation:
Department of Classics and Letters, University of Oklahoma
*
kyleharper@ou.edu
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Abstract

This article analyzes the configuration of biology, anthropology, and history over the last generation by taking the sub-field of the “history of sexuality” as a case study. The history of sexuality developed at a particularly important site of engagement with neighboring disciplines. I argue that the concepts of nature and culture that came to prevail among historians of sexuality were deeply influenced by the debate between a particular strand of evolutionary biology, namely sociobiology, and its critics, who were committed to cultural hermeneutics. This debate encouraged a formulation of nature and culture which is effectively dualist and which remains present within the sub-field. By focusing the analysis on the study of ancient (classical Mediterranean) sexuality, I seek detailed insights into the reception of this debate within a specific domain of historical investigation, one whose stakes have been particularly high because of the intervention of Michel Foucault. The article closes by arguing that biologists and anthropologists in the last two decades have advanced the study of culture as a part of nature, and that historians have much to gain by engaging with more recent models. The institution of monogamy is highlighted as an emerging theme of investigation that can only be approached with the unified insights of history, anthropology, and biology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , October 2013 , pp. 986 - 1016
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2013 

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148 Ibid., 418–19.

149 Low, “Complexities in Human Monogamy,” 165.

150 Quinlan, Robert, “Human Pair-Bonds: Evolutionary Functions, Ecological Variation, and Adaptive Development,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 227–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Low, Bobbi, “Ecological and Socio-Cultural Impacts on Mating and Marriage Systems,” in Dunbar, Robin and Barrett, Louise, eds., Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Oxford, 2007), 449–62Google Scholar; Gangestad, Steven W. and Simpson, Jeffry A., “The Evolution of Human Mating: Trade-Offs and Strategic Pluralism,” Behavior and Brain Sciences 23 (2000): 573–87CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

151 MacDonald, “Establishment and Maintenance.”

152 Scheidel, “A Peculiar Institution?,” 282–83.

153 Scheidel, “Sex and Empire.”

154 Fortunato, Laura and Archetti, Marco, “Evolution of Monogamous Marriage by Maximization of Inclusive Fitness,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology 23 (2010): 149–56CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Especially Fortunato, Laura, “Reconstructing the History of Marriage Strategies in Indo-European-Speaking Societies: Monogamy and Polygyny,” Human Biology 83 (2011): 87–105CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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157 On Islamic polygamy, see Ali, Kecia, Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam (Cambridge, Mass., 2010)Google Scholar.

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