Material culture profoundly influences the ways we understand, experience and represent sexuality. This chapter examines cross-cultural material cultures of heterosexuality, homosexuality, domestic life, communal rituals, sex work and intimate relationships, among other examples. The history of sexuality and material culture is a long one, and to consider Roman brothels, Palauan men’s houses and Peruvian pottery is to recognise their significance in changing sexual mores. Objects, including buildings and artworks, can tell us about fundamentally diverse ways of understanding sexuality as an everyday practice and the subject of academic inquiry. The chapter also offers a discussion of the ephemera of movements for sexual rights in more recent times. These objects may be everyday items repurposed for queer life and politics, for example, or custom-made props for protest and organising. Museums have often paid little attention to the material culture of sexuality, hiding away incriminating exhibits, but new museological approaches to objects reveal the intricacies of intimate life, tell the story of previously marginalized forms of sexuality, and even resist established modes of power. Material culture, and the ways we address it, speak forcefully to the politics of sexuality.

Taking up the invitation to reflect on the mid-1970s project that resulted in To Dwell Among Friends (1982), I review its development, my network survey of the 2010s, and lessons learned. This chapter discusses the decision to use egocentric network analysis as a tool to understand urban modernity in the first project and to study the effect of social ties on health in the second. The accounts spur discussions of several conceptual issues, such as the importance of considering burdensome ties, the notion of “social capital,” and the criteria for deciding a tie even exists, as well as several methodological issues, including the GSS “important matters” question, the reasons for using multiple and diverse name-eliciting questions, and the respondent burden this method creates.

Culture is a key determinant in organizational effectiveness and plays an enormous role in the lives of military organizations. Cultural biases often result in unstated assumptions that have a deep impact on strategy, operational planning, doctrinal creation, and organization and training of armed forces. The impact of culture on military affairs often remains opaque for years, if not decades, after the events it has affected. Leadership is essential to creating and maintaining organizational culture. Leaders who can shape an organization’s culture from its inception have an outsized influence on its future orientation. Leaders, therefore, must be discriminating when establishing the initial culture of an organization, for once embedded, that culture will prove extraordinarily difficult to change. But even superb leaders are limited. Selection of the right subordinate leaders is critical if an organization’s culture is to survive a leadership transition. Some military organizations do change, assisted by cultures that embrace innovation and a reasonable degree of risk-taking. Organizational culture takes on the characteristics of wider societal culture, but when the military becomes a caste apart, the result can be the degradation of its ethical foundations. Military organizations often have subcultures with significant influence on the larger organization. Technology-centric forces must not allow a culture focused on technological excellence to turn into one centered on technological determinism. Professional military education is critical in sustaining organizational culture.

Strategic culture drives patterns of national statecraft, which in turn drive military strategy. Grand strategy also derives from strategic culture, which emerges from geographical, economic, and historical circumstances. A nation’s circumstances give rise to a distinctive manner of perceiving national power – including the use of military force. Strategic culture is ethnically and nationally driven, derived from a combination of factors. It may be national or subnational, and it may be based on real or imagined traits. It tends to be both enduring and unexamined. It involves intersectionality between national, subnational, and organizational cultures, and it may invoke fictive and contingent identities. It manifests in how individuals and organizations make sense of reality. Individuals and subgroups are presumed to self-ascribe to a certain identity, to absorb distinctive attitudes about force, and thus to adopt a “way of war.” Organizational and ethnic cultures coexist, and any military unit may have multiple subcultures. But strategic culture, since it derives from ethnic and national characteristics, precedes and supersedes organizational culture. Strategic culture influences the organizational culture of a national military, with ethnic and historical factors setting the parameters within which organizational culture and individual initiative operate. Ethnic culture frames strategic culture, which in turn interacts with organizational structure, institutional form, and individual incentives to create military organizational culture.